my heart
My Heart
by Frank O'Hara
I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart—
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.
To be that alive with both sides of the same coin...the yin and yang of one's heart...is perhaps our greatest achievement, Ruth?
ReplyDeletethese two poems come to mind:
ReplyDeletea sketch for a modern love poem
tadeusz Rozewicz
and yet whiteness
can be best described by greyness
a bird by a stone
sunflowers
in december
love poems of old
used to be descriptions of flesh
they described this and that
for instance eyelashes
and yet redness
should be described
by greyness the sun by rain
the poppies in november
the lips at night
the most palpable
description of bread
is that of hunger
there is in it
a humid porous core
a warm inside
sunflowers at night
the breasts the belly the thighs of Cybele
a transparent
source-like description
of water
is that of thirst
of ash
of desert
it provokes a mirage
clouds and trees enter
a mirror of water
Lack hunger
absence
of flesh
is a description of love
in a modern love poem
this one translated by czeslaw Milosz (i added the line division at Lack hunger that i saw in another translation and that i think is necessary.)
and:
I imagine The Gods
by jack gilbert
I imagine the gods saying, We will
make it up to you. We will give you
three wishes, they say. Let me see
the squirrels again, I tell them.
Let me eat some of the great hog
stuffed and roasted on its giant spit
and put out, steaming, into the winter
of my neighborhood when I was usually
too broke to afford even the hundred grams
I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,
past the Street of the Moon
and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,
the Street of Silence and the Street
of the Little Pissing. We can give you
wisdom, they say in their rich voices.
Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,
the Algerian student with her huge eyes
who timidly invited me to her room
when I was too young and bewildered
that first year in Paris.
Let me at least fail at my life.
Think, they say patiently, we could
make you famous again. Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.
xo
erin