Bombshell Bohemia

You Know Where I am

2011-08-03T13:19:00.000-07:00

Carmen De Boheme
by Hart Crane

Sinuously winding through the room
On smokey tongues of sweetened cigarettes, --
Plaintive yet proud the cello tones resume
The andante of smooth hopes and lost regrets.

Bright peacocks drink from flame-pots by the wall,
Just as absinthe-sipping women shiver through
With shimmering blue from the bowl in Circe's hall.
Their brown eyes blacken, and the blue drop hue.

The andante quivers with crescendo's start,
And dies on fire's birth in each man's heart.
The tapestry betrays a finger through
The slit, soft-pulling; -- -- -- and music follows cue.

There is a sweep, -- a shattering, -- a choir
Disquieting of barbarous fantasy.
The pulse is in the ears, the heart is higher,
And stretches up through mortal eyes to see.

Carmen! Akimbo arms and smouldering eyes; --
Carmen! Bestirring hope and lipping eyes; --
Carmen whirls, and music swirls and dips.
"Carmen!," comes awed from wine-hot lips.

Finale leaves in silence to replume
Bent wings, and Carmen with her flaunts through the gloom
Of whispering tapestry, brown with old fringe: --
The winers leave too, and the small lamps twinge.

Morning: and through the foggy city gate
A gypsy wagon wiggles, striving straight.
And some dream still of Carmen's mystic face, --
Yellow, pallid, like ancient lace.

[copyright 1933 by Hart Crane]

Excerpt from Ann Arbor Variations

2011-02-25T20:07:00.000-08:00

allan grant

Ann Arbor Variations (IV)
by Frank O'Hara

The violent No! of the sun
burns the forehead of hills.
Sand fleas arrive from Salt Lake
and most of the theatres close.

The leaves roll into cigars, or
it seems our eyes stick together
in sleep. O forest, o brook of
spice, o cool gaze of strangers!

the city tumbles towards autumn
in a convulsion of tourists
and teachers. We dance in the dark,
forget the anger of what we blame

on the day. Children toss and murmur
as a rumba blankets their trees and
beckons their stars closer, older, now.
We move o'er the world, being so much here.

It's as if Poseidon left off counting
his waters for a moment! In the fields
the silence is music like the moon.
The bullfrogs sleep in their hairy caves.

across the avenue a trefoil lamp
of the streets tosses luckily.
The leaves, finally, love us! and
moonrise! we die upon the sun.

[copyright 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith]

Bon anniversaire, mon amour.

2010-12-26T22:30:00.000-08:00

allan grant

since feeling is first
e.e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

[copyright e.e.cummings, 1925]

To a Young Poet

2010-09-02T18:07:00.000-07:00

allan grant

for Charles Anna and Gio

To a Young Poet
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird.
Bird and wing together
Go down, one feather.

No thing that ever flew,
Not the lark, not you,
Can die as others do.

[copyright Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1921]

Belewe Moon

2010-02-13T20:12:00.000-08:00

Willy Ronis

for Spencer

Belewe Moon

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

You Being In Love

2010-02-07T18:20:00.000-08:00

allan grant

you being in love
by e.e. cummings

you being in love
will tell who softly asks in love,

am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely
to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean:
entirely having in my careful how
careful arms created this at length
inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure-you go from several
persons: believe me that strangers arrive
when i have kissed you into a memory
slowly, oh seriously
-that since and if you disappear

solemnly
myselves
ask "life, the question how do i drink dream smile

and how do i prefer this face to another and
why do i weep eat sleep-what does the whole intend"
they wonder. oh and they cry "to be, being, that i am alive
this absurd fraction in its lowest terms
with everything cancelled
but shadows
-what does it all come down to? love? Love
if you like and i like,for the reason that i
hate people and lean out of this window is love,love
and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason
that i do not fall into this street is love."

[copyright e.e.cummings, 1925]

Song of Cybele

2010-02-03T22:12:00.000-08:00

Song of Cybele

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

Chanson

2010-01-20T20:18:00.000-08:00

Yale Joel

Song
by Frank O'Hara

Did you see me walking by the Buick Repairs?
I was thinking of you
having a Coke in the heat it was your face
I saw on the movie magazine, no it was Fabian's
I was thinking of you
and down at the railroad tracks where the station
has mysteriously disappeared
I was thinking of you
as the bus pulled away in the twilight
I was thinking of you
and right now

[copyright 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith]

Song

2010-01-05T21:43:00.000-08:00

New York Times, 1978

Song
by Frank O'Hara

I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab
which is typical
and not just of modern life

mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves
must lovers of Eros end up with Venus
muss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you

how I hate disease, it's like worrying
that comes true
and it simply must not be able to happen

in a world where you are possible
my love
nothing can go wrong for us, tell me

[copyright 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith]

Chansonnier

2009-12-05T01:39:00.000-08:00

serge jacques

Immerse the dream, Drench the Kiss,
Dip the song into the stream

-Edna St Vincent Millay

Sporting Life
by Jack Spicer

The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios don’t develop scar-tissue. The tubes burn out, or with a transistor, which most souls are, the battery or diagram burns out replaceable or not replaceable, but not like that punchdrunk fighter in the bar. The poet
Takes too many messages. The right to the ear that floored him in New Jersey. The right to say that he stood six rounds with a champion.
Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions, or, if the scar tissue is too heavy, demonstrate in a bar where the invisible champions might not have hit him. Too many of them.
The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a counterpunching radio.
And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even know they are champions.

