I first encountered that poem through Bill Hopkins' setting of it. I still hear those rhythms (actually, not sure if they're in the score, which I've never seen) when I read it.
That reminded me that I wanted to get hold of more of his music... UE seem to have stopped printing them so I'm trying to find out where I can get hold of them.
I feel like I'm turning into a bit of a cliché, reading poetry on the bus and occasionally giggling, gasping or (at times) even with tears in my eyes.
A girl who, for the purposes of this forum, I might as well call c (as opposed to C), whom I had 'seduced' by reading poetry drunk, gave me her copy of Frank O'Hara's selected poems (edited by Donald Allen). It is this that I am reading on the bus (though obviously not now because it's past 1am and I sincerely doubt that I would be able to get wireless internet on a bus and I do not have the patience to write this much on a mobile phone and I don't have a Blackberry) and it's why I'm putting more of it here.
NOW THAT I AM IN MADRID AND CAN THINKI think of you
and the continents brilliant and arid
and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air
as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning
and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York
see a vast bridge stretching to the humbled outskirts with only you
standing on the edge of the purple like an only tree
and in Toledo the olive groves' soft blue look at the hills with silver
like glasses like an old lady's hair
it's well known that God and I don't get along together
it's just a view of the brass works to me, I don't care about the Moors
seen through you the great works of death, you are greater
you are smiling, you are emptying the world so we can be alone
HAVING A COKE WITH YOUis 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 pain
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 ayway 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 marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I'm telling you about it
I seem to have overcome my allergy to long lines of poetry
I really must return her book of Thomas Kinsella poetry to her soon
I really must read some of it soon
I really must go to bed now
[sigh]
