ode to tanaquil

[hooverstreet.livejournal.com]

smiling through my own memories of painful excitement your wide eyes

stare

and narrow like a lost forest of childhood stolen from gypsies

two eyes that are the sunset of


two knees


two wrists


two minds


and the extended philosophical column, when they conducted the dialogues


in distant Athens, rests on your two ribbon-wrapped hearts, white


credibly agile

flashing

scimitars of a city-state



where in the innocence of my watching had those ribbons become entangled

dragging me upward into lilac-colored ozone where I gasped

and you continued to smile as you dropped the bloody scarf of my life

from way up there, my neck hurt



you were always changing into something else

and always will be

always plumage, perfection's broken heart, wings



and wide eyes in which everything you do

repeats yourself simultaneously and simply

as a window "gives" on something



it seems sometimes as if you were only breathing

and everything happened around you



because when you disappeared in the wings nothing was there

but the motion of some extraordinary happening I hadn't understood

the superb arc of a question, of a decision about death



because you are beautiful you are hunted

and with the courage of a vase

you refuse to become a deer or a tree

and the world holds its breath

to see if you are there, and safe



are you?



FRANK O'HARA, 1960

Comments

[chalkdustmonkey.livejournal.com]

haunted by the courage of a vase
you refused to be a deer or a tree
or safe.