Words can bang around in your head
Forever, if you let them and you give them room.
I used to love poetry, and mostly I still do,
Though sometimes “I, too, dislike it.” There must be
Something real beyond the fiddle and perfunctory
Consolations and the quarrels—as of course
There is, though what it is is difficult to say.
The salt is on the briar rose, the fog is in the fir trees.
I didn’t know what it was, and I don’t know now,
But it was what I started out to do, and now, a lifetime later,
All I’ve really done. The Opening of the Field,
Roots and Branches, Rivers and Mountains: I sat in my room
Alone, their fragments shored against the ruin or revelation
That was sure to come, breathing in their secret atmosphere,
Repeating them until they almost seemed my own.
We like to think our lives are what they study to become,
And yet so much of life is waiting, waiting on a whim.
So much of what we are is sheer coincidence,
Like a sentence whose significance is retrospective,
Made up out of elementary particles that are in some sense
Simply sounds, like syllables that finally settle into place.
You probably think that this is a poem about poetry
(And obviously it is), yet its real subject is time,
For that’s what poetry is—a way to live through time
And sometimes, just for a while, to bring it back.
Forever, if you let them and you give them room.
I used to love poetry, and mostly I still do,
Though sometimes “I, too, dislike it.” There must be
Something real beyond the fiddle and perfunctory
Consolations and the quarrels—as of course
There is, though what it is is difficult to say.
The salt is on the briar rose, the fog is in the fir trees.
I didn’t know what it was, and I don’t know now,
But it was what I started out to do, and now, a lifetime later,
All I’ve really done. The Opening of the Field,
Roots and Branches, Rivers and Mountains: I sat in my room
Alone, their fragments shored against the ruin or revelation
That was sure to come, breathing in their secret atmosphere,
Repeating them until they almost seemed my own.
We like to think our lives are what they study to become,
And yet so much of life is waiting, waiting on a whim.
So much of what we are is sheer coincidence,
Like a sentence whose significance is retrospective,
Made up out of elementary particles that are in some sense
Simply sounds, like syllables that finally settle into place.
You probably think that this is a poem about poetry
(And obviously it is), yet its real subject is time,
For that’s what poetry is—a way to live through time
And sometimes, just for a while, to bring it back.
* * *
A paneled dining room in Holder Hall. Stage right, enter twit:
“Mr. Ashbery, I’m your biggest campus fan.” We hit it off
And talked about “The Skaters” and my preference for “Clepsydra”
Vs. “Fragment.” Later on that night John asked me to a party in New York,
And Saturday, after dinner and a panel on the artist’s role as something
(And a party), driving Lewis’s Austin-Healey through the rain
I sealed our friendship with an accident. The party was on Broadway,
An apartment (white of course, with paintings) just downstairs
From Frank O’Hara’s, who finally wandered down. I talked to him
A little about Love Poems (Tentative Title), which pleased him,
And quoted a line from “Poem” about the rain, which seemed to please him too.
The party ended, John and I went off to Max’s, ordered steaks
And talked about our mothers. All that talking!—poems and paintings,
Parents, all those parties, and the age of manifestos still to come!
I started coming to New York for lunch. We’d meet at Art News,
Walk to Fifty-sixth Street to Larre’s, a restaurant filled with French expatriates,
Have martinis and the prix fixe for $2.50 (!), drink rose de Provence
And talk (of course) about Genet and James and words like “Coca-Cola.”
It was an afternoon in May when John brought up a play
That he and Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara—Holy Trinity!
(Batman was in vogue)—had started years ago and never finished.
There was a dictator named Edgar and some penicillin,
But that’s all I remember. They hadn’t actually been together
In years, but planned to finish it that night at John’s new apartment
On Ninety-fifth Street, and he said to come by for a drink
Before they ate and got to work. It was a New York dream
Come true: a brownstone floor-through, white and full of paintings
(Naturally), “with a good library and record collection.”
