Ave Maria

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies
get them out of the house so they won’t
know what you’re up to
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by
silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you
must
they won’t hate you
they won’t criticize you they won’t know
they’ll be in some glamorous
country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or
playing hookey
they may even be grateful to you
for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
and didn’t upset the peaceful
home
they will know where candy bars come
from
and gratuitous bags of popcorn
as gratuitous as leaving the movie before
it’s over
with a pleasant stranger whose apartment
is in the Heaven on
Earth Bldg
near the Williamsburg Bridge
oh mothers you will have made
the little
tykes
so happy because if nobody does pick
them up in the movies
they won’t know the difference
and if somebody does it’ll be
sheer gravy
and they’ll have been truly entertained
either way
instead of hanging around the yard
or up in their room hating you
prematurely since you won’t have done
anything horribly mean
yet
except keeping them from life’s darker joys
it’s unforgivable the latter
so don’t blame me if you won’t take this
advice
and the family breaks up
and your children grow old and blind in
front of a TV set
seeing
movies you wouldn’t let them see when
they were young

by Frank O Hara

A Raspberry Sweater

to George Montgomery

It is next to my flesh,
that’s why.  I do what I want.
And in the pale New Hampshire
twilight a black bug sits in the blue,
strumming its legs together.  Mournful
glass, and daisies closing. Hay
swells in the nostrils.  We shall go
to the motorcycle races in Laconia
and come back all calm and warm.

by Frank O Hara

An Abortion

Do not bathe her in blood,
the little one whose sex is
undermined, she drops leafy
across the belly of black
sky and her abyss has not
that sweetness of the March
wind. Her conception ached
with the perversity of nursery
rhymes, she was a shad a
snake a sparrow and a girl’s
closed eye. At the supper, weeping,
they said let’s have her and
at breakfast: no.
Don’t bathe
her in tears, guileless, beguiled
in her peripheral warmth, more
monster than murdered, safe
in all silences. From our tree
dropped, that she not wither,
autumn in our terrible breath.

by Frank O Hara

As Planned

After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don’t you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?

by Frank O Hara