Long poem(rough draft)

 AN ELEGY FOR SOMEONE WHO IS STILL LIVING

After frank O’hara

I sip my cocktail while the pretty nurse

says “I gotta get out of New York City!”

I nod attentively then click her off

turning to Miles Davis on the turntable,

it should be raining now

but it’s snowing somewhere not here,

I pause between beats

no lines come, so I listen to the sax

what else should we do?

Well, I’ll turn words upside down

juggle metaphors and images together

nothing will come of it,

I’ll be dizzy that’s it, that’s about it!

maybe it’s time to wish

for different faces

different names

different drinks

free of me and my silence

this silence I sit in at lunchtime.

The black and white photo on my table

makes a great book cover,

it meets me head on,

Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, and Grace Hartigan

forever drinking, smoking cigarettes, and talking

round a Village bar table,

What insults?

What ribbing?

What laughs?

came and went that rainy evening

it must have been raining that night in Manhattan,

It makes for a great tale, rain, rain, and rain in the late 1950s,

Their smoke lingers

round me, their words in diaries now

I've read them and re-read them

on all kinds of nights,

Hartigan wrote “Everything changes”

and it does, and death comes too

altering sweltering nights of art and poetry,

and I think of you out there

your name dead now,

changed so you can forget me

so you can drink alone

Or with strangers who know your new name

fancy, cold, and lonely

an elegy comes from me to you

wrapped in fog

wrapped in winter,

Winter has something to say

but keep it serious not solemn

please

please,

I think of the NY school poets

they would hate that I called them that

especially my looking into a boarded up cathedral

a copy of the Four Quartets gathering dust

in the nave, the lonely nave,

I say a prayer and throw a stone

shattering the stained glass window

so much for peace, so much for serenity,

Stop! Says the meter lady

passing out her ticket candy,

dig out all that nonsense

she yells, waving away my doubt

Telling me to pick up the stone, and clean up the mess.