[copyright Jack Spicer, Wesleyan University Press, 2008]

Each and Every Door

2009-11-22T22:21:00.000-08:00

"The easiest kind of relationship for me is with
ten thousand people. The hardest is with one."

-Joan Baez

The Pull

2009-11-09T00:08:00.000-08:00

alfred eisenstaedt

One morning a little of his wine
turned my heart into a lion hunter.

-Rumi

Whatever Comes

2009-11-03T00:28:00.000-08:00

nina leen

"Eyes, dreams, lips, and the night goes."

Erat Hora
by Ezra Pound

“Thank you, whatever comes.” And then she turned
And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers
Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside,
Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes
One hour was sunlit and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.

[copyright Ezra Pound, 1926]

Time Cannot Be Worn

2009-10-29T23:15:00.000-07:00

alan grant

Time Cannot Be Worn...
by Hart Crane

Time cannot be worn strapped to the supple wrist
Like any buckled jewel or bangle; no,
Lady, though the fingers that attach it twist
The oyster from its shell, may guide the bow
Across cool strings that lift a lasting claim
Upon Eternity. No, Lady,

[copyright Liveright Publishing, 1933]

Rhapsody

2009-10-06T00:50:00.000-07:00

james jowers

Rhapsody (excerpt)
by Frank O'Hara

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

[copyright Frank O'Hara, 1951]

Two Songs

2009-10-05T23:50:00.000-07:00

allan grant

Two Songs
from "The Lamp and the Bell" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I

Oh, little rose tree, bloom!
Summer is nearly over.
The dahlias bleed and the phlox is seed.
Nothing's left of the clover.
And the path of the poppy no one knows.
I would blossom if I were a rose.

Summer, for all your guile,
Will brown in a week to Autumn,
And launched leaves throw a shadow below
Over the brook's clear bottom,--
And the chariest bud the year can boast
Be brought to bloom by the chastening frost.

II

Beat me a crown of bluer metal;
Fret it with stones of a foreign style:
The heart grows weary after a little
Of what it loved for a little while.

Weave me a robe of richer fibre;
Pattern its web with a rare device:
Give away to the child of a neighbour
This gold gown I was glad in twice.

But buy me a singer to sing one song--
Song about nothing--song about sheep--
Over and over all day long;
Patch me again my thread-bare sleep.

[copyright Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1921]

Ground Zero

2009-09-11T21:02:00.000-07:00

Michael Ochs

Ground Zero
by Colin Dodds

The folding chair, the windowpane that survived
are what made ground zero so strange.
His blinking and his silent fires
are what made ground zero so like us.

Before he arrived, we were hunting out
the history of exactly what happened
to that child or this.
As if the milky way and the past that engulfs us
were just the wake of a gone locomotive.

Ground zero counts on its fingers
the ways god loves his children.

Rainrainrainrainrain.

We had lived in a time and place
in which exactly nothing would explode.
Now everything ticks.

And I hurry off to Grand Central Station,
Grand Zero Station, Ground Zero Station.
I forget which.

The hours and the rooms lightened, untightened.
On television, where most of this happened,
ground zero went for a stroll,
showing his scabs and talking of rockets
in childish bad taste.

Dusk arrived like another catastrophe
that nobody had prepared for.
Women shook out their hair.
Men tried to be in the way.

Death had made a daring escape
from the nursing home and the hospital
and stared through our dream of everyday life.

It's cold now,
but everyone stands outside the store,
even ground zero,
reciting what they have learned.

Blinkblinkblinkblinkblink.

[copyright Medium Rare Publishing, 2003]

the city rhythm

2009-08-31T19:17:00.000-07:00

Allan Grant

“The game enforces smirks, but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.”

- Hart Crane

The City Rythm

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

Thanks

2009-07-06T19:04:00.000-07:00

Nixon in California, by ralph crane

for bob

Thanks
Yusef Komunyakaa

Thanks for the tree
between me & a sniper's bullet.
I don't know what made the grass
sway seconds before the Viet Cong
raised his soundless rifle.
Some voice always followed,
telling me which foot
to put down first.
Thanks for deflecting the ricochet
against that anarchy of dusk.
I was back in San Francisco
wrapped up in a woman's wild colors,
causing some dark bird's love call
to be shattered by daylight
when my hands reached up
& pulled a branch away
from my face. Thanks
for the vague white flower
that pointed to the gleaming metal
reflecting how it is to be broken
like mist over the grass,
as we played some deadly
game for blind gods.
What made me spot the monarch
writhing on a single thread
tied to a farmer's gate,
holding the day together
like an unfingered guitar string,
is beyond me. Maybe the hills
grew weary & leaned a little in the heat.
Again, thanks for the dud
hand grenade tossed at my feet
outside Chu Lai. I'm still
falling through its silence.
I don't know why the intrepid
sun touched the bayonet,
but I know that something
stood among those lost trees
& moved only when I moved.

[copyright 1993, by Yusef Komunyakaa]

Bees of Paradise

2009-06-20T23:53:00.000-07:00

william files

"-- And Bees of Paradise"
by Hart Crane

I had come all the way here from the sea,
Yet met the wave again between your arms
Where cliff and citadel--all verily
Dissolved within a sky of beacon forms--

Sea gardens lifted rainbow-wise through eyes
I found.

