I’ve got to tell you
how I love you always
I think of it on grey
mornings with death
in my mouth the tea
is never hot enough
then and the cigarette
dry the maroon robe
chills me I need you
and look out the window
at the noiseless snow
At night on the dock
the buses glow like
clouds and I am lonely
thinking of flutes
I miss you always
when I go to the beach
the sand is wet with
tears that seem mine
although I never weep
and hold you in my
heart with a very real
humor you’d be proud of
the parking lot is
crowded and I stand
rattling my keys the car
is empty as a bicycle
what are you doing now
where did you eat your
lunch and were there
lots of anchovies it
is difficult to think
of you without me in
the sentence you depress
me when you are alone
Last night the stars
were numerous and today
snow is their calling
card I’ll not be cordial
there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
do you know how it is
when you are the only
passenger if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go
— Frank O’Hara, “Morning”
I want to meet this Kentuckian poet. I am getting nostalgic for writing, all writing. Like the arguments are something I make of myself. I have kept a folder since high school.
I am icing my heels because they’re bruised from working 8 hour shifts, and earning money I have to store up.
The mother of a friend is marrying an unforgotten lover in two days. A friend is giving birth to a daughter in August, in Florida, and I can’t be there. Instead, I will be moving her unbegotten lover north to school. He will be 11 hours away.
Of all times, now is not the time,
given the world’s old vague condition,
to hang in my mind the plumb-bob weight
of original sin and watch it twist
around like a tire at the end of a rope
looped over a tree branch. Once
my sister came within a hair
of getting bit by a snake asleep
in the tire she’d hooped around herself.
She was wearing a dress, my friend, just home
from church; her patent leather shoes
kicked at the air just twice before
she shed the tire and screamed. I chopped
the copperhead to pieces. What kind
of parents allow their child to play
with an axe? Well, mine, I suppose. I made
them proud that day. The sin was how
I let myself be proud, a pride
that wore like whitewash from a fence.
Now you might think I’m being stern
and unforgiving. After all,
I was only six and could not have known
about sin. But I did; I knew it like
a nursery rhyme, or the Now I Lay Me
bedtime prayer. I once got drunk
on a Sunday morning; I don’t know
if that was sinful, but it proved
that nothingness is absolute,
a naked shameful nothing left
beneath the shade tree in my heart,
the rusted axehead long since stuck
and buried in its trunk, a bone
caught in its living throat, a wound
I made in its side and can’t undo.
We should both be doing something good;
we should be kind to someone now.
— Maurice Manning, ”The Doctrine of An Axe”
