I Am the Least Difficult of Men. All I Want Is Boundless Love, or: Born 100 Years Ago Today

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.





Four more below the fold:

Have You Forgotten What We Were Like Then When We Were Still First Rate

Only two tablets now, both living, every other finished journal of my life I had not yet destroyed now disappeared, pages ripped from covers and fed into Iron Mountain locked shredding bins, I couldn't get them back if I wanted, and here's the thing: not one twinge of seller's regret. The living are dead as soon as last line filled, I've their replacements already though only one past half. I still make these



and don't see or want that stopping though I can now start *their* imminent shredding starting with, fine metaphor abounding, the weakest, most disposable, I mean, what the fuck am I going to do with boxes of these, shred NOW! before I'm shipped to my new permanent *AND* temporary home in El Salvador than make my survivors have to throw them out (and be forced to look at them), vital reminder:





Been a few years since posted that, it makes me uncynically happy, few things do these days. Going to Michigan Monday to visit our daughter and son-in-law is another, as always there are no plans to post and no plans to not post. I've long been told to avoid eye contact with white men in asshole pick-up trucks and white women in Jeeps driving batshit crazy, word yo, hoping for no cracker-encounters, but... hey! did I play this Lambchop song here recently, doesn't matter, I guarantee Lambchop will be played in the car to Michigan, around Michigan, then home to Maryland

Do you know there are people who don't get what's going on and why?
Ferengitriskelionocracy							< thought of that night before last
"It’s really strange how Trump figured out that Executive Orders are basically “longer tweets that drive giant media attention” and the media hasn’t figured it’s being played each time they report on these as if it’s Moses coming down the Mount with stone tablets"
⬆	Counterpoint - yes the media has, and it slavishly loves it						⬆
no longer effectuates agency priorities
"Preserve this video of street-boy demeanor Trump Regime arrogance. It can be interpreted as an indeed creative declaration of war on Denmark/Greenland"
Snatching people off the street because of their opinion in Magamerica
ICE Makes Another Student Disappear
Snatching people off the street because they are union organizers
"the funniest part of this era is that they’re disappearing people and plenty of folks are like “this is almost the end of democracy” like you need to collect all the McDonalds Monopoly pieces for it to count"
Another student disappeared by *CE, this time at the University of Alabama
"This is how the Gestapo will come for you, wearing hoodies and casually ganging up on a lone woman in the street"
Georgia Woman Arrested After Disposing of Miscarriage
Eff be eye be Hitlordsay opcays
Is today's monologue > a rhetorical question? >	How the fuck did hitlordsay not occur to me until (citizens are being snatched off the street, yo) yesterday?
Reminder: one primary purpose of snatching people off the street in the open when phones are recording is to create a honeypot for the Gestapo of people who scream in anger as much if not more than feeding the ravenous magaturds the fofa they crave							⬆
"From vandalizing Teslas = terrorism to talking about Teslas = terrorism"
Israel is the template for Trump and Europe’s war on freedom
"It's hard to overstate how much contemporary evangelicalism has broken the brains of American conservatives, an ideology that allows you be ontologically righteous with no actual demands on you so long as you are a considered "a good Christian""
The Shooting of Gaza’s Children
"There’s something so uniquely American about the first major scandal of this administration being the improper process in which people were discussing the war crimes they were committing and not the war crimes themselves"
Democrats Rage Over Yemen Strike Leak, But Not at the Strike Itself
"Both Obama and Biden bombed Yemen (and helped Prince Bone-Saw bomb it), slaughtering masses of innocent people. So why would the Democrats be upset about the bombing and slaughtering itself?"
Selling war where it counts, in DC metros and buses
Which US puppet will lead Lebanon's financial reconstruction?
Deconstructing the new American oligarchy
Trump is tearing it all down—and weirdly, that might be the best shot we’ve had in decades
⬆	"The real scandal isn’t that Trump is wrecking the government. It’s that these institutions were already rotting from within—and Democrats like Schumer and Gillibrand were pretending it worked while defending the status quo behind the scenes. You’ve got Ruben Gallego out in Arizona holding $5,000-a-plate fundraisers while Bernie and AOC are packing arenas in the same state. No more hiding. No more pretending. The masks are off. Now we know who’s fighting for people—and who’s just trying to manage our decline"						⬆
⬆	There is not going to be an election in 2028						⬆
MOTHERFUCKING DEMOCRATS ARE THE ENEMY!
⬆	"I cannot overstate how significant this is - while the national media is focused on the D.C. drama, a group of Democrats off the radar in a tiny state just radically shifted more power to the planet's largest corporations via world-changing legislation"						⬇
The Existential Threat of Ultra-Billionaires
"I keep saying this but the reason members of congress want to stay in office until they die is they can't buy that kind of elder care anywhere else, even if they are rich"
You, dear civil servants, are the canaries in the coal mine
"posting "these aren't very bright guys and things got out of hand" again isn't really doing much besides underlining how humiliating it is to lose every battle to clumsy idiots"
Democrats attempted programmatic post-neoliberalism inside a party that neoliberalism had hollowed out
Neoliberalism and Its Hegemonic Crisis
The difference between Democrats and their base and Republicans and their base
Bernie and AOC sheepdog for the Democrats
WHY THE WEASEL TESTICLES?
William T. Vollmann's Battle to Publish an American Epic
On Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s prescient novel *American Abductions*
One year from yesterday will be Frank O'Hara's centennial
Robert Ashley born 85 years ago today, much more music HERE

ANIMALS

Frank O'Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

More Than the Ear Can Hold

 Want to DJ one hour on WFMU?

