WEBVTT

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A more cheerful poem, is weed
in California on the roadsides,

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you know what-- oh, it's 9:15.

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I haven't been paying
attention to the time.

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I'll read this
poem, and then I'll

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read one somewhat longer poem.

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And that'll be it.

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The horse parsnip grows on
the roadsides in California.

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It's like Queen Anne's lace,
but it's very thick and shaggy.

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And someone asked
me what it was.

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I said horse parsnip.

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And he said, oh, horse parsnip?

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Ho-ho-ho.

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Couldn't write a
poem about that.

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So I think I'd try to write one.

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[LAUGHTER]

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"Horse Parsnip."

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Weed, Horse is Lorca's word,
fierce as wind or melancholy,

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gorgeous, and illusion.

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White horse grazing
near the river dust.

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And parsnip is
hopeless, second cousin

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to the rhubarb which is already
second cousin to an apple pie.

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Marrying the words to the
coarse white umbles sprouting

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on the 1st of May is
history but conveys nothing.

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It is not the veined
body of Queen Anne's lace

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I found bored in a
spring classroom.

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From which I walked hands
tingling for the breasts

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that are meadows in
New Jersey in 1933.

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It is thick, shaggier,
and the name is absurd.

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It speaks of durable
unimaginative pleasures

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reading Balzac, fixing
the window sash,

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rising to a clean kitchen.

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The fact that the car
starts and driving

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to work through hills
where the roadside thickens

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with the green, ungainly
stalks, the bracts and bright

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white flower, it's
of horse parsnips."

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