Saturday commute clxvi: Street sign in O'Hara

It's the month of May in my heart as the song
says and everything's perfect: a little too chilly
for April and the chestnut trees are refusing to bloom
as they should refuse if they don't want to, sky
clear and blue with a lot of side-paddle steamers
pushing through to Stockholm where the canals're true-blue

in my spacious quarters on the rue de l'Université
I give a cocktail in the bathroom, everyone gets wet
it's very beachy; and I clear my head staring at the sign
LOI DU 29 JUILLET 1881 **

                                                             

                         so capitalizing on a few memories 

from childhood by forgetting them, I'm happy as a finger

of Vermouth being poured over a slice of veal, it's

the new reality in the city of Balzac! praying to be let

into the cinema and become an influence, carried through

streets on the shoulders of Messrs Chabrol and Truffaut

towards Nice

             or do you think that the Golden Lion

would taste pleasanter (not with vermouth, lion!) ?

no, but San Francisco, maybe, and abalone

                                           there is

nothing in the world I wouldn't do foryouforyou (zip!)

and I go off to meet Mario and Marc at the Flore

**  Introduced by the anti-monarchist, 

anti-imperialist representative of

Montpellier in the Chamber of Deputies,

Eugène Lisbonne, a diligent opponent of

"the government of moral order," this Law 

established the sweepingly broad freedom 

of the press in France, embodying special

protection against loyalty oaths and oth-

er indignities against chestnut trees.

Frank O'Hara

Beer for Breakfast

  Paris, April, 1960

  Floating Bear, 1961

Donald Allen

  editor

The Collected Poems

  of Frank O'Hara

op. cit.

Suppose it were Friday clxxi: Promising news of farce

The week has brought word of a worthy

parody of the American President, oth-

er than by himself, on which I've been

made eager to lay my hands. I feel the

temptation to scoop this new trouvaille

for myself, strangely enough, before re-

porting further; but my hopes are unut-

terably elevated by its not being avail-

able through Amazon. Imagine, a package

from somewhere other than precedent.

At the same time, we are well enough a-

long now in Lent to deny ourself diurnal

gasps at the latest fashions in politic-

al apologias. I think it was the guy who

lately pretended there was a time when

mauling the voiceless gender was a good

time to be had by all, who left us with

this impression of being freed from such

distractions. It isn't that etiquette

has changed, and it's always been one's

responsibility not to need to be told.

The pose he presents is a tease without

a tactic, the oblivious lamb as leader.

For a society humiliated already by its

credulity, whose joke is this, anyway?

Ryan Koning

  on the runways

Of guts forsworn or found

It's notable, I think, how the American 

President's perversion has triumphed im-

portantly in the culture of competition

for his Office. I don't refer to that

rich lode of illegality and legal bribe-

ry for which we trace our roots to col-

onial times. I refer to the shape-shift-

ing custom of changing the race, itself,

in serial changes of identity along the

way. As we study notional entrants from

the other Party, in the lists for the

pending tournament, we watch ostensible

leaders fretting openly and nervously

over whether to opt for the trident or

the mace, the short sword or the lance

in defining themselves. This visible

fear for one's own hide is genuinely

new, it seems to me, as a testament to

the power of misrepresentation of who-

ever they might actually be, when not

being themselves. Is there no gift for

inspiring others, in this most urgent

obligation of resistance to distortion?

What armor is better than who one is,

against an opponent of no core at all?

This, the mayor of South Bend has pos-

ited with the most unsettling impunity.

You'd think a winner could do as well.

Défense de fumer

     gangland contacts

     blatant infidelity

     drug dependency

     unsavory father

     corrupt elections

     nepotism in offices

     extravagant promises

     an eternal flame

     anyone thinking of

     any resemblance to

     excuse who we gave

     ourselves instead?

     

Sunday nibbled sleeve vii: On the preference for impoverishment

I have a friend who lives in a

garden estate within sailing

sound of the Tomales Bay and in

scent of the Pacific Ocean,

whom I tease because he is very

fair and yet writes poetry. This

is akin, it seems to me, to skate-

boarding uphill, which many would

see as some miraculous trick by a

figure of scintillating endowment, 

but from which I'd flinch, as em-

bracing an avoidable difficulty.

One likes to see invention in the

same light as love, a pursuit one

can decline in favor of the bus.