Second Avenue

by Frank O'Hara

Paper, saddle-stapled.

Genres: Poetry

18 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1960

About the author

Collections of American poet Francis Russell O'Hara include Meditations in an Emergency (1957) and Lunch Poems (1964); playfulness, irony, sophistication, and a shared interest in the visual arts mark works of the New York School, an active group that included O'Hara during the 1950s and 1960s.

Parents reared O'Hara in Grafton, Massachusetts. O'Hara served in the south Pacific and Japan as a sonar man on the destroyer United States Ship Nicholas during World War II.

With the funding, made available to veterans, he attended Harvard University and roomed with artist-writer Edward Gorey. He majored in music and composed some works despite his irregular attendance was and his disparate interests. Visual art and contemporary music, his first love, heavily influenced O'Hara, a fine piano player all his life; he suddenly played swathes of Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff when visiting new partners, often to their shock.

At Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O'Hara changed his major and graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English.

He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At Michigan, he won a Hopwood award and received his Master of Arts in English literature 1951. In that autumn, O'Hara moved into an apartment in city of New York with Joe LeSueur, his roommate and sometimes his lover for the next 11 years. Known throughout his life for his extreme sociability, passion, and warmth, O'Hara had hundreds of friends and lovers throughout his life, many from the New York art and poetry worlds. Soon after he arrived in New York, the Museum of Modern Art employed him at the front desk, and he began to write seriously.

O'Hara, active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Art News, and in 1960 was made Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was also friends with artists like Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers, and Joan Mitchell. O'Hara died in an accident on Fire Island in which he was struck and seriously injured by a man speeding in a beach vehicle during the early morning hours of July 24, 1966. He died the next day of a ruptured liver at the age of 40 and was buried in the Green River Cemetery on Long Island.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In memory of Vladimir Mayakovsky


1

Quips and players, seeming to vend astringency off-hours,
celebrate diced excesses and sardonics, mixing pleasures,
as if proximity were staring at the margin of a plea. . . .

This thoroughness whose traditions have become so reflective,
your distinction is merely a quill at the bottom of the sea
tracing forever the fabulous alarms of the mute
so that in the limpid tosses of your violet dinginess
a pus appears and lingers like a groan from the collar
of a reproachful tree whose needles are tired of howling.
One distinguishes merely the newspaper of a sediment,
since going underground is like discovering something in
your navel that has an odor and is able to fly away.
I must bitterly reassure the resurgence of your complaints
for you, like all heretics, penetrate my glacial immodesty,
and I am a nun trembling before the microphone
at a movie premiere while a tidal wave has seized the theatre
and borne it to Siam, decorated it and wrecked its projector.
To what leaf of fertility and double-facedness owe I
my persistent adoration of your islands, oh shadowed flesh
of my smiling? I scintillate like a glass of ice
and it is all for you and the boa constrictors who entertain
your doubts with a scarf dance called "Bronx Tambourine".
Grappling with images of toothpaste falling on guitar strings,
your lips are indeed a disaster of alienated star-knots
as I deign to load the hips of the swimming pool, lumber!
with the clattering caporal of destiny's breast-full,
such exhalations and filthiness falling upon the vegetables!
You will say I am supernatural.
Varying your task with immortal plunging justices and fruits,
I suffer accelerations that are vicarious and serene,
just as the lances of an army advance above the heat of the soldiery,
so does my I tremble before the getting-out-of-bedness
of that all-encompassing snake warned off in pocket-books
as "him", and subtitled elsewhere "couch", "marvel", "ears",
or "fire-escape", "lampooned frigid scalper of an Amazon maid",
"warrior of either sex in the distances which are American";
and just as it is a miracle to find her in the interrogation 
of an escalator, you find yourself racing towards nervousness,
the puree of crime, and your face has fallen like a waffle
and is the velour of Lesbian sandals with nails in the toes;
your lamp will never light without dirt and the speed 
increases of moving away from all rapturous ice-floes
as a shaggy white figure approaches and sinks its fangs
upon my brazen throat, so thrust into the wind that a necklace
of fur such as this which drags me beneath the Bering Sea
is the only possible adornment for this burning flight
and the magnificent entrance to be mine as I crash
against the portals of the mistress of chairs, who is
yes, a bearded man suspended by telephone wires from moons
in alternate sexual systems. And then there is the crushing
drop! as the fur falls from me and the man crashes, a crater,
from the heavens which he so adorned and which I also decorate
as the forest of my regard. But now I have a larger following.



