Frank O’Hara: 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