Poetry Slam: At the Same Old Stand Buying Bagels

FOND SONORE
By Frank O'Hara

In placing this particular thought
I am taking up the cudgel against indifference
I wish that I might be different but I am
that I am is all I have so what can I do

as the hero of the hour I might have one strange destiny
but it is all mixed up and I have several
I can't choose between them they are pulling me aloft
which is not to say up like a Baroque ceiling or anything

where is the rain and the lightning to drown or burn us
as there used to be
where are the gods who could abuse and disabuse us often
when am I ever in the country walking along a lane plotting murder

you would think that the best things in life were free
but they're the worst even the air is dirty
and it's this "filth of life" that coats us against pain
so where are we back at the same old stand buying bagels

I think it would be nice to go away
but that's reserved for TV and who wants to end up in Paradise
it's not our milieu
we would be lost as a fish is lost when it has to swim

and yet and yet
this place is terrible to see and worse to feel
along with the purple you have contracted for an awful virus
and it is Christmas and the children are growing up

Poetry Slam Tuesdays: The Best of All My Days (O You)

ANIMALS
by 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

Poetry Slam Tuesdays: Digressions

I was going to transcribe a Frank O'Hara poem for today's poetry slam,
but really, it's tonight, and tonight is almost tomorrow,
& I just wrote my last Groupon for the day
in bed with a heating pad
listening to Tori Amos, and only Tori,
for the first time in months & months.
I'm wearing my Sly shirt & forgot to take off
the wristband from Lauren's show
& I was going to type out O'Hara's DIGRESSION ON NUMBER I, 1948,
mostly because it starts with the line,
"I am ill today but I am not too ill/I am not ill at all"
which sums up everything & nothing
of my own day,
because I am ill today but not too ill,
& I might not be ill at all, really,
plus I'm not sure if I even get his second stanza
& as I started typing it I felt like a fraud
because I didn't know what a "complicated Metzinger"
was in the slightest
& right as I thought that, the book fell shut
& I reopened it to the wrong page,
instead to his poem
YOU ARE GORGEOUS AND I'M COMING
and I couldn't help but smile,
because I get that, if only that:

"yes it may be that dark and purifying wave, the death of boredom
nearing the heights themselves may destroy in the pure air
to be further complicated, confused, empty but refilling, exposed to light"

This isn't about you, so you probably won't care.

Poetry Slam Tuesdays: The Catastrophe of My Personality

A glass of red wine and Frank O'Hara. I highly recommend it. This poem, in particular. I'd say it makes me want to cry, but that's too obvious, huh. But God! The way he talks about his "wounded beauty" makes my heart aflutter, too.

I often wait for "for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting."

Perhaps I am myself again. Words!

MAYAKOVSKY

By Frank O'Hara

1
My heart’s aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it’s throbbing!

then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.

2
I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.

Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,

and I’ll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.

Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.
I embrace a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.

3
That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest
oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Poetry Slam Tuesdays: It's Funny, But It's True

All summer, I kept wishing I had my Frank O'Hara collection with me, and not locked in a storage unit. Now it's back where it belongs, on my bookshelf. Here is a poem from it.

TRAVEL

Sometimes I know I love you better
than all the others I kiss it's funny

but it's true and I wouldn't roll
from one to the next so fast if you

hadn't knocked them all down like
ninepins when you roared by my bed


I keep trying to race ahead and catch
you at the newest station or whistle

stop but you are flighty about
schedules and always soar away just

as leaning from my taxicab my breath
reaches for the back of your neck

Poetry Slam Tuesdays: Partly Because

Having a Coke with You

By Frank O'Hara

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne

or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona

partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian

partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt

partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches

partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary

it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still

as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it

in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth

between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time

and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or

at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them

when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully

as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

You can also listen to Frank O'Hara read the poem, which is ... just terrific. (Video below.) 

I can't decide what part of this poem I love best. Definitely the end, but damn, this part makes me happy:

I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time

 

Hat tips and curtsies and so forth to CW for sharing this poem with me last week!