Sleeping on the Wing Challenge: Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)

[Angeline]

Here we are at Week Three, and our featured poet is Frank O'Hara. You can still write poetry in the previous weeks' challenge threads, but they are now unstuck.

First, some O'Hara poetry.

A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island

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.

*************************

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
in Ghana are doing these days
______________________I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

*************************

A Terrestrial Cuckoo

What a hot day it is! for
Jane and me above the scorch
of sun on jungle waters to be
paddling up and down the Essequibo
in our canoe of war-surplus gondola parts.

We enjoy it though: the bats squeak
in our wrestling hair, parakeets
bungle lightly into gorges of blossom,
the water's full of gunk and
what you might call waterlilies if you're

silly as we. Our intuitive craft
our striped T shirts and shorts
cry out to vines that we are feasting
on flies to make straight the way
of tropical art. "I'd give a lempira or two

to have it all slapped onto a
canvas" says Jane. "How like
lazy flamingos look the floating
weeds! and the infundibuliform
corolla on our right a harmless Charybidis!

or am I seduced by its ambient
mauve?" The nose of our vessel sneezes
into a bundle of amaryllis, quite
artificially tied with ribbon.
Are there people nearby? and postcards?

We, essentially travelers, frown
and backwater. What will the savages
think if our friends turn up? with
sunglasses and cuneiform decoders!
probably. Oh Jane, is there no frontier?

We strip off our pretty blazers
of tapa and dive like salamanders
into the vernal stream. Alas! they
have left the jungle aflame, and in
friendly chatter of Kotzebue and Salonika our

friends swiftly retreat downstream
on a flowery float. We'll strike through
the tongues and tigers hotly, towards
orange mountains, black taboos, dada!
and clouds. To return with absolute treasure!

our only penchant, that. And a red-
billed toucan, pointing t'aurora highlands
and caravanserais of junk, cries out
"New York is everywhere like Paris!
go back when you're rich, behung with lice!"

*************************

To The Film Industry in Crisis

Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals
with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of
____ants,
nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition
is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you,
promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though
____you
are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry,
it's you I love!

In time of crisis, we must all decide again and again
____whom we love.
And give credit where it's due: not to my starched nurse,
_____who taught me
how to be bad and not bad rather than good (and has
_____lately availed
herself of this information), not to the Catholic Church
which is at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic
_____entertainment,
not to the American Legion, which hates everybody, but
_____to you,
glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous
_____Cinemascope,
searching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound,
_____with all
your heavenly dimensions and reverberations and icono-
_____clasms! To
Richard Barthelmess as the "tol'able" boy barefoot and
_____in pants,
Jeanette McDonald of the flaming hair and lips and
_____long, long neck,
Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged
_____fender of a car
and smiles, Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a
_____sausage
on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred
_____Astaire of the feet,
Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers'
_____gasping spouses,
the Tarzans, each and every one of you (I cannot bring
_____myself to prefer
Johnny Weismuller to Lex Barker, I cannot!), Mae West
_____in a furry sled,
her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Rudolph
_____Valentino of the moon,
the crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle
_____Norma Shearer,
Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel
_____McCrea's yacht
and crying into the dappled sea, Clark Gable rescuing
_____Gene Tierney
from Russia and Allan Jones rescuing Kitty Carlisle from
_____Harpo Marx,
Cornel Wilde coughing blood on the piano keys while
_____Merle Oberon berates,
Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through
_____Niagara Falls,
Joseph Cotton puzzling and Orson Welles puzzled and
_____Dolores del Rio
eating orchids for lunch and breaking mirrors, Gloria
_____Swanson reclining,
and Jean Harlow reclining and wiggling, and Alice Faye
_____reclining
and wiggling and singing, Myrna Loy being calm and
_____wise, William Powell
in his stunning urbanity, Elizabeth Taylor, blossoming,
_____yes, to you

and to all you others, the great, the near-great, the fea-
_____tured, the extras
who pass quickly and return in dreams saying your one
_____or two lines,
my love!
Long may you illumine space with your marvellous ap-
_____pearance, delays
and ennunciations, and may the money of the world glit-
_____teringly cover you
as you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with
_____your faces
in packs for our edification, the way the clouds come
_____often at night
but the heavens operate on the star system. It is a divine
_____precedent
you perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great
_____earth rolls on!

