Dead Crush #14

I first recognized art
as wildness, and it seemed right,
I mean rite, to me

climbing the water tower I’d
look out for hours in wind
and the world seemed rounder
and fiercer and I was happier
because I wasn’t scared of falling off

from “Ode to Michael Goldberg (‘s Birth and Other Births)”

Happy Ashbery Day everyone (thank you to Dan for making me aware of this). It’s also my dad’s birthday.

I don’t even know where to start.

Let’s start with the appearance, because that’s where I start everything. Delicate but wiry. Portrait-worthy (HOW many portraits does this guy have? Larry Rivers’ is my favorite). Flaws obtained by acts of violence (I am a huge sucker for the broken nose. Or any sort of broken anything that heals wrong.) Small and Irish. A dapper dresser. A drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, a phone in the other, and a book in the other (busy busy busy—he creates implied arms). The voice: flat and nasal, apparently indistinguishable from that of Ashbery. And you just know he had the best walk in the world. You just know.

The poetry. I can’t really say anything about it. If I were to try, I would probably just do some kind of high-pitched ecstatic whining thing, or jump really high on a trampoline. Or read you the poems. So instead I’ll just read you the poems. (Actually, you will read them.)

To John Ashbery (not just cuz it’s his day, but also because it’s one of my favorites)

I can’t believe there’s not
another world where we will sit
and read new poems to each other
high on a mountain in the wind.
You can be Tu-Fu, I’ll be Po Chu-i
and the Monkey Lady’ll be in the moon,
smiling at our ill-fitting heads
as we watch snow settle on a twig.
Or shall we be really gone? this
is not the grass I saw in my youth!
and if the moon, when it rises
tonight, is empty—a bad sign,
meaning “You go, like the blossoms.”

A Raspberry Sweater
to George Montgomery
It is next to my flesh,
that’s why. I do what I want.
And in the pale New Hampshire
twilight a black bug sits in the blue,
strumming its legs together. Mournful
glass, and daisies closing. Hay
swells in the nostrils. We shall go
to the motorcycle races in Laconia
and come back all calm and warm.

Poetry
The only way to be quiet
is to be quick, so I scare
you clumsily, or surprise
you with a stab. A praying
mantis knows time more
intimately than I and is
more casual. Crickets use
time for accompaniment to
innocent fidgeting. A zebra
races counterclockwise.
All this I desire. To
deepen you by my quickness
and delight as if you
were logical and proven,
but still be as quiet as if
you would never leave me
and were the inexorable
product of my own time.

If I could go back in time and be anything (aside from or including Gram Parson’s girlfriend or Jean Seberg) I would be one of Frank O’Hara’s female muses (of course most of his muses were of the male variety). Not that I would ever be beautiful or talented or loopy enough to qualify, but it’s my fantasy and therefore I can make myself however I want. Jane Frielicher and Grace Hartigan (pictured above) were two painters whom he revered, and wrote poems about them and for them and just in general adored them. He loved painters—he told Larry Rivers in a poem about him “you do what I can only name,” which is often how I feel when looking at the visual art of my friends. So not only do I want to sit around with Frank and drink with him, I think I just would prefer to a painter. Frank didn’t want to be a painter, but he wanted to absorb them. He wanted to absorb everything he loved—absorb the world, transform it somehow in that birdlike skull, and give us result after result straight from that factory, which I imagine to be filled with toy birds, jittery squirrels, and even more cigarette smoke. He rarely revised, often wrote poems in rooms full of the din of his drunken friends. Typewriter clacking. When I try to picture him, I often picture a blur.

Frank O’Hara would love this day. Though I’m more partial to gloom myself, this is a day for purchasing beautiful things, for teen hormones, for shiny details. Background details that almost go unnoticed because of a preoccupation with an obsession. I love Frank because he’s everything I’m not—his sadness hits him just as hard as lust or joy. It is everything, embodied by skinny, quick-moving legs on a noon sidewalk. No dream world for him. He is his own anima.

It’s so strange how I’m still so drawn to that explosive life, especially at a time when I’m trying to be more introspective. I think it’s because of this plan: after I spend some time in my own skull listening, I plan to do quite a bit of living. Although really my plan is that I have no plan. Inner, then outer? Frank could do both all at once: is still doing it all and it’s called Love.