Frank O'Hara - Alma

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Alma

                  "Est-elle almée?. . . aux premières heures bleues
                  Se détruira-t-elle comme les fleurs feues. . . "
                                                       -- Rimbaud

1
The sun, perhaps three of them, one black one red, you
know, and her dancing all the time, fanning the purple
sky getting purple, her fancy white skin quite unorien-
tal to the dirty children's round eyes standing in circles
munching muffins, the cock-roaches like nuggets half
hid in the bran. Boy! how are you, Prester John? the
smile of the river, so searching, so enamelled.

2
What mention of the King?
the spinning wheel still turns,
the apples rot to the singing,
Alceste on winter sojourns

is nice at Nice. Wander,
my dear sacred Pontiff, do dare
to murder minutely and ponder
what is the bloody affair

inside the heart of the weak
dancer, whose one toe is worth
inestimable, the gang, the cheek
of it! it's too dear, her birth

amidst the acorns with nails
stuck through them by passionate
parents, castanets! Caucasian tales!
their prodigality proportionate:

"Sacred Heart, oh Heart so sick,
make Detroit more wholly thine,
all with greeds and scabs so thick
that Judas Priest must make a sign."

Thus he to bed and we to rise
and Alma singing like a loon.
Her dancing toenails in her eyes.
Her pa was dead on the River Gaboon.

3
Detroit was founded on the great near waterways next
to Canada which was friendly and immediately gained
for herself the appellation "the Detroit of Thermopylaes,"
a name which has stuck to this day wherever ballroom
dancing is held in proper esteem. Let me remind you of
that great wrist movement, the enjambement schizo-
phrene, a particularly satisfying variation of which may
be made by adding a little tomato paste. Great success.
While in Detroit accused of starting the Chicago fire.
Millions of roses from Russians. Alma had come a long
way, she opened a jewelry shop, her name became a
household word, she'd invented an arch-supporter.
How often she thought of her father! the castle, the
kitchen-garden, the hollihocks and the mill stream
beyond curving gently as a parenthesis. Many a bitter
tear was shed by her on the boards of this theatre as she
pondered the inscrutable meagerness of divine
Providence, always humming, always shifting a little,
never missing a beat. She guested one season at the
height of her nostalgia with the Metropolitan Opera
Ballet in Salammbô: her father seemed very close in all
that oriental splendor of bamboo and hotel palms and
stale sweat and bracelets, an engagement of tears. In the
snow, in her white fox fur wraps, how more beautiful
than Mary Garden!

4
Onward to the West. "Where I came from,
where I'm going. Indian country." Gold.
Oh say can you see Alma. The darling
of Them. All her friends were artists.
They alone have memories. They alone
love flowers. They alone give parties
and die. Poor Alma. They alone.
                                             She died,
and it was as if all the jewels in the world
had heaved a sigh. The seismograph
at Fordham University registered, for once,
a spiritual note. How like a sliver
in her own short fat muscular foot.
She loved the Western World, though
there are some who say she isn't really dead.

Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems, 1953