*************************
Poem

Hate is only one of many responses
true, hurt and hate go hand in hand
but why be afraid of hate, it is only there
think of filth, is it really awesome
neither is hate
don't be shy of unkindness, either
it's cleansing and allows you to be direct
like an arrow that feels something

out and out meanness, too, lets love breathe
you don't have to fight off getting in too deep
you can always get out if you're not too scared

an ounce of prevention's
enough to poison the heart
don't think of others
until you have thought of yourself, are true

all of these things, if you feel them
will be graced by a certain reluctance
and turn into gold

if felt by me, will be smilingly deflected
by your mysterious concern

*************************

Sleeping On The Wing

Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness,
as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries "Sleep!
O for a long sound sleep and so forget it!"
that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city,
veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon
does when a car honks or a door slams, the door
of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.

Fear drops away too, like the cement, and you
are over the Atlantic. Where is Spain? where is
who? The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,
was it? A sudden down-draught reminds you of gravity
and your position in respect to human love. But
here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.
Once you are helpless, you are free, can you believe
that? Never to waken to the sad struggle of a face?
to travel always over some impersonal vastness,
to be out of, forever, neither in nor for!

The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind
and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.
The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible!
and was and is, and yet the form, it may be sleeping
too. Those features etched in the ice of someone
loved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space
and speed, your hand alone could have done this.
Curiosity, the passionate hand of desire. Dead,
or sleeping? Is there speed enough? And, swooping,
you relinquish all that you have made your own,
the kingdom of your self sailing, for you must
awake and breathe your warmth in this beloved image
whether it's dead or merely disappearing,
as space is disappearing and your singularity.

 

[Angeline]

Frank O'Hara 411

Small personal details--such as the time you wake up, the books you buy, who calls on the phone, what clothes you wear--actually make up a rather large part of experience, and matter a lot, but they aren't usually put into poetry--they don't seem important enough or general enough. How can these things matter to anyone except the person who experiences them? Frank O'Hara puts them onto his poetry for their own sake; they are simply there, as important as anything else. They are obviously related to larger ideas and feelings (what isn't?), but the connection isn't insisted on. You get the feeling, reading Frank O'Hara, that anything and everything you think or see or feel can be put into a poem and it will work oit right. He seems to write from the middle of all these things, while they are still part of ordinary, unsorted-out days. Sometimes his poems seem, in fact, to be more about particular days than about particular subjects.

_____Instead of beginning with a subject, it often seems as though Frank O'Hara begins a poem by just starting to talk. Subjects, ideas, and perceptions come up in his poems the way they do in thinking and it conversation, one after another, both connected and unconnected to everything else that is going on. When particular people or towns or streets or books appear in his poems, he lets them stay particular, the way they really are, with their real names--Patsy and Easthampton and Sixth Avenue and New World Writing. And he leaves himself in the middle of it all, walking, thinking, looking around, and talking. His poems don't give profound explanations for the way life is--they give a feeling of what it's like to be alive.

_____"Sleeping on the Wing" is a poem with a dream in it. The dream seems to have taken place in one of those sleeps, maybe in the afternoon, in which you don't quite lose completely your awareness of your real life, when you stay a little in between your dreams and your real concerns. The dream in the poem is about flying. The concerns seem to be mainly about the death of someone the poet loved.

_____The poem is a little hard to read until you get used to the way O'Hara lets the details of his thoughts flow into one another, the way they probably really did during his sleep. He goes to sleep suddenly, as suddenly as a pigeon flies up when a car honks or when a door slams. For him, the door that has slammed is "the door/of dreams," and he is the one flying up, over the city, out toward the Atlantic. Like the hero of a tragedy for whom everything has gotten to be too much, he dreams to forget. Sleeping is a way to get away--from the city, from the cement, from fear, from facts (about Spain, about the Civil War, about anything). It is a way to be in a "beautiful lie"--to be as calmly distant as the Greek gods were on Mount Olympus, to be really free, over the "impersonal vastness" of the sea. In a way it would seem good to stay "away" forever, away from caring about people, and feeling confused, and being hurt.