Yes, tall, inseparably our days
Pass sunward. We have walked the kindled skies
Inexorable and girded with your praise,

By the dove filled, and bees of Paradise.

[copyright Hart Crane, 1920]

Juggling Clouds

2009-06-17T22:24:00.000-07:00

Wrap us and lift us; drop us then, returned
Like water, undestroyed, --like mist, unburned...
But do not claim a friend like him again,
Whose arrow must have pierced you beyond pain.

-excerpted from "To The Cloud Juggler"
by Hart Crane, 1920

Aqui Te Amo

2009-06-10T22:32:00.000-07:00

alfred eisenstaedt

Aqui Te Amo
by Pablo Neruda

Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.

Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.
Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.
Aqui te amo.

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.
The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

[copyright w.s.merwin, 1969]

Mnemosyne

2009-05-31T22:53:00.000-07:00

Mnemosyne

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

No Law For This

2009-05-01T23:43:00.000-07:00

The Interrogation of the Man of Many Hearts
(excerpts) by Anne Sexton

Never. Never. Not my real wife.
She's my real witch, my fork, my mare,
my mother of tears, my skirtful of hell,
the stamp of my sorrows, the stamp of my bruises
and also the children she might bear
and also a private place, a body of bones
that I would honestly buy, if I could buy,
that I would marry, if I could marry.
...
I'm caught deep in the dye of her.
I have allowed you to catch me red-handed,
catch me with my wild oats in a wild clock
for my mare, my dove and my own clean body.
People might say I have snakes in my boots
but I tell you that just once am I in the stirrups,
just once, this once, in the cup.
The love of the woman is in the song.
I called her the woman in red.
I called her the girl in pink
but she was ten colors
and ten women
I could hardly name her.
...
Maybe I shouldn't have put it in words.
Frankly, I think I'm worse for this kissing,
drunk as a piper, kicking the traces
and determined to tie her up forever.
You see the song is the life,
the life I can't live.
God, even as he passes,
hands down monogamy like slang.
I wanted to write her into the law.
But, you know, there is no law for this.

[copyright 1967 by Anne Sexton]

For the Traveler

2009-03-28T21:33:00.000-07:00

alfred eisenstaedt



My Grandmother's Love Letters
by Hart Crane


There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.


There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.


Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.


And I ask myself:


"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"


Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

[copyright Hart Crane, 1920]

alfred eisenstaedt

Cornkind
by Frank O'Hara

So the rain falls
it drops all over the place
and where it finds a little rock pool
it fills up with dirt
and the corn grows
a green Bette Davis sits under it
reading a volume of William Morris
oh fertility! beloved of the Western world
you aren't so popular in China
though they fuck too

and I do really want a son
to carry on my idiocy past the Horned Gates

poor kid a staggering load

yet it can happen casually
and he lifts a little of the load each day
as I become more and more idiotic
and grows to be a strong strong man
and one day carries as I die
my final idiocy and the very gates
into a future of his choice

but what of William Morris
what of you Million Worries
what of Bette Davis in
AN EVENING WITH WILLIAM MORRIS
or THE WORLD OF SAMUEL GREENBERG

what of Hart Crane
what of phonograph records and gin

what of "what of"

you are of me, that's what
and that's the meaning of fertility
hard and moist and moaning

[copyright Frank O'Hara, 1960]

The Breeze at Dawn

2009-03-26T16:58:00.001-07:00

alfred eisenstaedt

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want; don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep.

-Rumi
(translation by Coleman Barks)

Lack of Any Bed

2009-02-23T12:39:00.000-08:00

Improvisations On A Sentence By Poe
Jack Spicer

"Indefiniteness is an element of the true music."
The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. The seagull
Alone on the pier cawing its head off
Over no fish, no other seagull,
No ocean. As absolutely devoid of meaning
As a French horn.
It is not even an orchestra. Concord
Alone on a pier. The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. No fish
No other seagull, no ocean—the true
Music.

[copyright Jack Spicer, 1961]

Orfeo
by Jack Spicer

Sharp as an arrow Orpheus
Points his music downward.
Hell is there
At the bottom of the seacliff.
Heal
Nothing by this music.
Eurydice
Is a frigate bird or a rock or some seaweed.
Hail nothing
The infernal
Is a slippering wetness out at the horizon.
Hell is this:
The lack of anything but the eternal to look at
The expansiveness of salt
The lack of any bed but one’s
Music to sleep in.

[copyright Jack Spicer, 1961]

A City Winter

2009-02-04T21:45:00.000-08:00

alfred eisenstaedt

A City Winter (excerpt)
Frank O'Hara

The snow drifts low

and yet neglects to cover me, and I
dance just ahead to keep my heart in sight.
How like a queen, to seek with jealous eye
the face that flees you, hidden city, white
swan. There's no art to free me, blinded so.

