Frank O'Hara

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 Theatre 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

The white chocolate jar full of petals swills odds and ends around in a dizzying eye of four o’clocks now and to come. The tiger, marvellously striped and irritable, leaps on the table and without disturbing a hair of the flowers’ breathless attention, pisses into the pot, right down its delicate spout. A whisper of steam goes up from that porcelain urethra. “Saint-Saëns!” it seems to be whispering, curling unerringly around the furry nuts of the terrible puss, who is mentally flexing. Ah be with me always, spirit of noisy contemplation in the studio, the Garden of Zoos, the eternally fixed afternoons! There, while music scratches its scrofulous stomach, the brute beast emerges and stands, clear and careful, knowing always the exact peril at this moment caressing his fangs with a tongue given wholly to luxurious usages; which only a moment before dropped aspirin in this sunset of roses, and now throws a chair in the air to aggravate the truly menacing.

Mothers of America let your kids go to the movies! get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to it’s true that fresh air is good for the body but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images and when you grow old as grow old you must they won’t hate you they won’t criticize you they won’t know they’ll be in some glamorous country they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey they may even be grateful to you for their first sexual experience which only cost you a quarter and didn’t upset the peaceful home they will know where candy bars come from and gratuitous bags of popcorn as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it’s over with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg near the Williamsburg Bridge oh mothers you will have made the little tykes so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies they won’t know the difference and if somebody does it’ll be sheer gravy and they’ll have been truly entertained either way instead of hanging around the yard or up in their room hating you prematurely since you won’t have done anything horribly mean yet except keeping them from the darker joys it’s unforgivable the latter so don’t blame me if you won’t take this advice and the family breaks up and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set seeing movies you wouldn’t let them see when they were young

It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch ah lunch! I think I am going crazy what with my terrible hangover and the weekend coming up at excitement-prone Kenneth Koch's I wish I were staying in town and working on my poems at Joan's studio for a new book by Grove Press which they will probably not print but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it yesterday I looked up the rue Frémicourt on a map and was happy to find it like a bird flying over Paris et ses environs which unfortunately did not include Seine-et-Oise which I don't know as well as a number of other things and Allen is back talking about god a lot and Peter is back not talking very much and Joe has a cold and is not coming to Kenneth's although he is coming to lunch with Norman I suspect he is making a distinction well, who isn't I wish I were reeling around Paris instead of reeling around New York I wish I weren't reeling at all it is Spring the ice has melted the Ricard is being poured we are all happy and young and toothless it is the same as old age the only thing to do is simply continue is that simple yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do can you do it yes, you can because it is the only thing to do blue light over the Bois de Boulogne it continues the Seine continues the Louvre stays open it continues it hardly closes at all the Bar Américain continues to be French de Gaulle continues to be Algerian as does Camus Shirley Goldfarb continues to be Shirley Goldfarb and Jane Hazan continues to be Jane Freilicher (I think!) and Irving Sandler continues to be the balayeur des artistes and so do I (sometimes I think I'm "in love" with painting) and surely the Piscine Deligny continues to have water in it and the Flore continues to have tables and newspapers and people under them and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy we shall be happy but we shall continue to be ourselves everything continues to be possible René Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn't it I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don't believe it