_____But even in his dream, a "down-draught" reminds him that just as gravity is a force that holds you to the earth, so is love. Both keep you from flying, from being free. In his dream he flies so far away that the world seems an iceberg below him. Or perhaps its "form"--the way it really is--is asleep, the way he is, as you could think the form of a statue is still "sleeping" (still uncarved) inside a block of marble. Now the face of the person who died is carved in the ice. Frank O'Hara says he himself is the sculptor, that is, he is the one who made these features appear. And in fact he did, since they are appearing in his dream--brought to his mind by feelings of wonder and curiosity and desire. But who really is dead and who is sleeping? Can he fly with enough speed to wake up? And he swoops back down to earth, to being awake, to being alive, to remembering the dead person's reality and life and death. His flight, in which he was so distant and exceptional and free, disappears, as does the space he flew through, and the image he carved.

_____"Sleeping on the Wing" says a great deal in a short space. It says, for one thing, a lot about the amazing confusion of desires that people have at various times. Do we want to be asleep or awake, to forget or remember, to be alone or with people, attached or free, away or in the middle of things, to be indifferent or to love and thus risk pain? The poem doesn't try to explain it all: rather, it gives a sense of what it's like to be in the middle of an inexplicable combination of feelings. If Frank O'Hara had tried to sort it all out in advance, he probably couldn't have gotten to this same sense. Our intellect is relatively slow in getting to the truth of feelings. Our dreams every night illustrate how fast and accurate we can be with another part of our minds.

~ Excerpted from Sleeping on the Wing

 

[Angeline]

Frank O'Hara Writing Exercises

Frank O'Hara said in an essay about writing, "You just go on your nerve." And to get to that brilliant, concise, honest kind of sense there is in "Sleeping on the Wing," you probably have to give up advance planning and logic and restraint, and trust your nerve.

_____Write a poem that has a dream in it. Start from anywhere--from a detail in the dream, or just from a thought. The important thing isn;t to get the plot of the dream just right. The idea is to use the dream (some of it or all of it) to write a poem. Be as casual about the details of the dream as you are about your other thoughts. As you write, let the poem be open to thoughts, associations, whatever comes to mind, even if they seem, at the moment, trivial, strange, silly, incomplete, or disconnected. Whenever anything in he dream makes you think of something--an idea, a feeling, a memory--say it. Like O'Hara's poem, yours can be a combination of dreams and of thinking. One thing that might help you get in a mood of dreamy concentration is to write while listening to music (Frank O'Hara often did this). Remember, nothing that you write has to be final--you can always change the poem later.

_____Another kind of poem to write is a poem in which the subject is a day, like Frank O'Hara's poem "The Day Lady Died." O'Hara's poem is about doing a lot of ordinary things, then finding out something extraordinary: that someone who meant a lot to him has died. The ordinary things he does are in preparation for going to the country for the weekend to stay with friends (Mike and Patsy): he gets money from the bank, buys presents for his hosts. Then he does another ordinary thing--buys a newspaper--and finds out something very bad and not ordinary--that the singer Billie Holiday has just died. "Lady Day," which the title of the poem refers to, was a name Billie Holiday was called by her admirers. He feels shocked and unhappy and is overcome by the memory of the last time he saw her, when she was singing at a nightclub called The Five Spot.

_____Your poem about a day might be about a completely ordinary day or, like O'Hara's, an ordinary day in which one extraordinary thing happened--something that happened to you, something you thought, something you found out. If you do end with something like that, be sure to make it just one in a list with the others, described plainly and not prepared for with any special buildup. It will probably be clear which things are more and less important to you; and, also, you can refer to it in your title, as O'Hara does. In any case, just start talking about this ordinary or mostly ordinary day without deciding in advance what is going to come next. Let the poem surprise you a little, like a walk you take when you're going nowhere in particular. Let the poem start sometime at the beginning of the day. Try making it a rule that you'll put a name of someone or something in every line--use the names of streets, bridges, friends, movie stars, restaurants, soft drinks, rivers, magazines, whatever. That is, instead of saying "We walk down the street," say "Jennie and I walk down Cypress Road." You can write it in the present as if you were still in the middle of it, saying what you do, what you're thinking, what you remember, what the weather is like, what you're wearing, what you say, what you see. If you revise the poem, one way to decide what you really want to be in it is to decide what seems to be part of the real feeling and mood of the day.
~ Excerpted from Sleeping on the Wing

 

[champagne1982]

I wrote a poem about a day and a dream. It was when I suspected I would need a re-op on my valve and aorta and marks the valvessary of the first of my heart surgeries.

