Short Poems, Long Poems

Back in the last decade Eric Stephen and I were sitting in Eric's basement East Village apartment, drinking and snorting blow. HIs wife and children were up in New England. Safe passsing midnight we decided to read short poems.

Eric read O Hara's THE DAY THE LADY DIED

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

I thought it long and went for Hart Crane's At Melville's Tomb

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

I hd not idea what a calyx meant. I asked myself. A guess. In context. A basket.

Steven the thespian went long with TS Eliot THE LOVESONG OF J ALFRED PRUFROCK,. He began with the second stanza. English instead of the opening Italian. I have always been inpressed by his memory.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

On and on and one ad finitum

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

It was an impressive performance.

Drinks all around and more blow of course.

Until my landlord calls screaming that the furnace is broken and get back to the building.

Buzzkill.

ps Frank O'Hara died after a beach buggy stuck him on a Provincetown beach, Hart Crane jumped or was thrown over board in the Gulf of Mexico from the USS Orizaba April 27, 1932, and TS Eliot passed peacefully short of breath at his home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965.

"In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning."

Short or long and in-between poetry knows no time. - James Steele

Almost a haiku

Alex
Young
Beautiful
I ask
Do I smell old
Sniff
No
She has a cold___

ps - calyx - the sepals of a flower, typically forming a whorl that encloses the petals and forms a protective layer around a flower in bud.