Conversion.
Walking down the stairs this morning in the cold air,
I longed for California and thought
I smelled laurel leaves: riding an acacia
limb in the spring, rivers of yellow pollen,
wild fennel we broke into 6 inch lengths and threw at each other
in the neighborhood wars or crouched in thickets of broom
shooting blue jays with a BB gun.
Oiseaux, I read when I picked up a volume of Ponge
in the bookshop on rue Racine and thought of blue jays.
And so bought the Ponge, thinking
I would write grave, luminous, meditative poems.
And walking across the bridge later past Notre Dame,
I remembered boring Jack Kjellen who lived with his mother,
the telephone operator, and who always wanted
to pretend that we were the children of Fatima
having a vision of the Virgin.
And I would go along for a while hoping to get him
back to playing pirates.
Vision of Jack kneeling under the fig tree,
palms powerfully touching, looking up awed and reverent
into the branches with the fat green figs hung
like so many scrotum eyes among the branches.
Scrota?
But they were less differentiated than that.
Breasts, bottoms, the sexual ambiguity
of flowers and fruits and French botanical paintings.
Oh yes, sweet hermaphrodite peaches and the glister
of plums!