On Waking Up Before Dawn​

I wish that I will never return
to that place where night wraps tight
her sheets and tucks me in beneath
a star bright canopy nor watch the milky way
spill across the sky then disappear
when I close my eyes.

What's there beneath the horizon
and beyond? My Love, whisper now
and promise me there is more,
more than darkness over the edge,
more than the centre of the night,
more than cold, dark sleep.

I fear the loneliness that lies close
on the other side. I have been and back
and knew only dreamless sleep;
there is no comfort in this. Wake me
into your morning, so that I may see
the day and know the warmth of you.​

I don't think I properly appreciate Mr. O'Hara since I don't really like his poems. Maybe they're too inaccessible to me. He speaks of the common place in his life but as far as I'm concerned, he could be talking about oceanography and I would know as much. He's the most dead of all three of the poets we've discussed so far IMO. <le sigh> I shall try though. Someone liked him enough to name an anthology and text book after one of his poems and the least I can do is give it a closer read later on.

 

[Angeline]

I wrote a poem about a day and a dream. It was when I suspected I would need a re-op on my valve and aorta and marks the valvessary of the first of my heart surgeries.

On Waking Up Before Dawn​

I wish that I will never return
to that place where night wraps tight
her sheets and tucks me in beneath
a star bright canopy nor watch the milky way
spill across the sky then disappear
when I close my eyes.

What's there beneath the horizon
and beyond? My Love, whisper now
and promise me there is more,
more than darkness over the edge,
more than the centre of the night,
more than cold, dark sleep.

I fear the loneliness that lies close
on the other side. I have been and back
and knew only dreamless sleep;
there is no comfort in this. Wake me
into your morning, so that I may see
the day and know the warmth of you.​

I don't think I properly appreciate Mr. O'Hara since I don't really like his poems. Maybe they're too inaccessible to me. He speaks of the common place in his life but as far as I'm concerned, he could be talking about oceanography and I would know as much. He's the most dead of all three of the poets we've discussed so far IMO. <le sigh> I shall try though. Someone liked him enough to name an anthology and text book after one of his poems and the least I can do is give it a closer read later on.

Hmmm interesting. I wrote a few dream poems and a poem about a day.

December Fourth

The Sun has fallen.

(Come home right away.)

It cracked like an egg,
yolk spilling, and

the house is a ruin
with pieces of her
everywhere, books, poems,
the room is exploding
with photographs.

(Come home right away.)

The Sun has fallen,
and everyone screams.
The living room is bursting,
a supernova. Everything
I understand is blowing up.

I sit in the rocking chair.
I don’t move. I don't know
what to do.

Maybe in Hiroshima
or Nagasaki it felt like this,
one flash, then blind,
then ashes.

The Sun has fallen,
and now there is silence,
empty and immense.

There is no meaning.
Everything is gone
but me and my rocking chair.
We have no meaning.
We exist like stones
unaware of time
in this sunless world.

Eventually
Daddy picked me up,
put me in my bed,
which like me
was no longer real.

Your bed is still in the world.
It must be because I awake
there. Someone speaks,
something about black dresses
and shoes.

I think Ezra Pound has been the most dead to me so far. I love O'Hara's poems, which just goes to show how subjective this poetry stuff is. You know I'm a big fan of Ted Berrigan. When I was typing this info up this morning, I thought how much O'Hara reminds me of Berrigan, and then I remembered reading that O'Hara's writing greatly influenced Berrigan. So I guess I'm primed for this sort of writing. I don't really understand the dream exercise yet, but I have to read it and the namesake poem more.

I'm still up for people adding poets. I just don't want to try to suggest an exercise myself for a poet unless I feel pretty comfortable with his or her poems. Maybe Langston Hughes, or (as I said) Gwen Brooks are people I could do.

 

[champagne1982]

This is a hard exercise. I don't remember details but impressions of momentous days. I have so much to write about but I hate dwelling on the tragedies and to be frank, my victories are pretty mundane.