2

What spanking opossums of sneaks are caressing the routes!
and of the pulse-racked tremors attached to my viciousness
I can only enumerate the somber instances of wetness.

Is it a triumph? and are the lightnings of movedness
and abysmal elevation cantankerous filaments
of a larger faint-heartedness like loving summer? You,
accepting always the poisonous sting of the spine,
its golden efflorescence of nature which is distrustful,
how is one borne to this caprice of a lashing betrayal
whose jewel-like occasion has the clarity of blossoming trees?
is it not the deepest glitterings of love when the head
is turned off, glancing over a stranger's moon-like hatred
and finding an animal kingdom of jealousy in parachutes
descending upon the highway which you are not speeding down?
It is this silence which returns you to the open fields
of blandest red honey where the snake waits, his warm tongue.
Dice! into the lump and crush of archness and token angels
you burn your secret preferment and ancient streaming,

as a gasp of laughter at desire, and disorder, and dying.



3

And must I express the science of legendary elegies
consummate on the Clarissas of puma and gnu and wildebeest?
Blue negroes on the verge of true foreignness
escape nevertheless the chromaticism of occidental death
by traffic, oh children bereaved of their doped carts
and priests with lips like mutton in their bedrooms at dawn!
and falling into a sea of asphalt abuse which is precisely life
in these provinces printed everywhere with the flag "Nobody",
and these are the true tillers of the spirit
whose strangeness crushes in the only possible embrace, 
is like splintering and pulling and draining the tooth
of the world, the violent alabaster yielding to the sky,
the kiss and the longing to be modern and sheltered and different
and insane and decorative as a Mayan idol too well understood
to be beautiful. Can roses be charming? As the sluice
pours forth its granular flayings a new cloud rises
and interplanetary driftings become simply initiatory gifts
like the circumcision of a black horse. I yield up
my lover to the reveries, completely, until he is taken away
by the demons who then deilver me their bolts from afar
like drunken Magi. It is the appeasement, frieze-style,
of undulant spiritual contamination, to which sainthood
I sacrifice my brilliant dryness, it had been my devoir
and my elegant distinction, a luminous enlacement
of the people through the bars of the zoo, the never fading.
My spirit is clouded, as it was in Tierra del Fuego,
and if the monsters who twirl on their toes like fiery wagons
cannot dismiss the oceanographer of a capricious promptness
which is more ethical than dismal, my heart
will break through to casualness and appear in windows
on Main Street, "more vulgar bu they love more than he
hates, as the apples turn straightway into balloons
and burst". No airship casts its shadow down the Road
and the Shroud. A mystery appears and doesn't mention
intelligence of death, and is as swiftly gone into the corn
and the ivy fields, all red and grey in the gathering noise.
The houses look old, vicous, and their robes bear
massive pretenses to anxiety, the animal's dream
of successiveness, the paralytic's apprehension of germs,
and then, fleeing! the dancer's nestling into kelp
and the condemned man's amusement at versatility,
the judge's ardent approximation of harrowing languor
in which the pelt of the whole city moves forward as a flame.
one would call upon Apollo as a famous father and tenor
but the prodigious paleness of the insulted disfigures
all ingenuity and the sounds perfidious mountains move
away from with tomb-like excitement, the eternal travellers,
so you are silent, aren't you? Well, I shall be older
and uglier than you, and my least motion shall wither
the vertiginous breath which is earth meeting sky meeting sea,
as in the legend of a sovereign who did and who was.
Immense flapping. I hold all of night in my one eye. You.



4

Is your throat dry with the deviousness of following?
I lead you to a stream which will lick you like a wasp,
and there the maidens will uncoil the hemp hunters and wires
so that your body may recline upon boards of starry nudging,
sisters of bar-girls in the haunches of the Himalayas.
Oh aspirations prancing like an elephant in a skirmish!
Or are you altitudes? . . .



5

 or are you myself,
indifferent as a drunkard sponging off a car window?
Are you effeminate, like an eyelid, or are you feminine,
like a painting by Picasso? You fled when you followed,
and now the bamboo veils of intemperance are flapping down
with tigerish yaps over the paling corduroy doorway
which was once a capacious volute filled with airplanes, 
and that was not a distance, that simple roaring and vagueness.
You are lean, achieved, ravished, acute, light, tan,
waving, stolen, lissome in whispering, salivary in intent,
similar to the sole support of a love affair, so artful,
and loyal only to faults. I found myself equal to every . . .