[copyright Frank O'Hara, 1951]

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy

2009-01-11T19:03:00.000-08:00

Gene Lester

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy
by Jack Spicer

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

[copyright Jack Spicer, c.1950s]

St. Paul and All That

2008-12-28T16:00:00.000-08:00

alfred eisenstaedt

St. Paul and All That
Frank O’Hara

Totally abashed and smiling

I walk in
sit down and
face the frigidaire

it’s April
no May
it’s May

such little things have to be established in the morning
after the big things of night

do you want me to come? when

I think of all the things I’ve been thinking of

I feel insane

simply “life in Birmingham is hell”

simply “you will miss me
but that’s good”

when the tears of a whole generation are assembled
they will only fill a coffee cup

just because they evaporate

doesn’t mean life has heat

“this various dream of living”

I am alive with you

full of anxious pleasures and pleasurable anxiety

hardness and softness

listening while you talk and talking while you read

I read what you read

you do not read what I read

which is right, I am the one with the curiosity

you read for some mysterious reason

I read simply because I am a writer

the sun doesn’t necessarily set, sometimes is just

disappears

when you’re not here someone walks in
and says “hey,

there’s no dancer in that bed”

O the Polish summers! those drafts!

those black and white teeth!

you never come when you say you’ll come but on the

other hand you do come

[copyright Frank O’Hara, 1961]

alfred eisenstaedt

Shadow Kids

2008-12-27T17:41:00.000-08:00

The Promenade Deck on the Queen Mary, by Sean Duggan

The Shadow Kids (lyrics)

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

Queen Mary by Sean Duggan

No Amount of Pressure

2008-12-12T21:33:00.000-08:00

alfred eisenstaedt

No Amount of Pressure
excerpt from "bathtub/wine/evening"
by Raymie Wolfe

Dad sleeps loudly in the other room. He and I have become one part in this house, no longer separate. He is one of my limbs now. Not just on my arm, but of my arm. I want to save up every tenderness for Him and put my hand on his forehead and give him comfort. I want to get behind him and hold him up, let him see the world erect, like he is used to. Old age is not for him. It's not for him and we're going to fight it to the very end.

My arms are behind him, pulling his shoulders back closer to their natural-born position; uncoiled. I am saying "breathe deep into the stretch." I imagine that when I let go he doesn't collapse. But with each breath unfurls another portion of wing, until finally I remove my hands and he flies away.

i breathe with him. and when I open my eyes i gently release him. and he falls slowly forward, into the arms of age.

it doesn't matter what prayers live in the molecules of hands
no amount of pressure releases them

[copyright Raymie Wolfe, 2008]

visit 100 Years of Raymitude

Grandfather

2008-12-11T23:47:00.000-08:00

alfred eisenstaedt

Grandfather

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

99

2008-12-06T20:39:00.000-08:00

99
e.e. cummings

now all the fingers of this tree(darling)have
hands,and all the hands have people;and
more each particular person is(my love)
alive than every world can understand

and now you are and i am now and we're
a mystery which will never happen again,
a miracle which has never happened before--
and shining this our now must come to then

our then shall be some darkness during which
fingers are without hands;and i have no
you:and all trees are(any more than each
leafless)its silent in forevering snow

--but never fear(my own,my beautiful
my blossoming)for also then's until

[copyright E.E. Cummings, 1950]

Hemos Perdido Aun

2008-12-03T23:17:00.000-08:00

Hemos Perdido Aun
Pablo Neruda (translation W.S. Merwin)

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin between my hands.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that is always turned to at twilight
and my cape rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
towards where the twilight goes erasing statues.

[copyright W.S. Merwin, 1969]

How to Get There

2008-12-02T22:52:00.000-08:00

alfred eisenstaedt

How to Get There
Frank O’Hara

White the October air, no snow, easy to breathe
beneath the sky, lies, lies everywhere writhing and

gasping

clutching and tangling, it is not easy to breathe
lies building their tendrils into dim figures
who disappear down corridors in west-side apartments
into childhood’s proof of being wanted, not

abandoned, kidnapped

betrayal staving off loneliness, I see the fog lunge in
and hide it

where are you?

here I am on the sidewalk

under the moonlike lamplight thinking how

precious moss is

so unique and greenly crushable if you can find it
on the north side of the tree where the fog binds you
and then, tearing apart into soft white lies,

spreads its disease

through the primal night of an everlasting winter
which nevertheless has heat in tubes, west-side and

east-side

and its intricate individual pathways of white

accompanied

by the ringing of telephone bells beside which

someone sits in

silence denying their own number, never given out!

nameless

like the sound of troika bells rushing past suffering
in the first storm, it is snowing now,

it is already too late

the snow will go away, but nobody will be there

police cordons for lying political dignitaries ringing too
the world becomes a jangle

from the index finger

to the vast empty houses filled with people,

their echoes

of lies and the tendrils of fog trailing softly around

their throats

now the phone can be answered, nobody calling,

only an echo

all can confess to be home and waiting, all is the same
and we drift into the clear sky enthralled

by our disappointment

never to be alone again

never to be loved

sailing through space: didn’t I have you once for my
self?
West Side?
for a couple of hours, but I am not that person

[copyright Frank O’Hara, 1960]

St. Sebastian

2008-11-22T01:28:00.000-08:00

alfred eisenstaedt

The Love Song of St. Sebastian (excerpt)
T.S. Eliot

I would come with a towel in my hand
And bend your head beneath my knees;
Your ears curl back in a certain way
Like no one’s else in all the world.
When all the world shall melt in the sun,
Melt or freeze,
I shall remember how your ears were curled.
I should for a moment linger
And follow the curve with my finger
And your head beneath my knees---
I think that at last you would understand.
There would be nothing more to say.
You would love me because I should have strangled you
And because of my infamy;
And I should love you the more because I mangled you
And because you were no longer beautiful
To anyone but me.

excerpted from Inventions of the March Hare
[copyright Valerie Eliot, 1996]

Ghost of Youth

2008-11-20T00:33:00.000-08:00

alfred eisenstaedt

Opera
T.S. Eliot

Tristan and Isolde
And the fatalistic horns
The passionate violins
And ominous clarinet;
And love torturing itself
To emotion for all there is in it,
Writhing in and out
Contorted in paroxysms,
Flinging itself at the last
Limits of self-expression.