The Twin Towers happened in the morning where I was, I'd just rolled out of bed... besides that one's been over wrote.

hmmm...

One Evening In November

You introduced yourself to my palm
and began to chew the first finger
of my right hand. Needle sharp
you sank those teeth into my flesh
and I yelped louder than your sister
as she and roly-poly brother played

savages on the floor. Spike the cocker
wasn't sure why you nuzzled his belly
Melanie surmised it was because gold
was the colour of your mom. I could
do nothing but agree. You crept inside
the sleeve of my jacket and we laughed
at your smallnesss. That didn't last.

It seems as the evening pressed
into night, you discovered that cries
would lead to that warm spot next
to my heart beneath my chin and now,
you live inside my chest and Cooper,
I'd be lost without you.

 

[Eluard]

I can see why Champers wouldn’t like O’Hara — he’s a hard poet to find the way into. I kind of discovered him only a year ago and have been reading him pretty heavily ever since. One thing that the précis above doesn’t mention is that he was above all else a painter’s poet: he was the doyen of the N.Y. art scene of the late 50s and a strong supporter of the Abstract Expressionists, like Franz Kline, Pollock, de Kooning (especially) and Rauchenberg. He was a curator at MOMA in the 60s and exerted a tremendous influence over the reception of abstract expressionism world-wide. And he knew everyone, and slept with most of them too.

Being at the center of the N.Y. scene comes at a price though. At his worst he is gossipy and a relentless name-dropper. He gets away with it because all of the people that he is mentioning are in the art world or are hanging on to its fringes. So you have heard of them, even if only vaguely. But you can’t imitate that anywhere other than in the major cultural centers. It couldn’t be done in Sydney, for example, without being hilarious.

But there is a better side of O’Hara, before he got fully immersed in being part of, and piloting, the cultural elite. In the 50s he was a more emotionally open individual and his love poems to Larry Rivers are maybe his best things. He needed to be in love to write well because he is an emotional, not an intellectual poet. He doesn’t reflect on things spiritually or philosophically, he falls through those things to the emotional crisis beneath them.

‘Sleeping on the Wing’ btw was written in a matter of minutes when James Schuyler twitted him that he (O’Hara) seemed able to write anything at anytime. So O’Hara went into the bedroom and typed out ‘Sleeping on the Wing’ just like that. The death that is mentioned in it is likely to be James Dean’s because at that time O’Hara was fixated on it — having already written several poems on the subject in the previous weeks. And O’Hara was also afraid to go to sleep because he didn’t like the dreams he had — usually nightmares. (Facts here are courtesy of Brad Gooch’s incredibly good biography.)

I was only able to get into O’Hara because I got his collected poems — that somehow enables you (or maybe just me) to find the poet as he was himself. At his best he is emotionally fluent and real — he lives inside his poetry. At his worst he’s just gossipy and arid (faults that he was aware of more than anyone).

 

[Eluard]

BTW Ange — the third to last line of Sleeping on the Wing needs a line break after 'after'.

 

[champagne1982]

I see what it is about m. O'Hara now El, thanks for illuminating a bit more about this poet. He's an MFA snob not to mention I can't like abstract expressionism no matter how hard I try. It's tough to get into a person's writing when you're spending a lot of time in subconcious disdain over who he is.

Interesting insight on me leaving me much to consider about my own flaws over a dead white guy's.

 

[champagne1982]

How I Spent The Last Three Hours

I like coffee in the morning
and I only mention
this since I had one with dinner
yesterday and it kept me awake
until after one.

He made me a coffee with milk
and sugar in it and thanks
were what I gave
even though my petulant mind
could only think about French
Vanilla flavouring keeping chilly
in the fridge. So, anyway,
the phone sounded off.

At seven thirty the tone
isn't as ominous as it seems
at three a.m. It's still
the harbringer of ungood news.

So, she's in a coma?
This shock isn't as tough
as I expected.

Mom needs to be told.
clichés are ok. Yep,
it's been a full and long
life. Not really easy.

At ten to nine you told me
you were driving to her side.
Always as bad as your gran,
you asked what I wanted. Silly,
I want what's best for us all.
I want the last decade back.