"Oh the droppings from the trees! the little clam shells,
their bosoms thrust into the clouds and kiss-stained!
I met Joe, his hair pale as the eyes of fields of maize
in August, at the gallery, he said you're the first Creon
of 1953, congrats. Your costume, he said, was hand
over fist. If you worked harder you could remake
old Barrymore movies, you're that statuesque, he said.
For when the window, the ice in it, ran, the fish leaped forth
and returned where they wished to return to and from,
as in a rainbow the end keeps leaping towards the middle
which is the shape of all flowers, and of all flowers
the most exotic." Yes! yes! it was cerulean, oh my darling!
"And the simple yet exquisite pertinence of that race
above the airfield, those tubby little planes flopping 
competitively into the wind sleeve, was keen as a violin,
as colourless and as intent. It seemed there was no one there 
bu children, and at each flaming accident a crumbling giggle
tumbleweeded over the flatsand into the hangars and echoed.
What must the fliers have thought? a performance 
like a plate of ham and eggs eaten with a fur collar on.
I kept jingling the coins in my pocket and patting
the dollar bills that rustled like so many horses' hooves
against my anxious thigh. He was up there,
the one who ruined my sister while she was still a look
of spiritual withdrawal in my maiden aunt;s memories
of bathing at Onset. I always win at Japanese bowling.
I won a piano with a flowered shawl draped over it
and a photograph of Anna Sten beside a trembling yellow vase."

Screaming and tearing at her breasts she bent over,
terribly pale and yet trifling with her feeling before him,
the heavy bronze crucifix he had stepped on, quite
accidentally, mistaking it for a moth, tinea pellionella
which, in its labors against death, another more
vibrantly mournful kind, renders mankind subtly naked;
more than her eyes could stand, she went bloated into the azure
like a shot. Greying even more steadily now he remembered
the afternoon game of marbles beside the firehouse
and how the scum settled on his shoulders as he swam
and the many tasks done and forgotten and famous which,
as a pilot, he has disdained, trusting to luck always.
"Arabella" was the word he had muttered that moment
when the lightning had smelled sweet over the zoo of the waves
while he played on and on and on and the women grew hysterical.
Of heldness and of caresses you have become the entrepreneur.
The sea looked like so many amethyst prophets and I,
hadn't the cannery sent forth perfume? would never go back.
And then staggering forward into the astounding capaciousness
of his own rumour he became violent as an auction,
rubbed the hairs on his chest with bottles of snarling
and deared the frying pan that curtained the windows
with his tears. I remember I felt at that moment the elephant
kissing. When paralysis becomes jaundice and jaundice
is blushing, a linen map of ecstasy hands next to the range
where the peas are burning and memories of Swan Lake
aspire like Victoria Falls to a jacket of dust.

You are too young to remember the lack of snow in 1953 showing:
"1 Except that you react like electricity to a chunk of cloth,
it will disappear like an ape at night. 2 Before eating
there was a closing of retina against retina, and ice,
telephone wires! was knotted, spelling out farce
which is germane to lust. 3 Then the historic duel in the surf
when black garments were wasted and swept over battlements
into the moat. 4 The book contained a rosary pressed
in the shape of a tongue. 5 The hill had begun to roll
luminously. A deck appeared among the fir trees, Larry's
uncle sent a missionary to India when he was in grade school
who cried 'Go straight' to the white men there. Forgiveness
of heat. 6 Green lips pressed his body like a pearl shell.
7 It all took place in darkness, and meant more earlier
when they were in different places and didn't know each other.
As is often misprinted." And such whiteness not there!
All right, all right, all right, you glass of coke, empty
your exceptionally neonish newspaper from such left hands 
with headlines to be grey as cut WITHER ACCEPTED AS SELLING
(The western mountain ranges were sneaking along "Who
taps wires and why?" like a pack of dogies and is there much
tapping under the desert moon? Does it look magical
or realistic, that landing? And the riverboat put in there,
keeps putting in, with all the slaves' golden teeth and arms,
selfconscious without their weapons. Joe LeSueur,
the handsome Captain who smuggle Paris perfume, tied up
at the arroyo and with thunderous hooves swam across a causeway
to make the Honest Dollar. In Pasadena they are calling
"Higho, Silver!" but in the High Sierras they just shoot
movie after movie. Who is "they"? The Westerners, of course,
the tans. Didn't you ever want to be a cowboy, buster?) Big-
town papers, you see, and this great-coated tour of the teens
in (of bless me!) imagination. That's what the snow said,
"and doesn't your penis look funny today?" I jacked "off".