We have the tragic? oh no!
Life departs with a feeble smile
Into the indifferent.
These emotional experiences
Do not hold good at all,
And I feel like the ghost of youth
At the undertakers’ ball.

excerpted from Inventions of the March Hare
[copyright Valerie Eliot, 1996]

Suite Clownesque

2008-11-20T00:26:00.000-08:00

t.s.eliot

for the critic

Suite Clownesque
T.S.Eliot

Across the painted colonnades
Among the terra cotta fawns
Among the potted palms, the lawns,
The cigarettes and serenades

Here’s the comedian again
With broad dogmatic vest, and nose
Nose that interrogates the stars,
Impressive, skeptic, scarlet nose;
The most expressive, real of men,
A jellyfish impertinent,
A jellyfish without repose.

Leaning across the orchestra
Just while he ponders, legs apart,
His belly sparkling and immense:
It’s all philosophy and art.
Nose that interrogates the stars
Interrogates the audience
Who still continue in suspense

Who are so many entities
Inside a ring of lights!
Here’s one who has the world at rights
Here’s one who gets away with it
By simple spreading of the toes,
A self-embodied role, his soul
Concentred in his vest and nose.

excerpted from Inventions of the March Hare
[copyright Valerie Eliot, 1996]

para mi corazon

2008-11-18T00:42:00.000-08:00

alfred eisenstaedt

XII Para Mi Corazon
Pablo Neruda (translation w.s. merwin)

Your breast is enough for my heart,
and my wings for your freedom.
What was sleeping above your soul will rise
out of my mouth to heaven.

In you is the illusion of each day.
You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers.
You undermine the horizon with your absence.
Eternally in flight like the wave.

I have said that you sang in the wind
like the pines and like the masts.
Like them you are tall and taciturn,
and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.

You gather things to you like an old road.
You are peopled with echoes and nostalgic voices.
I awoke and at times birds fled and migrated
that had been sleeping in your soul.

[copyright w.s.merwin, 1969]

Love Dogs

2008-11-13T23:30:00.000-08:00

alfred eisenstaedt

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.

Give your life
to be one of them.

-excerpt from Love Dogs by Rumi (translation Coleman Barks)

Just Once

2008-11-11T23:19:00.000-08:00

alfred eisenstaedt

Just Once
by Anne Sexton

Just once I knew what life was for.
In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;
walked there along the Charles River,
watched the lights copying themselves,
all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening
their mouths as wide as opera singers;
counted the stars, my little campaigners,
my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love
on the night green side of it and cried
my heart to the eastbound cars and cried
my heart to the westbound cars and took
my truth across a small humped bridge
and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home
and hoarded these constants into morning
only to find them gone.

December 1st

by Anne Sexton

As we kissed good-bye
you made a little frown.
Now Christ's lights are
twinkling all over town.
The cornstalks are broken
in the field, broken and brown.
The pond at the year's end
turns her gray eyelid down.
Christ's lights are
twinkling all over town.

A cat-green ice spreads
out over the front lawn.
The hemlocks are the only
young thing left. You are gone.
I hibernated under the covers
last night, not sleeping until dawn
came up like twilight and the oak leaves
whispered like money, those hangers on.
The hemlocks are the only
young thing left. You are gone.

Again, Again, Again

2008-11-11T00:29:00.000-08:00

alfred eisenstaedt

One should say before sleeping, "I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knees and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again."

-excerpt from an essay by W.B. Yeats

Dust Bowl

2008-11-03T21:20:00.000-08:00

Dust Bowl

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

The Flood

2008-10-20T00:16:00.000-07:00

Mervyn Peake

the flood

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

I Remember You As You Were

2008-10-07T22:09:00.000-07:00

Alfred Eisenstaedt

I Remember You As You Were

by Pablo Neruda

I remember you as you were in the last autumn.
You were the grey beret and the still heart.
In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.
And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.

Clasping my arms like a climbing plant
the leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace.
Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning.
Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul.

I feel your eyes traveling, and the autumn is far off:
grey beret, voice of a bird, heart like a house
towards which my deep longings migrated
and my kisses fell, happy as embers.

Sky from a ship. Field from the hills.
Your memory is made of light, of smoke, of a still pond!
Beyond your eyes, farther on, the evenings were blazing.
Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.

[copyright w.s. merwin, 1969]

In Her Nature

2008-10-06T18:10:00.001-07:00

"Taylor, you are like nature,
and when in your nature,
that's when you shine."

-B.C.

"Taylor Reading" pastel by Ron Leach

A Thirsty Fish

2008-10-05T17:28:00.000-07:00

Alfred Eisenstaedt

A Thirsty Fish
from The Essential Rumi translation by Coleman Barks

I don’t get tired of you. Don’t grow weary
of being compassionate toward me!