DNR on her chart, I pray
for the best but I hope
she doesn't linger. Give
her permission to go. I know,
Liz, I know. Tell her not to wait.
I'm still days away.

I wish I could leave right now.
But, there's my job,
there's tickets and hotels...

Tell her I love her, ok?
I love you, too.

 

[Eluard]

BTW Ange — the third to last line of Sleeping on the Wing needs a line break after 'after'.

Edit: Ooops meant to say after `awake' — note to self, don't post just before bed.

 

[Eluard]

How I Spent The Last Three Hours

Champers — very nice poem! This is really getting towards O'Hara territory (though it makes too much sense for him in fact, he was always scrambling things up).

 

[Tzara]

Frank Does Not Eat His Orange

At lunch, in my dream, I hold an orange. I cannot
bite into it, as it has not been peeled, though I suppose
that is me being fussy as, of course, I could
bite into this orange and spurt juice about
my too clean-shaven chin, however silly that may be, but
as I said, in this dream I am just holding it, this
orange and I keep holding it, like it is God. Yes, God.
And one should not bite into God, I don't think. No.


.

 

[Eluard]

Frank Does Not Eat His Orange

At lunch, in my dream, I hold an orange. I cannot
bite into it, as it has not been peeled, though I suppose
that is me being fussy as, of course, I could
bite into this orange and spurt juice about
my too clean-shaven chin, however silly that may be, but
as I said, in this dream I am just holding it, this
orange and I keep holding it, like it is God. Yes, God.
And one should not bite into God, I don't think. No.


.

Nice one Tz.

 

[Angeline]

Something about Sunday.
The moment crosses over.
2:00 PM last time I looked
At the clock noon still watched
From the blind but the quality
Of light is syrupy, thicker.

I eat this heavy-lidded moment.
The dead live again. Anyone
Even old Lester as he never was
But as I imagine him may speak
To me or some approximation
May answer as grandfather. I may

Fly and I have. Everything falls.
I fall up. I become part of the sky.
I float over Greenwood Avenue,
Brothers of Israel temple,
The train station, a billboard:
LAUGH AT HIGH PRICES

And someone does raspy loud,
But I only blink as if the day were
Something caught in my eye, turn
over to a forest of pines, bird screech
and the whispering leaves.

Everyone has left but me.
I search the ground for signs
And find a blue eggshell
With the number 5 written on it.
The sun is slipping away.
The forest sinks into shadows.

 

[Eluard]

Something about Sunday.
The moment crosses over.

. . .

Wow! This one'd be tough to top.

 

[Angeline]

Wow! This one'd be tough to top.

Thank you El. It felt right.

(Still needs a little tinkering but not tonight. I need space from it for a bit.)

 

[Eluard]

He's an MFA snob

What is MFA?

(I'm sure I'll slap my forehead when you tell me.)

 

[champagne1982]

What is MFA?

(I'm sure I'll slap my forehead when you tell me.)

Master of Fine Arts? whack-a-mole anyone?

 

[Angeline]

What is MFA?

(I'm sure I'll slap my forehead when you tell me.)

Master of Fine Arts? As in MFA program at the University of Iowa or Cornell or some academic snobbery? That's my guess.

 

[Angeline]

Master of Fine Arts? whack-a-mole anyone?

Heh. I speak Champ.

 

[Eluard]

Yes, but my dears it is worse still — O'Hara went to Harvard!!

 

[Eluard]

Malediction


The elastic witch was tearing things apart
Starting with a sky all octopus black.
. . .You figure on some respite from this
But there is none to be had.

Rosy crosses sink into the earth
One after another.
Yes that is how the Gods would come.
Not in oval tins wobbling on
The azimuth from strings that
Shoot up from a craterous city,
But in daggers that go straight
Into the earth like plants.
Find it terrible — the melting, dreaming
Moment in which wishes explode.
How simple is the malediction that
Adds and subtracts lives.

I know that my heart will not love again.
It has folded away like a suit
In a suitcase. I cannot imagine
That it will be needed now.
I shall continue on with remembrance
Until it too
Learns to betray.

 

[Tzara]

. . .O'Hara went to Harvard!!

Where he roomed (for two years) with Edward Gorey:

 

[Angeline]

Where he roomed (for two years) with Edward Gorey:

Oh to have been a fly on the wall of that room.