Frank O'Hara - Meditations in an Emergency (1957)

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It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

Frank O'Hara
Leaf! you are so big! How can you change your color, then just fall! As if there were no such thing as integrity!

Frank O'Hara
I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught in some moorings. I am always tying up and then deciding to depart.

Frank O'Hara
I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to.

Frank O'Hara
I love you. I love you, but I'm turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.

Frank O'Hara
One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

Frank O'Hara
And I have mastered the speed and strength which is the armor of the world.

Frank O'Hara
There were occasionally rifts in the cloud where the face of a woman appeared, frowning.

Frank O'Hara
Life perpetuated in parti-colored loves and beautiful lies all in different languages.

Frank O'Hara
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Frank O'Hara
If I am ever to find these trees meaningful I must have you by the hand. As it is, they stretch 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 frozen fast in wintry eyes.

Frank O'Hara
There is a geography which holds its hands just so far from the breast and pushes you away, crying so.

Frank O'Hara
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Frank O'Hara
I loved her fright, which was against me into the air! and the diamond white of her forelock which seemed to smart with thoughts as my heart smarted with life! and she'd toss her head with the pain and paw the air and champ the bit, as if I were Endymion and she, moon-like, hated to love me.

Frank O'Hara