All this thirst equipment
must surely be tired of me,
the waterjar, the water carrier.

I have a thirsty fish in me
that can never find enough
of what it’s thirsty for!

Show me the way to the ocean!
Break these half-measures,
these small containers.

All this fantasy
and grief.

Let my house be drowned in the wave
that rose last night out of the courtyard
hidden in the center of my chest.

Joseph fell like a moon into my well.
The harvest I expected was washed away.
But no matter.

A fire has risen above my tombstone hat.
I don’t want learning, or dignity,
or respectability.

I want this music and this dawn
and the warmth of your cheek against mine.

The grief armies assemble,
but I’m not going with them.

This is always how it is
when I finish a poem.
A great silence overcomes me,
and I wonder why I ever thought
to use language.

[copyright HarperOne, 1997]

Bombshell I

2008-09-30T00:37:00.000-07:00

Alfred Eisenstaedt

The Revolving Door

2008-09-19T23:55:00.000-07:00

Alfred Eisenstaedt

The Revolving Door

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

City Poems

2008-09-16T00:36:00.000-07:00

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

The Kiss that Burned Chicago Down

2008-09-12T00:38:00.000-07:00

"After all, a girl is... well, a girl.

It's nice to be told you're successful at it."

-Rita Hayworth

In the Ruin

2008-09-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

Downtown NYC after Sept 11, by Tony Karp

In the Ruin
by Colin Dodds

We are gone, so gone from that place
that we have stationed the angel
with the flaming sword before it,
just to be sure we would not go there anymore.

It’s just down the street
from where the world hinges
on the difference between
one piece of paper and another.

Last week is so long ago
that the firemen digging through the rubble
have become archaeologists
digging in the ruins.

They do so to learn how folks
lived a week ago, if any did.
They dare not remember a week ago,
but are lonely for it.

Fall creeps in like an anonymous letter
under a closed door.
Everyone is dead in the ruin.
But something must be done

to guard against our weakness
or to find the right way to die,
to forget or subdue the knowledge
we summon too much of.

The will is strong. The senses
are subtle. The intelligence is deep.
This is not easy
and does not end.

It is the time after the cracked glass
has been shattered anew,
after we’ve been slaughtered, but before
we’ve undertaken slaughter of our own.

By the deli, the jewelry store with its sale,
our neighbors rot in an uneven cage.
There is nothing beneath them but gold
and nothing above them but the sickened living.

The firemen do not dig for clues
The case is open and shut. Nor for the dead.
The dead and the world are so strange,
we think them odd stones shaped by chance.

Forgetfulness is what will wash us to newness.
We can not yet guess if a year, a life
will be the right length
for the forgetting that needs to be done.

[copyright Medium Rare Publishing, 2003]

Critical Mass

2008-09-08T21:14:00.000-07:00

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Critical Mass
(for justin and pierre)

There was anger outside of saint marks church
The day Pierre died
Bikes hung from every steeple
People littered streets with empty cups
It was September and my naked heart fell
Down the perennial well.

We’d sought hope and we harnessed it
Down at the Center
Collected the numbers hovering close to the ground
Cut our hair into brushes to dip in the soot
And drew zeros all over our foreheads—

But I’ve been impressed on the sidewalk
Since June
My old man keeps rifles, now, in with the spoons
The boys hide their faces and grow out their beards
And curse the war years.

And my heart’s in the water
Looking for my friends
While these stubborn men stand on the ashen blue plans
For a fat, lonely country and a little oil land
The right ones who grip on their crosses like triggers
Just nod at the sheepdogs
And sleep by their windows
And wait for September again…

[copyright Taylor Roberts, 2004]

Critical Mass Arrests of 2004 amid the RNC

For The Boys

2008-09-07T02:04:00.000-07:00

Anita Ekberg 1953, by Phil Stern

Initiation
by Colin Dodds

With one ejaculation,
I was exiled from mythology
and pushed into the streets.
I made my debut in that birth canal
that never gives birth,
but only replaces and replaces.

I found a spastic moment of peace.
And it bothered me more than loneliness did.
Its relief was just one more law sunk into me.
I was no match for that peace.
I spent half my life chasing it down
and the other half trying to escape it.

I wanted my desire to swell enough
to dissolve the rest of me
or to vanish altogether.
Neither occurred.

Not Built for Wisdom
by Colin Dodds

I spurned those who wanted
to be closer to me
because you can’t be god
in someone else’s heaven.

I told myself and them
that I wouldn’t be around too long,
that I heard music in my head
that was really music.

Only a sound, a voice
that exists completely
before giving a hint of itself
can appear like that, like music.

And I wouldn’t be so
selfish
if it didn’t seem that what I had
was so specifically my own.

[copyright Medium Rare Publishing, 2003]

Dylan Writing, by Daniel Kramer

Anita Ekberg contact sheet, 1953 by Phil Stern

Fallen Magnolias

2008-09-04T21:57:00.000-07:00

Alfred Eisenstaedt

"New Orleans, meanwhile, remained mostly deserted on Tuesday, with the occasional resident who ignored the evacuation order sweeping up outside. There was scant evidence of the clean-up promised by officials, with a carpeting of tree limbs, fallen magnolias and fractured crepe myrtles on the streets."

