Nothing in "Conversion" is in a hurry, and that is part of its trick. It has six short lines in three couplets, with no capital letters and no punctuation. It runs as one unbroken sentence, a thought that rolls from the whole day ("every minute of the day") toward the evening and comes to rest at a table. The title promises something bigger than a meal, though. "Conversion" is a word for religious awakening, for chemistry, for changing one currency into another. The poem borrows all of these meanings and applies them to the most ordinary event there is, the end of a day.
Its central idea is that time, which we usually treat as abstract and always slipping away, can be turned into something solid and edible. "every minute of the day / will become corn." The future tense sounds like a prophecy, yet what it foretells is a vegetable, and that gentle absurdity sets the poem's tone. Minutes and kernels have more in common than it first seems. Both are small, near-identical units, countable and gathered in bulk. To say a day will "become corn" is to picture it harvested, a field of minutes cut down at dusk. The word "corn" also echoes the "con-" of the title, so the sound of the transformation is planted before we reach it.
The second couplet is the strangest. "alone on a dish / where I sit in the evening." With no punctuation to guide us, "alone" could belong to the corn, a single kernel left on a plate, or to the speaker. Then "a dish / where I sit" briefly seats the speaker on the plate, as though the one who eats were also part of what is served. This blurring does not look like carelessness. If every minute becomes food, the person who lived those minutes is being consumed along with them. The dish also becomes a kind of altar, a small flat surface on which the day is set out.
The last couplet turns on a flexible idiom: "give my time." We say it of generosity, giving time to a cause, and of waste, giving it away. Here the speaker does both at once, offering and squandering. The objects are "pie and spirits." Pie is comfort, sweet and domestic. "Spirits" carries three meanings at once, alcohol, ghosts and the soul. Together the phrase reads like a pocket-sized communion, with pie and liquor in place of bread and wine. Since corn can be distilled into liquor, the poem may also hint at a second conversion, grain into drink. That is an inference from the imagery, but the word "corn" makes it hard to ignore.
The sound of the poem supports this mood of quiet ceremony. The lines are short and loosely built around two or three strong beats, and the opening has an almost proverbial sway: "every MINute of the DAY." The long *i* of "time" and "pie" chimes across the final couplet in place of a formal rhyme, and "day" and "dish" begin with the same hard *d*. The poem ends on "spirits," whose last syllable is unstressed, so the voice fades like the evening. Because nothing is end-stopped, we never get a pause to judge what we have heard. The speaker slides from the day's work to the night's indulgence without a full stop, and without a moral.
That lack of a moral is what makes the poem worth reading closely. It can be taken as gratitude, a small thanksgiving in which the day's hours are honoured by being turned into a good meal. It can equally be taken as gentle self-mockery, an admission that a whole day's minutes amount to dinner and drink. The poem does not choose between these readings, and the plain vocabulary, with no word harder than "conversion," lets both stay open. In a few lines it shows how a title, an absence of punctuation and one double-edged phrase can carry a religious idea without any solemnity.