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I’ll sleep on yoghurt
    and dream of the Persian Gulf

Today is Frank O’Hara
walking through New York
ignoring the news on Fox
and CNN, listening
instead to Rachmaninoff
and the Milky Way,
whispering in French,
tripping over the names
he dropped before Larry Rivers
eulogized him to the hordes
who believed he was their best friend.

Today is Frank O’Hara
stepping away from them.
He will not scan headlines
for fallen stars, drop in for a beer
with Mike Goldberg,
nor listen for the click
of chorus girls, hard hats
and yellow cabs.
He does not recall head lights
blinding him on Fire Island.

Today is Frank O’Hara
walking through New York
as the Towers blossom and fall.
He cannot revise the terrible future
he conceived,

    Where does the evil of the year go
        when September takes New York
    and turns it into ozone stalagmites

Oh Frank, I wander restless
through your corpus which joked
the future into consciousness.
Who would have known you
were serious as a bomb,
not arrogant when you wrote

              silent, listening to
the air becoming no air becoming air again

[Italicized lines are from various poems in Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems.]

 

The Modern Economy

I marched all day and all I got was this lousy piece of chalk.

—Graffiti

If you take the free tour of the Bank of England
you will learn how money is made and how to invest it.
But demonstrators have shut down the Bank of England
because the G-8 or G-12 or G-20 or G-whatever inflation
has raised it to, want to regulate the Modern Economy.
The protesters want to regulate the Modern Economy too, but their way.
The Queen dislikes the protesters because they are noisy.
Her son dislikes the Queen because she will not die.
King me! the Prince demands.
Be patient, you saucy lad, and wait your turn,
But Mum, I’m 60!
Such is the relationship between means and production.
The Modern Economy pities the maybe-future king, says,
Don’t worry, Sir. You will always have Wales.
That’s the 20^th Century for you, a homeless guy mutters.
It’s no longer the 20^th Century a demonstrator shouts back.
Oh.

The Modern Economy is the pure product of capitalism.
It is not immoral. It is agnostic and hardworking.
It must finish paving Brazil, keep China smoking and teach India
just enough English to answer the phones.
The Modern Economy dislikes the English pound because it is weak.
It has already bumped off the franc, the lire, the mark,
the drachma, the guilden, the peseta. It wants to reduce currency
to dollars and euros and yen, but that damn quid won’t quit.
The Modern Economy stimulates itself by rubbing against
the British market so the whole island stiffens and tips into the sea.
The homeless guy, barely staying afloat, hangs on
better than most, but even he’s going under.
Help me! he screams, his mouth filling with seawater.
The Modern Economy ignores him.
That’s the trouble with these people, it thinks
No matter how much you do for them, they’re always asking
for more.

 

Local Birds

Walking on the beach near Bodega Bay I came
across a gang of turkey vultures looking me
over as they gorged themselves on the carcass
of a sea lion. I never saw birds like this.
They didn’t sing or whistle or hang out on phone
wires. And they didn’t scare easily, hissing
as I stopped to watch them devour the eyes.
If one had pulled out a pack of Lucky’s and lit up,
I wouldn’t have been surprised. That evening,
they circled above me as I lounged in the Jacuzzi.
I flapped my arms so they wouldn’t mistake me
for another dead seal. Then I went inside, put
on The Birds filmed here 50 years ago, and kept
my eye on the blonde, Tippi Hedren. Smitten
when he saw her in a beer commercial, Hitchcock
trained her to act terrified, tying a live crow to her
collar in one scene, and in another, sliding a wooden
gull down a wire at her face. Tippi got frazzled
and wound up in the hospital. In the film,
the locals blame her for bringing this horrorshow
to their quiet village. There’s this smarty-pants
“amateur” ornithologist, a frumpy woman,
who snarls at beautiful Tippi. “I have never known
birds of different species to flock together.”
On the beach the next morning I saw crows finish
off the last of that seal while the vultures stood around
looking like extras. Most of the buildings in the movie
are gone, but the restaurant is still there.
The owner back then, a guy named Mitch, offered
Hitchcock the place for free if the town in the film
be called Bodega Bay and the lead be named “Mitch.”
He even snagged a speaking part. His immortal words
to Rod Taylor, “What happened, Mitch?”
I don’t know how old she is or where she lives,
but Tippi returns to the restaurant each year
to sign autographs. I looked around one night
but didn’t see her. At the Tube stop in London
where Hitchcock was born, they put up mosaics
based on his films—Janet Leigh soaps it up
in the shower. Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly
stare out a window. Stewart again and Kim Novak
wrestle in a bell tower. Bob Cummings wears handcuffs
as another blonde, I don’t know this one, drives
a getaway car. And there’s our Tippi, screaming
as she runs from the darkness that swarms her,
raising her ceramic arms to cover her golden head.