- NY Times September 3, 2008

Weegee's "Water Main Burst Uproots Madison Avenue," circa 1938

Marble-Sized Song

2008-09-02T21:50:00.000-07:00

Marble-Sized Song
by Albert Goldbarth

Does she love you? She says yes, but really
how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion,
undoing its petals and laminae, and going in
below all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectrical
coffer where self-understanding is storaged away,
and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to study
in its nakedness as it spins
in a clinical light?—the way
we all, in our various individual versions
of this common human urge, go in,
and in, and in, the physicist down
to the string-vibration underlying matter, and
the Appalachia fiddler getting so
(as she puts it) "into my music," sound becomes
a flesh for her to intimately ("in"-timately)
enter, "its thick and its sweetbreads."
Is he cheating on you? He says no, and feigns
that he's insulted, but for certainty
you'll need to delicately strip the bark away
and drill, and tweeze, until you can smear a microscope slide
of the pith and can augur the chitterlings
—the way the philosopher can't accept a surface
assumption of truth, but needs to peel back
the fatty sheen of the dermis, soak the cambium layer
into a blow-away foam, and then with pick
and lightbeam helmet, inch by inch begin
spelunking through those splayed-out caverns
under the crust, where gems of cogitation are buried
—the way the diver descends for the pearl,
the miner: in, the archaeologist: in, the therapist: down
the snakier roots of us and in, and in, the way
the lone, leg-pretzeled yogi makes
a glowing bathysphere of worldliness and sends it in,
and further in, tinier and heavier and ever in,
the way the man in the opium den is floating forever,
toward a horizon positioned in the center of the center
of his head. . . . If we could stand beyond the border
of our species and consider us objectively, it might seem
that our purpose in existing is to be a living agency
that balances, or maybe even slows, the universe's
irreversible expansion out, and out . . . and each
of us, a contribution to that task.
My friend John's wife received the news: a "growth,"
a "mass," on her pituitary, marble-sized, mysterious.
And the primary-care physician said: Yes,
we must go in and in. That couldn't be the final word!
And the second-opinion physician said: Yes,
my sweet-and-shivering-one,
my fingerprint-and-irisprint-uniqueness,
someone's-dearest, you
who said the prayers at Juliette's grave, who drove
all night from Switzerland with your daughter, you
on this irreplaceable day in your irreplaceable skin
in the scumbled light as it crosses the bay in Corpus Christi,
yes in the shadows, yes in the radiance,
yes we must go in and in.

[copyright © 2008 by The Poetry Foundation]

Well Wrought

2008-09-01T19:56:00.000-07:00

A piano rests under a tree a few days after hurricane Katrina.

Well Wrought

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

above photo by Debbie Fleming Caffery

Sabrina

2008-08-27T23:41:00.000-07:00

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Sabrina

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

Ouija

2008-08-26T23:02:00.000-07:00

excerpt from "Ouija" by Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath as a young
married couple at 55 Eltisley Avenue

He preferred to talk about poetry. He made poems.
He spelled one out:

‘Nameless he shall be

The myriad of daughters
Tending his image
Washing the mountain slopes with tears
To slake the parched plains’.

‘Is that a good poem?’

I asked him. ‘That poem’, he declared,
‘Is a great poem.’ His favourite poet
Was Shakespeare. His favorite poem King Lear.
And his favourite line in King Lear? ‘Never
Never never never never’—but
He could not remember what followed.
We remembered but he could not remember.
When we pressed him he circled, baffled, then:
‘Why shall I ever be perplexed thus?
I’d hack my arm off like a rotten branch
Had it betrayed me as my memory.’
Where did he find that? Or did he invent it?
It was an odd joke. He liked jokes.
More often serious. Once, as we bent there, I asked:
‘Shall we be famous?’ and you snatched your hand upwards
As if something had grabbed it from under.
Your tears flashed, your face was contorted,
Your voice cracked, it was thunder and flash together:
‘And give yourself to the glare? Is that what you want?
Why should you want to be famous?
Don’t you see—fame will ruin everything.’
I was stunned. I thought I had joined
Your association of ambition
To please you and your mother,
To fulfill your mother’s ambition
That we be ambitious. Otherwise
I’d be fishing off a rock
In Western Australia. So it seemed suddenly. You wept.
You wouldn’t go on with Ouija. Nothing
I could think of could explain
Your shock and crying. Only
Maybe you’d picked up a whisper that I could not,
Before our glass could stir, some still small voice:
‘Fame will come. Fame especially for you.
Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes
You will have paid for it with your happiness,
Your husband and your life.’

Three Kisses

2008-08-17T20:00:00.000-07:00

by Alfred Eisenstaedt

in spite of everything

2008-08-16T20:55:00.000-07:00

Alfred Eisenstaedt

27 by e.e. cummings

in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neatening each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds

--before leaving my room
i turn, and(stooping
through the morning)kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.

Please Don't Kiss Me

2008-08-11T00:16:00.000-07:00

"We are all tied to our destiny and there is no way we can liberate ourselves."

- Rita Hayworth

My Old Man

2008-08-04T22:29:00.000-07:00

Nauset

2008-08-04T00:02:00.000-07:00

Sylvia Plath works on her typewriter perched on a stone wall in Yorkshire, England in 1956.

