Poem: If I had taken French

If I had taken French

for that hour of the day
they would have called me Guy
or Guillaume, perhaps, depending
on the instructor and the formality
of the address, and I 
would have been troubled
to remember the spelling,
would have sat bewildered
at the shift, wondering
why it was necessary
and not understanding
the connection.  I suppose
I only recognize it now,
that it is nothing more
than the superficial fact,
not a deeper history
of the lexical shifts
that led from one to the other,
or which direction it went, even,
though I suppose
I wouldn't need to know that
to remember the proper genders
of nouns or the conjugation
of verbs, though I expect
there would have been
 a great deal of trouble
regarding those matters
as well.

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