Читать книгу The Greatest Poems of Frank O'Hara - Frank O’Hara - Страница 17

Table of Contents

1 He paces the blue rug. It is the end of summer, the end of his excursions in the sun. He may now close his eyes as if they were tired flowers and feel no sense of duty towards the corridor, the recherche, the trees; they are all on his face, a lumpy portrait, a painted desert. He is crying. Only a few feet away the grass is green, the rug he sees is grass; and people fetch each other in and out of shadows there, chuckling and symmetrical.

The sun has left him wide-eyed and alone, hysterical

for snow, the blinding bed, the gun. "Flowers, flowers,

flowers!" he sneers, and echoes fill the spongy trees.

He cannot, after all, walk up the wall. The skylight

is sealed. For why? for a change in the season,

for a refurbishing of the house. He wonders if,

when the music is over, he should not take down

the drapes, take up the rug, and join his friends

out there near the lake, right here beside the lake!

"O friends of my heart!" and they will welcome him

with open umbrellas, fig bars, handmade catapults!

Despite the card that came addressed to someone else,

the sad fisherman of Puvis, despite his own precious

ignorance and the wild temper of the people, he'll try!

2 Now, sitting in the brown satin chair, he plans a little meal for friends. So! the steam rising from his Pullman kitchen fogs up all memories of Seurat, the lake, the summer; these are over for the moment, beyond the gusets, the cooking sherry and the gin; such is the plate for sporadic chitchat and meat. But as the cocktail warms his courageous cockles he lets the dinner burn, his eyes widen with sleet, like a cloudburst fall the summer, the lake and the voices! He steps into the mirror, refusing to be anyone else, and his guest observe the waves break.

3 He must send a telegram from the Ice Palace, although he knows the muzhiks don't read; "If I am ever to find these trees meaningful I must have you by the hand. As it is, they strtch dusty fingers into an obscure sky, and the snow looks up like a face dirtied with tears. Should I cry out and see what happens? There could only be a stranger wandering in this landscape, cold, unfortunate, himself froze fast in winter eyes." Explicit Rex