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
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 Theater 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
John Button Birthday
Sentiments are nice,
“The Lonely Crowd,”
a rift in the clouds
appears above the purple,
you find a birthday
greeting card with violets
which says “a perfect
friend” and means
“I love you” but the
customer is forced to be
shy. It says less, as
all things must.
But
grease sticks to the
red ribs shaped like a
sea shell, grease,
light and rosy that smells of
sandalwood: it’s
memory! I remember JA
staggering over to me
in the San Remo and murmuring
“I’ve met someone MARVELLOUS!” That’s friendship
for you, and the
sentiment of introduction.
And now that I have
finished dinner I can continue.
What is it that attracts
one to one? Mystery?
I think of you in
Paris with a red beard, a
theological student;
in London talking to a friend
who lunched with
Dowager Queen Mary and offered
her his last
cigarette; in Los Angeles shopping
at the supermarket;
on Mount Shasta, looking . . .
above all on Mount
Shasta in your unknown youth
and photograph.
And then the way you straighten
people out. How
ambitious you are! And that you’re
a painter is a great
satisfaction, too. You know how
I feel about
painters. I sometimes think poetry
only describes.
Now I have taken down the underwear
I washed last night
from the various light fixtures
and can proceed.
And the lift of our experiences
together, which seem
to me legendary. The long subways
to our old neighborhood the near East 49th and 53rd,
and before them the
laughing in bars till we cried,
and the crying in
movies till we laughed, the tenting
tonight on the old
camp grounds! How beautiful it is
to visit someone for
instant coffee! and you visiting
Cambridge,
Massachusetts, talking for two weeks worth
in hours, and
watching Maria Tallchief in the Public
Gardens while the
swan-boats slumbered. And now,
not that I’m
interrupting again, I mean your now,
you are 82 and I am
03. And in 1984 I trust we’ll still
be high together.
I’ll say “Let’s go to a bar”
and you’ll say “Let’s
go to a movie” and we’ll go to both;
like two old Chinese
drunkards arguing about their
favorite mountain
and the million reasons for them both.
Personal Poem
Now when I walk
around at lunchtime
I have only two
charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin
Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that
broke off a packing case
when I was in Madrid
the others never
brought me too much
luck though they did
help keep me in New
York against coercion
but now I’m happy for
a time and interested
I walk through the
luminous humidity
passing the House of
Seagram with its wet
and its loungers and
the construction to
the left that closed
the sidewalk if
I ever get to be a
construction worker
I’d like to have a
silver hat please
and get to Moriarty’s
where I wait for
LeRoi and hear who
wants to be a mover and
shaker the last five
years my batting average
is .016 that’s that,
and LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles
Davis was clubbed 12
times last night
outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a
nickel for a terrible
disease but we don’t
give her one we
don’t like terrible
diseases, then
we go eat some fish and
some ale it’s
cool but crowded we
don’t like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like
Don Allen we don’t like
Henry James so much
we like Herman Melville
we don’t want to be
in the poets’ walk in
San Francisco even we
just want to be rich
and walk on girders
in our silver hats
I wonder if one
person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I
shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for
my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at
the thought possibly so
Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]
Lana Turner has
collapsed!
I was trotting along
and suddenly
it started raining
and snowing
and you said it was
hailing
but hailing hits you
on the head
hard so it was really
snowing and
raining and I was in
such a hurry
to meet you but the
traffic
was acting exactly
like the sky
and suddenly I see a
headline
LANA TURNER HAS
COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in
Hollywood
there is no rain in
California
I have been to lots
of parties
and acted perfectly
disgraceful
but I never actually
collapsed
oh Lana Turner we
love you get up
Labels: O'Hara, poems
