a blog of found things: words, art, photography, disappointment & hope
Your envelope
with the two red stamps
I would have planted in a flower-pot
had you ever sent me word
I’d have watered it
daily
then your letters
would have grown for me
Letters
beautiful and sad
and letters
that smell of you
I wish
we had done it sooner
not wait
till so late in the year.
Sometimes my heart beats a bit faster or irregularly as if
my body is fighting back, clinging to wakefulness. Mostly,
though, I enjoy the feeling of the sleeping pill taking
hold, pulling me toward quietude. It is like foreplay with a pre-
dictable outcome. So unusual: that kind of kept promise.
Inside the old chair
I found another chair;
though smaller, I liked
sitting in it better.
Inside that chair
I found another chair;
though smaller, in
many ways I felt
good sitting in it.
Inside that chair
I found another chair;
it was smaller and
seemed to be made
just for me.
Inside that chair,
still another;
it was very small,
so small I could
hardly get out of it.
Inside that chair
I found yet another;
and in that, another,
and another, until
I was sitting in
a chair so small
it would be difficult
to say I was sitting
in a chair at all.
I could not rise
or fall, and no one
could catch me.
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,
overproduced 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!”, all to the good! I
don’t wear brown and gray suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart –
you can’t plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.
– Frank O’Hara
When you left the room, though it seemed empty
and cold suddenly, the way it can, the weather
notwithstanding, and so pointless I
wound down like a mechanical clock, every breath
another second slower, and everyone bored me,
most of all the ones with souls who sweat,
rubbing their two sticks so hard with no hope of fire
I could taste eternity, it wasn’t death.
When you showed up, I didn’t come alive,
Pinocchio-like, all six senses sputtering
like the kettle in the morning, stuttering
like the boy with a conscience at the story’s start,
and leap across the room in emulation of
my heart my heart my heart my heart my heart.
I tell you this, you tell me that.
We order a cream tea, I watch your hand
reach for the bowl and hesitate,
as if what’s sweet might turn to sand.
I tell you in exotic banter
of a poem where flowers close.
Blossoms, I tell you, in deep winter
bloom, undaunted, out of loss.
The stops like stars ignite the tracks.
You touch my hair as if it’s smoke
reflected in the window backwards
and the day that’s come and gone.
How I think about her now is how
a thought is said to cross the mind:
like a bird’s shadow as it flies,
dragging its span in darkness along the ground.
memoryhouse 