Nauset

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

POEM by Frank O'Hara

2008-07-31T19:34:00.000-07:00

Patsy Southgate, Bill Berkson, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara in O’Hara’s loft, 1964.
photograph by Mario Schifano

POEM ...from Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara

I watched an armory combing its bronze bricks
and the sky there where glistening rails of milk.
Where had the swan gone, the one with the lame back?

Now mounting the steps
I enter my new home full
of grey radiators and glass
ashtrays full of wool.

Against the winter I must get a samovar
embroidered with basil leaves and Ukranian mottos
to the distant sound of wings, painfully anti-wind,

a little bit of the blue
summer air will come back
as the steam chuckles in
the monster's steamy attack

and I'll be happy here and happy there, full
of tea and tears. I don't suppose I'll ever get
to Italy, but I have the terrible tundra at least.

My new home will be full
of wood, roots and the like,
while i pace in a turtleneck
sweater, repairing my bike.

I watched the pallisades shivering in the snow
of my face, which had grown preternaturally pure.
Once I destroyed a man's idea of himself to have him.

If I'd had a samovar then
I'd have made him tea
and as hyacinths grow from
a pot he would love me

and my charming room of tea cosies full of dirt
which is why i must travel, to collect the leaves.
O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors

though it is cold and you
are made of fire and wood!
I lift your lid and mountains
return, that I am good.

The stars blink like a hairnet that was dropped
on a seat and now is lying in the alley behind
the theater where my play is echoed by dying voices.

I am really a woodcarver
and my words are love
which willfully parades in
its room, refusing to move.

[1954]

The Vigil

2008-07-30T19:09:00.000-07:00

Lovers with 3-D glasses at the Palace Theatre (Infra-red), 1943. Photo by Weegee.

The Vigil ...from The Essential Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

Don’t go to sleep one night.
What you most want will come to you then.
Warmed by a sun inside, you’ll see wonders.
Tonight, don’t put your head down.

Be tough, and strength will come.
That which adoration adores
appears at night. Those asleep
may miss it. One night Moses stayed awake
and asked, and saw a light in a tree.

Then he walked at night for ten years,
until finally he saw the whole tree
illuminated. Muhammad rode his horse
through the night sky. The day is for work.
The night for love. Don’t let someone
bewitch you. Some people sleep at night.

But not lovers. They sit in the dark
and talk to God, who told David,
“Those who sleep all night every night
and claim to be connected to us, they lie.”

Lovers can’t sleep when they feel the privacy
of the beloved all around them. Someone
who’s thirsty may sleep for a little while,
but he or she will dream of water, a full jar
beside a creek, or the spiritual water you get
from another person. All night, listen
to the conversation. Stay up.
This moment is all there is.

Death will take it away soon enough.
You’ll be gone, and this earth will be left
without a sweetheart, nothing but weeds
growing inside thorns.

I’m through. Read the rest of this poem
in the dark tonight.
Do I have a head? And feet?

Shams, so loved by Tabrizians, I close my lips.
I wait for you to come and open them.

Bohemia

2008-07-29T23:20:00.000-07:00

from "Letter to Gary Buttone"
by Jack Spicer

Bohemia is a dreadful, wonderful place. It is full of hideous people and beautiful poetry. It is a hell full of windows into heaven. It would be wrong of me to drag a person I love into such a place against his will. Unless you walk into it freely, and with open despairing eyes, you can't even see the windows. And yet I can't leave Bohemia myself to come to you-- Bohemia is inside of me, in a sense is me, was the price i paid, the oath i signed to write poetry.
I think that someday you'll enter Bohemia-- not for me (I'm not worth the price, no human being is), but for poetry-- to see the windows and maybe blast a few yourself through the rocks of hell. I'll be there waiting for you, my arms open to receive you.

But let's have these letters go on, whether it be days, years, or never before I see you... And we can continue to love each other, by letter, from alien worlds.

Love,
Jack

[c. 1951-52]

Bombshell Bohemia

You Know Where I am

Excerpt from Ann Arbor Variations

Bon anniversaire, mon amour.

To a Young Poet

Belewe Moon

You Being In Love

Song of Cybele

Chanson

Song

Chansonnier

Each and Every Door

The Pull

Whatever Comes

Time Cannot Be Worn

Rhapsody

Two Songs

Ground Zero

the city rhythm

Thanks

Bees of Paradise

Juggling Clouds

Aqui Te Amo

Mnemosyne

No Law For This

For the Traveler

The Breeze at Dawn

Lack of Any Bed

A City Winter

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy

St. Paul and All That

Shadow Kids

No Amount of Pressure

Grandfather

99

Hemos Perdido Aun

How to Get There

St. Sebastian

Ghost of Youth

Suite Clownesque

para mi corazon

Love Dogs

Just Once

Again, Again, Again

Dust Bowl

The Flood

I Remember You As You Were

In Her Nature

A Thirsty Fish

Bombshell I

The Revolving Door

City Poems

The Kiss that Burned Chicago Down

In the Ruin

Critical Mass

For The Boys

Fallen Magnolias

Marble-Sized Song

Well Wrought

Sabrina

Ouija

Three Kisses

in spite of everything

Please Don't Kiss Me

My Old Man

Nauset

POEM by Frank O'Hara

Patsy Southgate, Bill Berkson, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara in O’Hara’s loft, 1964.photograph by Mario Schifano

The Vigil

Bohemia

Patsy Southgate, Bill Berkson, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara in O’Hara’s loft, 1964.
photograph by Mario Schifano