What kinds of show ideas are we interested in?
-Underrepresented music on WFMU: new and old artists that haven't received the proper kind of attention on our airwaves yet
-Uncategorizable strangeness
-Spoken word collages
-Spontaneous radio improvisation
-Labored sound art pieces made just for your radio show
-Interviews with scientists, obscure radio personalities, your parents ...
-Comedy
-Found sound, field recordings, etc.

Me, no. Two, three, four, five years back I briefly talked with someone at WOWD in Takoma Park about possibly DJing a show, I don't want to DJ a show beyond the one at this shitty blog, but you? some of you?

This all started after reading Ira's interview on tone view (in which he discusses, among many things, his WFMU weekly show), which means today's playlist is songs by one of the bands on the innermost circle of rotating bands/musicians for the three not permanent chairs in My Stupidass Deserted Island Five Game

 

 

• These efforts: These fuckers really not understand that Democrats are their allies, that Democrats are the Washington Generals?
  
• Reminder: The wife of a Supreme Court justice "is one of the most powerful and fierce women in Washington," and "is really the tip of the spear in these efforts."
• Reminder: Democrats suppressed the vote in Wisconsin to hurt Sanders
  
• Reminder: a nominee to the Supreme Court's father was a top lawyer for an oil company whose case will be heard at the Supreme Court (and the Washington Generals did not ask her about it much less ask her if she will recuse herself)
  
• Perry Anderson on Britain's, and ours, clusterfuck
• Update: I made this tonight 
  
• Deserted islands and radical needs
• My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, the two permanent seats remain permanent though I don't want to listen to either until the requisite birthday posts feel horribly obligatory, the fuck is wrong with me

 

 

• Liberalism and fascism, partners in crime
• I am sure Senator Crackerwhisperer from Texas and Senator Crackerwhisperer from Missouri (who is going to be a boil on America's ass for decades, provided there are decades) are just as livid at this censorship 
• Tech companies are destroying Democracy, Jeff types into his free google blogging platform
  
• Free speech, the concept, is disinformation itself
  
• The good parts
• Iron laws of institutions, a Pelosi reminder
• War on universities
  
• Dan's New Critical Compilation
• My giftmas present to me will be Berryman's letters
• Eileen Miles *Oath*
• James McNew interview
  
  

Frank O'Hara

The Enormous Bliss of American Death, or: Born 92 Years Ago Today

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.






Four more below the fold:

The Jungle of Impossible Eagerness, or: Born 91 Years Ago Today

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.






Four more below the fold:

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

 

Born Eighty-Nine Years Ago Today

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

 

A Dark Fruitcake Sleep

New paintings from Earthgirl. Here's why I am not a painter. The above was going to be my birthday present unless it sold at the MOCO Art Festival this weekend. It sold at the MOCO Art Festival this weekend. So did this one, you can't tell from the photo, it is only approx 4x6 inches (and won her first place):

CORSON'S INLET

A.R. Ammons

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning

to the sea,

then turned right along

   the surf

                         rounded a naked headland

                         and returned

   along the inlet shore:

it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,   

crisp in the running sand,

       some breakthroughs of sun

   but after a bit

continuous overcast:

the walk liberating, I was released from forms,   

from the perpendiculars,

      straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds

of thought

into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends   

               of sight:

                         I allow myself eddies of meaning:   

yield to a direction of significance

running

like a stream through the geography of my work:   

   you can find

in my sayings

                         swerves of action

                         like the inlet’s cutting edge:

               there are dunes of motion,

organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance   

in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:

but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events

I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting

beyond the account:

in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of   

primrose

       more or less dispersed;

disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows

of dunes,

irregular swamps of reeds,

though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all ...

predominantly reeds:

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,   

shutting out and shutting in, separating inside

          from outside: I have

          drawn no lines:

          as

manifold events of sand

change the dune’s shape that will not be the same shape   

tomorrow,

so I am willing to go along, to accept   

the becoming

thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish   

         no walls:

by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek   

to undercreek: but there are no lines, though

       change in that transition is clear

       as any sharpness: but “sharpness” spread out,   

allowed to occur over a wider range

than mental lines can keep:

the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:   

black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk

of air

and, earlier, of sun,

waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,   

caught always in the event of change:   

       a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals

       and ate

to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab,   

picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy

turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits:

risk is full: every living thing in

siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small

white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears

               the shallows, darts to shore

                            to stab—what? I couldn’t

       see against the black mudflats—a frightened

       fiddler crab?