6

"Nous avons eu lundi soir, le grand plaisir de rencontrer
à l'Hôtel Oloffson ou elle est descendue, la charmante
Mlle. Anne R. Lang, actrice du Theatre Dramatique de Cambridge.
Miss Lang est arrive à Port-au-Prince le mardi 24 fevrier
à bord d'un avion a visite les sites de la Capitale
et est enchantee de tout ce qu-elle a vu. Elle est fort
eprise de notre pays." And it's very exciting to be an old friend
of Verlaine and he has his problems, divine dust bag
of pressure chambers which is merely an episode clarifying
what the work really is in relationship with birds and insects
you are sitting on as you drink and think about dancing,
poor dedicated blonde that you are, ma fille, ma soeur,
my fellow airlines provocateur and sandal dropper on the hots.
Do you know which back alley we would park and snot the wimple
in? It is embarrassing to be too rich with black looks,
he would be waiting for you to come in from roaming, slipper
in left hand raised, the famous left hand of the epigraph.
"Ah, oui." Tumbling vipers where your stain, Lar, hot-tranced
into the hydrogen of a backache which is a whole harem
of swaying odors and caravanserai grit, alors! c'est mung,
the middling passionate rapids down where a tender word
rushes to snarl and laugh deliriously into the back of the head
where the hair barnacles its uneasy lay against the nape
so ecstatic, like churchbells against the flanks of horsetails,
sleight of hand, "O reine Uberschreigung!" of an old lavatory.
It was that way many times, yet the winter seemed prompt.



7

"You come to me smelling of the shit of Pyrrhian maidens!
and I as a fast come-on for fascinating fleas-in-ice
become ravenously casual avec quel haut style de chambre!
and deny myself every pasture of cerise cumulus cries.
You yourself had taken out volume of rare skies' pillars
and then bowed forth screaming "Lindy Has Made It!" until 
everyone showed their teeth to the neighbours of Uncle,
how embarrassing! the whiteness of the imitation of the glass
in which one elegant pig had straddled a pheasant and wept.
Well enough. To garner the snowing snow and then leave,
what an inspiration! as if suddenly, while dancing, someone,
a rather piratish elderly girl, had stuck her fan up her ass
and then become a Chinese legend before the bullrushes ope'd.
Yet I became aware of history as rods stippling the dip
of a fancied and intuitive scientific roadmap, clarte et
volupte et vif! swooping over the valley and under the lavender
where children prayed and had stillborn blue brothers of
entirely other races, the Tour Babel, as they say, said.
I want listeners to be distracted, as fur rises when most needed 
and walks away to be another affair on another prairie,
yowee, it's heaven in Heaven! with the leaves falling
like angels who've been discharged for sodomy
and it all almost over, that is too true to last, that is,
'rawther old testament, dontcha know'. When they bite,
you've never seen anything more beautiful, the sheer fantail
of it and them delicately clinging to the crimson box
like so many squid, of a rummaging albatross that sings? No!
don't even consider asking me to the swimming team's tea-
and-alabaster breakfast. I just don't want to be asked."

The mountains had trembled. quivering as if about to withdraw,
and where the ships had lined up on the frontier waiting for
the first gunshot, a young girl lunched on aspergum. A cow
belched. The sun went. Later in the day Steven farted.
He dropped his torpedo into the bathtub. Flowers. Relativity.
He stayed under water 65 seconds the first time and 84 the second.
Sheer Olympia, the last of the cat-lovers, oh Jimmy!
the prettiest cat in New York. A waiter stole the dollar bill
while the people sang in the Cicada Circle built in 1982
at a cost of three rose petals. She told him she'd miss him
when she went to live in the marshgrass, did Berdie,
and he thought, "You'll miss me like the emerald I have at home
I forgot to give you when I lost my pink Birthday Book
when it was smuggled out of Europe in a box of chocolate cherries."
Thirty-five cancerous growths were removed from as many breasts
in one great iron-grill-work purple apartment house yesterday,
and this tribute to the toughness of the Air Corps is like rain.

Had not all beautiful things become real on Wednesday?
and had not your own bumbleshoot caressed a clergyman and autos?
To be sure, the furniture was wrinkled, but a cat doesn't wink,
and her motto exists on the Liberian Ambassador's stationery,
"Amor vincit et Cicero vidit" in sachets of morning-glories.


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