The Essential Poetry of Frank O'Hara. Frank O'Hara
to insist.
Leaf! don't ne neurotic
like the small chameleon
Aus einem April
We dust the walls.
And of course we are weeping larks
falling all over the heavens with our shoulders clasped
in someone's armpits, so tightly! and our throats are full.
Haven't you ever fallen down at Christmas
and didn't it move everyone who saw you?
isn't that what the tree means? the pure pleasure
of making weep those whom you cannot move by your flaights!
It's enough to drive one to suicide.
And the rooftops are falling apart like the applause
of rough, long-nailed, intimate, roughened-by-kiss, hands.
Fingers more breathless than a tongue laid upon the lips
in the hour of sunlight, early morning, before the mist rolls
in from the sea; and out there everything is turbulent and green.
River
Whole days would go by, and later their years,
while I thought of nothing but its darkness
drfting like a bridge against the sky.
Day after day I dreamly sought its melancholy,
its searchings, its soft banks enfolded me,
and upon my lenghtening neck its kiss
was murmuring like a wound. My very life
became the inhalation of its weedy ponderings
and sometimes in the sunlight my eyes,
walled in water, would glimpse the pathway
to the great sea. For it was there I was being borne.
Then for a moment my strenghtening arms
would cry out upon the leafy crest of the air
like whitecaps, and lightning, swift as pain,
would go through me on its way to the forest,
and I'd sink back upon that brutal tenderness
that bore me on, that held me like a slave
in its liquid distances of eyes, and one day,
though weeping for my caresses, would abandon me,
moment of infinitely salty air! sun fluttering
like a signal upon the open flesh of the world.
Poem: "There I could never be a boy"
to James Schuyler
There I could never be a boy,
though I rode like a god when the horse reared.
At a cry from mother I fell to my knees!
there I fell, clumsy and sick and good,
though I bloomed on the back of a frightened black mare
who had leaped windily at the start of a leaf
and she never threw me.
I had a quick heart
and my thighs clutched her back
I loved her fright, which was against me
into the air! and diamond white of her forelock
which seemed to smart with thoughts as my heart smarted
with life
and she'd toss her head with the pain
and paw the air and champ the bit, as if I were Endymion
and she, moon-like, hated to love me
All thing are tragic
when a mother watches!
and she wishes upon herself
the random fears of a scarlet soul, as it breathes in and out
and nothing chokes, or breaks from triumph to triumph!
I knew her but I could not be a boy,
for in the billowing air I was fleet and green
riding blackly through the ethereal night
towards men's words which I gracefully understood,
and it was given to me
as the soul is given the hands
to hold the ribbons of life1
as miles streak by beneath the moon's sharp hooves
and I have mastered the speed and strenght which is the
armor of the world
On Rachmaninoff's Birthday
Blue windows, blue rooftops
and the blue light of the rain,
these contiguous phrases of Rachmaninoff
poring into my enormous ears
and the tears falling into my blindness
for without him I do not play,
especially in the afternoon
on the day of his birthday. Good
fartune, you would have been
my teacher and I your only pupil
and I would always play again.
Secrets of Liszt and Scriabin
whispered to me over the keyboard
on unsunny afternoons! and growing
still in my stormy heart.
Only my eyes would be blues as I played
and you rapped my knuckles,
dearest father of all the Russias,
placing my fingers
tenderly upon your cold, tired eyes.
The Hunter
He set out and kept hunting
and hunting. Where, he thought
and thought, is the real chamois?
and can I kill it where it is?
He had brought with him only a dish
of pears. The autumn wind soared
above the trails where the drops
of the chamois led him further.
The leaves dropped around him
like pie-plates. The stars fell
one by one into his eyes and burnt
There is a geography which