just like a pile of leaves

Meditations In An Emergency
'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’m 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 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.'
- Frank O’Hara



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For Grace, After a Party
'you do not always know what i am feeling.
last night in the warm spring air while i was blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t interest me, it was love for you that set me afire, and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of strangers my most tender feelings writhe and bear the fruit of screaming. put out your hand, isn’t there an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? and someone you love enters the room and says wouldn’t you like the eggs a little different today? and when they arrive they are just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather is holding.'
- Frank O’Hara



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Having a Coke with You
'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'
- Frank O’Hara



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Somewhere I Have Never Travelled
'somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience,
your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands'
- E.E. Cummings

(all images from Thierry Mugler Spring/Summer 2012, via)