I thought what I'd try and do was--
I lived in England for a while in a little village, which
was very cold and very--
my wife said it was like an Agatha Christie novel
without a murder.
And I was experimenting with prose poems, moved
by prose poems by Kathleen Fraser, which
were very like journal entries led in a lot of information.
And I'll read a couple of them that I've been working on.
"Little Shelford, morning, May 25.
Walking down the stairs this morning pass the coat of arms
of the Mansour family, I had a sharp sensation
of smelling Laurel leaves in California.
Riding an Acacia limb, rivers of yellow, feathery pollen, wild
fennel that we broke into six-inch lengths,
and threw at each other in the neighborhood wars.
Crouched in thickets of broom, shooting Blue Jays
with BB guns, whilst so.
I ran when I picked up a volume of Ponge
in the bookstore on Rue Racine, and thought of blue jays
and shooting them with BB guns, and so
I bought the Ponge, thinking I would write grave, luminous,
meditative poems.
"Do you want apple juice with breakfast?"
Arlene asks Luke in the other room.
"Yes," he says.
"It's the kind from Malta," she says, "frozen."
"I'll take apple juice," he says.
And walking across the bridge later to Notre Dame,
I thought of boring Jack Shalane, who always wanted
to play that we were the children of Fatima,
having a vision of the Virgin.
And I would go along with it for a moment,
hoping to get him back to pirates.
Image of Jack kneeling under the fig tree as Notre Dame
looms up in front of me, his palms prayerfully touching,
looking up awed and reverent into the branches, where
the fat green figs hung like so many scrotums
between the leaves.
And the fat figs were less differentiated
than that-- breasts, bottoms, sexual ambiguity of the flowers
and fruit in French botanical drawings,
sweet, hermaphrodite peaches, and the glister of plums."
Trying to get things to grow there, huh?
[INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]