Born Ninety Years Ago Yesterday

MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY

Frank O'Hara

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

          Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

          Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

          I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

          Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

          However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

          My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

          Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)

          St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

          Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

          It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

          “Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.

       I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.







   
RHAPSODY

Frank O'Hara

515 Madison Avenue   

door to heaven? portal

stopped realities and eternal licentiousness

or at least the jungle of impossible eagerness

your marble is bronze and your lianas elevator cables   

swinging from the myth of ascending

I would join

or declining the challenge of racial attractions

they zing on (into the lynch, dear friends)

while everywhere love is breathing draftily

like a doorway linking 53rd with 54th

the east-bound with the west-bound traffic by 8,000,000s   

o midtown tunnels and the tunnels, too, of Holland

where is the summit where all aims are clear   

the pin-point light upon a fear of lust

as agony’s needlework grows up around the unicorn   

and fences him for milk- and yoghurt-work

when I see Gianni I know he’s thinking of John Ericson   

playing the Rachmaninoff 2nd or Elizabeth Taylor   

taking sleeping-pills and Jane thinks of Manderley   

and Irkutsk while I cough lightly in the smog of desire   

and my eyes water achingly imitating the true blue

a sight of Manahatta in the towering needle

multi-faceted insight of the fly in the stringless labyrinth   

Canada plans a higher place than the Empire State Building   

I am getting into a cab at 9th Street and 1st Avenue   

and the Negro driver tells me about a $120 apartment   

“where you can’t walk across the floor after 10 at night   

not even to pee, cause it keeps them awake downstairs”

no, I don’t like that “well, I didn’t take it”

perfect in the hot humid morning on my way to work   

a little supper-club conversation for the mill of the gods

you were there always and you know all about these things   

as indifferent as an encyclopedia with your calm brown eyes   

it isn’t enough to smile when you run the gauntlet

you’ve got to spit like Niagara Falls on everybody or

Victoria Falls or at least the beautiful urban fountains of Madrid   

as the Niger joins the Gulf of Guinea near the Menemsha Bar

that is what you learn in the early morning passing Madison Avenue   

where you’ve never spent any time and stores eat up light

I have always wanted to be near it

though the day is long (and I don’t mean Madison Avenue)   

lying in a hammock on St. Mark’s Place sorting my poems   

in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island   

they are coming and we holy ones must go

is Tibet historically a part of China? as I historically   

belong to the enormous bliss of American death