               the news to my left over the dunes and

reeds and bayberry clumps was

               fall: thousands of tree swallows

               gathering for flight:

               an order held

               in constant change: a congregation

rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable

          as one event,

                      not chaos: preparations for

flight from winter,

cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps,

beaks

at the bayberries

    a perception full of wind, flight, curve,

    sound:

    the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness:

the “field” of action

with moving, incalculable center:

in the smaller view, order tight with shape:

blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:

snail shell:

            pulsations of order

            in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,   

broken down, transferred through membranes

to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no

lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together   

            and against, of millions of events: this,

                         so that I make

                         no form of

                         formlessness:

orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override   

or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain   

the top of a dune,

the swallows

could take flight—some other fields of bayberry   

            could enter fall

            berryless) and there is serenity:

            no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,

or thought:

no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:

terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities   

of escape open: no route shut, except in   

   the sudden loss of all routes:

            I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will   

not run to that easy victory:

            still around the looser, wider forces work:

            I will try

       to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening   

scope, but enjoying the freedom that

Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,   

that I have perceived nothing completely,

that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

THE EARTHWOMAN AND THE WATERWOMAN

Denise Levertov

The earthwoman by her oven
                           tends her cakes of good grain.
The waterwoman's children
are spindle thin.
                              The earthwoman
                  has oaktree arms. Her children
full of blood and milk
          stamp through the woods shouting.
                 The waterwoman
          sings gay songs in a sad voice
                        with her moonshine children.
When the earthwoman
has had her fill of the good day
            she curls to sleep in her warm hut
            a dark fruitcake sleep
but the waterwoman
                   goes dancing in the misty lit-up town
          in dragonfly dresses and blue shoes.

"When I woke up Mayakovsky He Was a Lot More Prompt," the Sun Said Petulantly

• Mstislav Rostropovich was born 87 years ago today. 
• The pianist in Shostakovich's Cello Sonata is Benjamin Britten, btw.
• Today's links while they're fresh.
• Protesting police violence in Albuquerque.
• Democrats are doomed.
• John Podesta's heroic battle against straw men.
• Destination Culture.

• Goats are more clever than previously thought.
• Crow is alive.
• What is forgetting?
• On the latest Jonathan Littell.
• What enemies say picking.
• Commercial Opportunities. Tom's latest.
• Hejinian, Whitman, and the politics of sleep.
• It's still Frank O'Hara's birthday.

A TRUE ACCOUNT OF TALKING TO THE SUN AT FIRE ISLAND

Frank O'Hara

The Sun woke me this morning loud

and clear, saying "Hey! I've been

trying to wake you up for fifteen

minutes. Don't be so rude, you are

only the second poet I've ever chosen

to speak to personally

                                  so why

aren't you more attentive? If I could

burn you through the window I would

to wake you up. I can't hang around

here all day."

                    "Sorry, Sun, I stayed

up late last night talking to Hal."

"When I woke up Mayakovsky he was

a lot more prompt" the Sun said

petulantly. "Most people are up

already waiting to see if I'm going

to put in an appearance."

                                       I tried

to apologize "I missed you yesterday."

"That's better" he said. "I didn't

know you'd come out." "You may be

wondering why I've come so close?"

"Yes" I said beginning to feel hot

wondering if maybe he wasn't burning me

anyway.

              "Frankly I wanted to tell you

I like your poetry. I see a lot

on my rounds and you're okay. You may

not be the greatest thing on earth, but

you're different. Now, I've heard some

say you're crazy, they being excessively

calm themselves to my mind, and other

crazy poets think that you're a boring

reactionary. Not me.

                                 Just keep on

like I do and pay no attention. You'll

find that people always will complain

about the atmosphere, either too hot

or too cold too bright or too dark, days

too short or too long.

                                 If you don't appear

at all one day they think you're lazy

or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.

And don't worry about your lineage

poetic or natural. The Sun shines on

the jungle, you know, on the tundra

the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were

I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting

for you to get to work.

                                    And now that you

are making your own days, so to speak,

even if no one reads you but me

you won't be depressed. Not

everyone can look up, even at me. It

hurts their eyes."

                          "Oh Sun, I'm so grateful to you!"

"Thanks and remember I'm watching. It's

easier for me to speak to you out

here. I don't have to slide down

between buildings to get your ear.

I know you love Manhattan, but

you ought to look up more often.

                                                    And

always embrace things, people earth

sky stars, as I do, freely and with

the appropriate sense of space. That

is your inclination, known in the heavens

and you should follow it to hell, if

necessary, which I doubt.

                                          Maybe we'll

speak again in Africa, of which I too

am specially fond. Go back to sleep now

Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem

in that brain of yours as my farewell."

"Sun, don't go!" I was awake

at last. "No, go I must, they're calling

me."

        "Who are they?"

                                  Rising he said "Some

day you'll know. They're calling to you

too." Darkly he rose, and then I slept.