Frank O'Hara Poems

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April 24

 Did you know that Evian spelled backwards is naive?
I myself was unaware of this fact until last Tuesday night
when John Ashbery, Marc Cohen, and Eugene Richie
gave a poetry reading and I introduced them
to an audience that already knew them,
and there were bottles of Evian at the table.
As air to the lungs of a drowning man was
a glass of this...Read more of this...

Poem

The clouds ache bleakly
and when they can manage it 
crush someone's head in
without a sound of anger.
This is a brutal mystery.

We meet in the streets
with our hands in our pockets
and snarl guiltily at each other
as if we had flayed a cloud
or two in our salad days.

Lots of things do blame us;
and in moments when I forget
how cruel we really should...Read more of this...

Death

1

If half of me is skewered
by grey crested birds
in the middle of the vines of my promise
and the very fact that I'm a poet
suffers my eyes
to be filled with vermilion tears 


2

how much greater danger
from occasion and pain is my vitality
yielding like a tree on fire!--
for every day is another view
of the tentative past
grown secure in its foundry of shimmering
that's...Read more of this...

Ode To Modern Art

 Come on in and stay a while
I'll photograph you emerging from the revolving door
like Frank O'Hara dating the muse of modern art
Talking about the big Pollock show is better
than going to it on a dismal Saturday afternoon
when my luncheon partner is either the author or the subject
of The Education of Henry Adams at a hard-to-get-
a-table-at restaurant on Cornelia Street
just...Read more of this...

July 10

 The sky was a midnight blue
velvet cloth draping
a birdcage and no moon
but the breeze was whistling
and the sound of a car
on Valentine Place was
the rush of a waterfall
on the phone in New York City
and that's when the muse
turned up with curly brown locks
she was a poet, too, and wanted
me to give her an assignment
she was willing to trade
fifteen minutes...Read more of this...

Like

It's not so much 
abstractions are available:
the lofty period of the mind
ending a sentence while the pain endures:
departures absences.

And you are still on the dock 
the smoke hasn't cleared in The Narrows 
At noon I sit in Jim's Place waiting for George
Who is mopping the stage up 
While two girls cry in the last row.

I think they got laid last...Read more of this...

Spleen

I know so much
about things I accept
so much it's like
vomiting. And I am
nourished by the
shabbiness of my
knowing so much
about others and what
they do and accepting
so much that I hate
as if I didn't know
what it is to me.
And what it is to
them I know and hate....Read more of this...

My heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time 
I don't prefer one "strain" to another 
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie 
not just a sleeper but also the big 
over-produced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!"...Read more of this...

The Lover

He waits and it is not without
a great deal of trouble that he tickles
a nightingale with his guitar.

He would like to cry Andiamo!
but alas! no one has arrived
yet although the dew is perfect

for adieux. How bitterly he beats
his hairy chest! because he is
a man sitting out an indignity.

The mean moon is like a nasty
little lemon above the ubiquitous
snivelling fir trees...Read more of this...