WEBVTT

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Conversion.

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Walking down the stairs this
morning in the cold air,

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I longed for
California and thought

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I smelled laurel
leaves: riding an acacia

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limb in the spring,
rivers of yellow pollen,

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wild fennel we broke into 6 inch
lengths and threw at each other

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in the neighborhood wars or
crouched in thickets of broom

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shooting blue jays
with a BB gun.

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Oiseaux, I read when I
picked up a volume of Ponge

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in the bookshop on rue Racine
and thought of blue jays.

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And so bought the
Ponge, thinking

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I would write grave,
luminous, meditative poems.

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And walking across the
bridge later past Notre Dame,

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I remembered boring Jack Kjellen
who lived with his mother,

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the telephone operator,
and who always wanted

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to pretend that we were
the children of Fatima

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having a vision of the Virgin.

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And I would go along for
a while hoping to get him

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back to playing pirates.

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Vision of Jack kneeling
under the fig tree,

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palms powerfully touching,
looking up awed and reverent

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into the branches with
the fat green figs hung

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like so many scrotum
eyes among the branches.

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Scrota?

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But they were less
differentiated than that.

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Breasts, bottoms,
the sexual ambiguity

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of flowers and fruits and
French botanical paintings.

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Oh yes, sweet hermaphrodite
peaches and the glister

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of plums!