Sunday, March 10, 2013

Exult responsibly


We are in the midst of
an early awakening of
Spring; two days of
sunshine after a late
snow, find the earth
warm and fragrant in
our twilight walk.


Whole days would go by, and later their years,
while I thought of nothing but its darkness
drifting like a bridge against the sky.
Day after day I dreamily sought its melancholy,
its searchings, its soft banks enfolded me,
and upon my lengthening neck its kiss
was murmuring like a wound. My very life
became the inhalation of its weedy ponderings
and sometimes in the sunlight my eyes,
walled in water, would glimpse the pathway
to the great sea. For it was there I was being borne.




         Then for a moment my strengthening arms
         would cry out upon the leafy crest of the air
         like whitecaps, and lightning, swift as pain,
         would go through me on its way back to the forest,
         and I'd sink back upon that brutal tenderness
         that bore me on, that held me like a slave
         in its liquid distances of eyes, and one day,
         though weeping for my caresses, would abandon me,
         moment of infinitely salty air! sun fluttering
         like a signal! upon the open flesh of the world.






















Frank O'Hara
River
1953
The Collected Poems
  of Frank O'Hara
Donald Allen, editor
op. cit.




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