The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara Quotes

“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?”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile.”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“For Grace, After a Party"

You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,

and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn’t there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn’t
you like the eggs a little

different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days!”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“Morning Poem"

I've got to tell you
how I love you always
I think of it on grey
mornings with death

in my mouth the tea
is never hot enough
then and the cigarette
dry the maroon robe

chills me I need you
and look out the window
at the noiseless snow

At night on the dock
the buses glow like
clouds and I am lonely
thinking of flutes

I miss you always
when I go to the beach
the sand is wet with
tears that seem mine

although I never weep
and hold you in my
heart with a very real
humor you'd be proud of

the parking lot is
crowded and I stand
rattling my keys the car
is empty as a bicycle

what are you doing now
where did you eat your
lunch and were there
lots of anchovies it

is difficult to think
of you without me in
the sentence you depress
me when you are alone

Last night the stars
were numerous and today
snow is their calling
card I'll not be cordial

there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
do you know how it is

when you are the only
passenger if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“The stars blink like a hairnet that was dropped / on a seat and now it is lying in the alley behind / the theatre where my play is echoed by dying voices.”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“Now That I Am in Madrid I Can Think "

I think of you
and the continents brilliant and arid
and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air
as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning
and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York

see a vast bridge stetching to the humbled outskirts with only you
Standing on the edge of the purple like an only tree
and in Toledo the olive groves’ soft blue look at the hills with silver
like glasses like an old ladies hair
It’s well known that God and I don’t get along together
It’s just a view of the brass works for me, I don’t care about the Moors
seen through you the great works of death, you are greater

you are smiling, you are emptying the world so we can be alone together.”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“Stars are out and there is sea
enough beneath the glistening earth
to bear me toward the future
which is not so dark. I see.”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“There’s too much lime in the world and not enough gin”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“Travel"

Sometimes I know I love you better
than all the others I kiss it’s funny

but it’s true and I wouldn’t roll
from one to the next so fast if you

hadn’t knocked them all down like
ninepins when you roared by my bed

I keep trying to race ahead and catch
you at the newest station or whistle

stop but you are flighty about
schedules and always soar away just

as leaning from my taxicab my breath
reaches for the back of your neck”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“Song "

I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab
which is typical
and not just of modern life

mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves
must lovers of Eros end up with Venus
muss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you

how I hate disease, it’s like worrying
that comes true
and it simply must not be able to happen

in a world where you are possible
my love
nothing can go wrong for us, tell me”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“You are the sick prince of my cerise innovations and in your drowning caresses I walk the sea”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“To the Harbormaster"

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me
O you were the best of all my days”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“To You"

What is more beautiful than night
and someone in your arms
that’s what we love about art
it seems to prefer us and stays

if the moon or a gasping candle
sheds a little light or even dark
you become a landscape in a landscape
with rocks and craggy mountains

and valleys full of sweaty ferns
breathing and lifting into the clouds
which have actually come low
as a blanket of aspirations’ blue

for once not a melancholy color
because it is looking back at us
there’s no need for vistas we are one
in the complicated foreground of space

the architects are most courageous
because it stands for all to see
and for a long long time just as
the words “I’ll always love you"

impulsively appear in the dark sky
and we are happy and stick by them
like a couple of painters in neon allowing
the light to glow there over the river”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“Poem"

“Two communities outside Birmingham, Alabama, are
still searching for their dead.” —News Telecast

And tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock in Springfield, Massachusetts,
my oldest aunt will be buried from a convent.
Spring is here and I’m staying here, I’m not going.
Do birds fly? I am thinking my own thoughts, who else’s?

When I die, don’t come, I wouldn’t want a leaf
to turn away from the sun— it loves it there.
There’s nothing so spiritual about being happy
but you can’t miss a day of it, because it doesn’t last.

So this is the devil’s desire? Well I was born to dance.
It’s a sacred duty, like being in love with an ape,
and eventually I’ll reach some great conclusion, like assumption,
when at last I meet exhaustion in these flowers, go straight up.”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“In Favor Of One's Time"

The spent purpose of a perfectly marvellous
life suddenly glimmers and leaps into flame
it's more difficult than you think to make charcoal
it's also pretty hard to remember life's marvellous
but there it is guttering choking then soaring
in the mirrored room of this consciousness
it's practically a blaze of pure sensibility
and however exaggerated at least somethings going on
and the quick oxygen in the air will not go neglected
will not sulk or fall into blackness and peat

an angel flying slowly, curiously singes its wings
and you diminish for a moment out of respect
for beauty then flare up after all that's the angel
that wrestled with Jacob and loves conflict
as an athlete loves the tape, and we're off into
an immortal contest of actuality and pride
which is love assuming the consciousness of itself
as sky over all, medium of finding and founding
not just resemblance but the magnetic otherness
that that that stands erect in the the spirit's glare
and waits for the joining of an opposite force's breath

so come the winds into our lives and last
longer than despair's sharp snake, crushed before it conquered
so marvellous is not just a poet's greenish namesake
and we live outside his garden in pure tempestuous rights”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“The sunset is climbing up I think
and I am coming back or going back,
as our love dries itself like ink
after this long swim, this heart attack.”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“Sleeping on the Wing

Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness,
as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries 'Sleep!
O for a long sound sleep and so forget it! '
that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city,
veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon
does when a car honks or a door slams, the door
of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.

Fear drops away too, like the cement, and you
are over the Atlantic. Where is Spain? where is
who? The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,
was it? A sudden down-draught reminds you of gravity
and your position in respect to human love. But
here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.
Once you are helpless, you are free, can you believe
that? Never to waken to the sad struggle of a face?
to travel always over some impersonal vastness,
to be out of, forever, neither in nor for!

The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind
and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.
The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible!
and was and is, and yet the form, it may be sleeping
too. Those features etched in the ice of someone
loved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space
and speed, your hand alone could have done this.
Curiosity, the passionate hand of desire. Dead,
or sleeping? Is there speed enough? And, swooping,
you relinquish all that you have made your own,
the kingdom of your self sailing, for you must awake
and breathe your warmth in this beloved image
whether it's dead or merely disappearing,
as space is disappearing and your singularity

Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. (University of California Press March 31, 1995)”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it, and a phone call to the beyond
which doesn't seem to be coming any nearer.
“Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days”
on the poetry of a new friend
my life held precariously in the seeing
hands of others, their and my impossibilities.
Is this love, now that the first love
has finally died, where there were no impossibilities?

—Frank O’Hara, “Poem,” The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. (University of California Press March 31, 1995)”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“I don't wear brown
and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“I don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“There’s too much lime in the world and not enough gin. —Frank O’Hara, from “Poem,” The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. (University of California Press March 31, 1995)”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“Ode to Willem de Kooning"

Beyond the sunrise
where black begins
                                                                  an enormous city
                                                                  is sending up its shutters
   
and just before the last lapse of nerve which I am already sorry for,
that friends describe as “just this once” in a temporary hell, I hope
 
           I try to seize upon greatness
            which is available to me …”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“I’m having a real day of it.

There was
something I had to do. But what?
There are no alternatives, just
the one something.
I have a drink,
it doesn’t help - far from it!
I
feel worse. I can’t remember how
I felt, so perhaps I feel better.
No, Just a little darker.
If I could
get really dark, richly dark, like
being drunk, that’s the best that’s
open as a field. Not the best,

but the best except for the impossible
pure light, to be as if above a vast
prairie, rushing and pausing over
the tiny golden heads in deep grass.”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“[...] I need you
and look out the window
at the noiseless snow”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara