Rhapsody

515 Madison Avenue

door to heaven? portal

stopped realities and eternal licentiousness

or at least the jungle of impossible eagerness

your marble is bronze and your lianas elevator cables

swinging from the myth of ascending

I would join

or declining the challenge of racial attractions

they zing on (into the lynch, dear friends)

while everywhere love is breathing draftily

like a doorway linking 53rd with 54th

the east-bound with the west-bound traffic by 8,000,000s

o midtown tunnels and the tunnels, too, of Holland

where is the summit where all aims are clear

the pin-point light upon a fear of lust

as agony’s needlework grows up around the unicorn

and fences him for milk- and yoghurt-work

when I see Gianni I know he’s thinking of John Ericson

playing the Rachmaninoff 2nd or Elizabeth Taylor

taking sleeping-pills and Jane thinks of Manderley

and Irkutsk while I cough lightly in the smog of desire

and my eyes water achingly imitating the true blue

a sight of Manahatta in the towering needle

multi-faceted insight of the fly in the stringless labyrinth

Canada plans a higher place than the Empire State Building

I am getting into a cab at 9th Street and 1st Avenue

and the Negro driver tells me about a $120 apartment

“where you can’t walk across the floor after 10 at night

not even to pee, cause it keeps them awake downstairs”

no, I don’t like that “well, I didn’t take it”

perfect in the hot humid morning on my way to work

a little supper-club conversation for the mill of the gods

you were there always and you know all about these things

as indifferent as an encyclopedia with your calm brown eyes

it isn’t enough to smile when you run the gauntlet

you’ve got to spit like Niagara Falls on everybody or

Victoria Falls or at least the beautiful urban fountains of Madrid

as the Niger joins the Gulf of Guinea near the Menemsha Bar

that is what you learn in the early morning passing Madison Avenue

where you’ve never spent any time and stores eat up light

I have always wanted to be near it

though the day is long (and I don’t mean Madison Avenue)

lying in a hammock on St. Mark’s Place sorting my poems

in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island

they are coming and we holy ones must go

is Tibet historically a part of China? as I historically

belong to the enormous bliss of American death

Source: The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (1995)

“It's Cooking”