Joseph’s Reviews > Frank O'Hara: Selected Poems > Status Update

“and the night is heavy though not warm, Joe is still up and we talk
only of the immediate present and it’s indiscriminately hitched-to past
the feeling of life and incident pouring over the sleeping city
which seems to be bathed in an unobtrusive light which lends things
coherence and an absolute, for just that time as four o’clock goes by”

“…I marvel that we ever found it
possible or desirable to raise our lazy heads
from opposite ends of a gray fountain’s inter-
section with the regimented air in order to just
say ‘Are you having fun?’ to the dear person for
whom we are preparing, with passionately efficient
distraction, the deepest hurt…
…Doesn’t it make
you marvel at human ambition? Is that a tear?”