John had procured a huge steak, and as I helped him set the table
The doorbell rang and Frank O’Hara, fresh from the museum
And svelte in a hound’s tooth sports coat entered, followed shortly
By “excitement-prone Kenneth Koch” in somber gray,
And I was one with my immortals. In the small mythologies
We make up out of memories and the flow of time
A few moments remain frozen, though the feel of them is lost,
The feel of talk. It ranged from puns to gossip, always coming back
To poems and poets. Frank was fiercely loyal to young poets
(Joe Ceravolo’s name came up I think), and when I mentioned Lewis
In a way that must have sounded catty, he leapt to his defense,
Leaving me to backtrack in embarrassment and have another drink,
Which is what everyone had. I think you see where it was going:
Conversation drifting into dinner, then I stayed for dinner
And everyone forgot about the play, which was never finished
(Though I think I’ve seen a fragment of it somewhere). I see a table
In a cone of light, but there’s no sound except for Kenneth’s
Deadpan “Love to see a boy eat” as I speared a piece of steak;
And then the only voice I’m sure I hear is mine,
As those moments that had once seemed singular and clear
Dissolve into a “general mess of imprecision of feeling”
And images, augmented by line breaks. There were phone calls,
Other people arrived, the narrative of the night dissolved
And finally everyone went home. School and spring wound down.
The semester ended, then the weekend that I wrote about in “Sally’s Hair”
Arrived and went, and then a late-night cruise around Manhattan for a rich friend’s
Parents’ anniversary bash, followed by an Upper East Side preppie bar
That left me looking for a place to crash, and so I rang John’s bell at 2 AM
And failed (thank God) to rouse him, caught a plane to San Diego
The next day, worked at my summer job and worked on poems
And started reading Proust, and got a card one afternoon
From Peter Schjeldahl telling me that Frank O’Hara had been killed.
I started coming to New York for lunch. We’d meet at Art News,
Walk to Fifty-sixth Street to Larre’s, a restaurant filled with French expatriates,
Have martinis and the prix fixe for $2.50 (!), drink rose de Provence
And talk (of course) about Genet and James and words like “Coca-Cola.”
It was an afternoon in May when John brought up a play
That he and Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara—Holy Trinity!
(Batman was in vogue)—had started years ago and never finished.
There was a dictator named Edgar and some penicillin,
But that’s all I remember. They hadn’t actually been together
In years, but planned to finish it that night at John’s new apartment
On Ninety-fifth Street, and he said to come by for a drink
Before they ate and got to work. It was a New York dream
Come true: a brownstone floor-through, white and full of paintings
(Naturally), “with a good library and record collection.”
John had procured a huge steak, and as I helped him set the table
The doorbell rang and Frank O’Hara, fresh from the museum
And svelte in a hound’s tooth sports coat entered, followed shortly
By “excitement-prone Kenneth Koch” in somber gray,
And I was one with my immortals. In the small mythologies
We make up out of memories and the flow of time
A few moments remain frozen, though the feel of them is lost,
The feel of talk. It ranged from puns to gossip, always coming back
To poems and poets. Frank was fiercely loyal to young poets
(Joe Ceravolo’s name came up I think), and when I mentioned Lewis
In a way that must have sounded catty, he leapt to his defense,
Leaving me to backtrack in embarrassment and have another drink,
Which is what everyone had. I think you see where it was going:
Conversation drifting into dinner, then I stayed for dinner
And everyone forgot about the play, which was never finished
(Though I think I’ve seen a fragment of it somewhere). I see a table
In a cone of light, but there’s no sound except for Kenneth’s
Deadpan “Love to see a boy eat” as I speared a piece of steak;
And then the only voice I’m sure I hear is mine,
As those moments that had once seemed singular and clear
Dissolve into a “general mess of imprecision of feeling”
And images, augmented by line breaks. There were phone calls,
Other people arrived, the narrative of the night dissolved
And finally everyone went home. School and spring wound down.
The semester ended, then the weekend that I wrote about in “Sally’s Hair”
Arrived and went, and then a late-night cruise around Manhattan for a rich friend’s
Parents’ anniversary bash, followed by an Upper East Side preppie bar
That left me looking for a place to crash, and so I rang John’s bell at 2 AM
And failed (thank God) to rouse him, caught a plane to San Diego
The next day, worked at my summer job and worked on poems
And started reading Proust, and got a card one afternoon
From Peter Schjeldahl telling me that Frank O’Hara had been killed.
John Koethe is the author of several collections of poetry, including North Point North: New and Selected (2002), Ninety-fifth Street (2009), and ROTC Kills (2012). Walking Backwards: Poems 1966—2016 is forthcoming from Farrar Straus and Giroux.