WEBVTT

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I've written for years
about the visual arts.

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I don't often write
poems about that subject.

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But some years ago, there
was a big Vermeer show

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that was going around,
which I missed.

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A friend of mine
sent me the catalog.

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And I was leafing through
it, and I saw this painting

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that I've seen so many times
in the Metropolitan, the Girl

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with the Pearl Earring.

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And so I began.

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Words began stirring,
and this thing turned up.

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I live in San Francisco,
and I live in the Haight.

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Haight Street is just two
and a half blocks down--

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thank god-- the hill,
from where I live.

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So this is "Girl with Pearl
Earring by Johannes Vermeer."

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"He put the spirit
essence, the light pip,

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not only in each eye's albumen
concentrate of starlight,

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but must have been taught how
to do that by first finding it

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in the pearl.

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He posed, then corrected,
in dusty studio light that

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pounced on the
window, behind which

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sits the cheeky girl, pearl,
pear- and apple-blossom cheeks.

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A fake description, naturally,
of their plain fleshiness,

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drably golden.

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And her lips, from
Haight Street's darlings.

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Nose studs, jacket studs,
girls with that kind of eye.

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One by the ATM machine,
casual, juicy, and so fair,

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a Netherlandish type.

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Panhandling strangers.

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Pomegranate seed ball
bearings agleam in her nose.

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Pearls, not sea-harvested,
but imagined.

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Seen, put there by a
certain need and fancy,

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because love says it's so.

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Picture that.

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Picture this."