Ann Arbor Variations
1
Wet heat drifts through the afternoon
like a campus dog, a fraternity ghost
waiting to stay home from football games.
The arches are empty clear to the sky.
Except for the leaves: those lashes of our
thinking and dreaming and drinking sight.
The spherical radiance, the Old English
look, the sum of our being, "hath perced
to the roote" all our springs and falls
and now rolls over our limpness, a daily
dragon. We lose our health in a love
of color, drown in a fountain of myriads,
as simply as children. It is too hot,
our birth was given up to screaming. Our
life on these street lawns seems silent.
The leaves chatter their comparisons
to the wind and the sky fills up
before we are out of bed. O infinite
our siestas! adobe effigies in a land
that is sick of us and our tanned flesh.
The wind blows towards us particularly
the sobbing of our dear friends on both
coasts. We are sick of living and afraid
that death will not be by water, o sea.
2
Along the walks and shaded ways
pregnant women look snidely at children.
Two weeks ago they were told, in these
selfsame pools of trefoil, "the market
for emeralds is collapsing," "chlorophyll
shines in your eyes," "the sea's misery
is progenitor of the dark moss which hides
on the north side of trees and cries."
What do they think of slim kids now?
and how, when the summer's gong of day
and night slithers towards their sweat
and towards the nest of their arms
and thighs, do they feel about children
whose hides are pearly with days of swimming?
[...] Read more
poem by Frank O'Hara
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