Random Thoughts While Walking Around New York After Buying the Second Edition of "The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara"
Thinking that if I hadn’t bought it, I wouldn’t have passed by the open door of a pop-up shop at just the right time to hear Frank Sinatra’s voice floating out.
Not you lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals
with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants,
nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition
is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you,
promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you
are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry,
it’s you I love!
Thinking that if Chalamet had been that articulate, he probably wouldn’t have gotten himself into so much trouble.
Being aware, during a bad day at work, how much quieter the city becomes, how much less agitated the air when I turn east on 21st Street from 5th Avenue on my way to lunch at a Chinese restaurant.
Deciding to chance getting caught in a rainstorm after work to stop by a bookstore on the way home to get a copy of Frederic Prokosch’s memoir after going to Whole Foods and deciding on chicken thighs for dinner since they were out of lamb chops and getting home missing the rain but sweaty since New York is never more humid than when it’s raining or about to rain and Yvette had insisted I take my blue herringbone overcoat with me that morning and it was too much to throw over my arm and manage the groceries and books at the same time.
Thinking that O’Hara was incredibly lucky to have seen Billie Holiday in the 5 Spot while feeling happy and even more important content while sitting in Mezzrow and listening to Champian Fulton bang out a piano solo on “It’s Alright With Me” that’s a marvel of speed and wit and only wishing I could order a vodka martini instead of a vodka tonic but remembering not to because the martini glasses in Mezzrow have no stems and so your hand warms up your martini while you drink it and really is it too much to think they should find a restaurant wholesaler (what about that Chinese place at the corner of Lafayette and Houston?) and buy themselves some decent stemware?
Thinking of O’Hara in the Golden Griffin trying to decide between Verlaine and Hesiod (trans. Lattimore) and Brendan Behan and Genet when I’m in the Rockefeller Center McNally Jackson and deciding that a thriller with an epigraph from Helene Cixous probably isn’t much of a thriller.
Realizing I have to stop by MoMA to get tickets to take Cree to see Niagara (which she hasn’t seen) on Wednesday and remembering how I used to look at the old men who show up for matinees at MoMA and Film Forum and Walter Reade clutching books and newspapers and hoping I didn’t turn into them but realizing I have though I try to keep it neater by zipping up whatever book I’m reading in the little clutch bag Stephanie bought me back from Busan.
Running into Page on 6th Avenue on Sunday afternoon and her telling me she didn’t in fact get back together with her boyfriend and noting that her dimples are just as deep as ever.
Becoming alarmed a block away from Café 53 because it’s dark and the neon Open sign isn’t on but finding as I get there that it’s just because they’re closing up and breathing a sigh of relief because just in the last month we’ve lost Iris (and their perfect nonalcoholic cucumber cocktail) and the Hudson View Diner (where even when you ate in they served the iced coffee in takeaway cups) and my favorite waitress at P.J. Carney’s (which thank goodness hasn’t closed) who didn’t return to work after her Christmas trip to Paris but glad I thought to give her the Everyman Poems of Paris before she left so she’d have something to read her to sleep at night in a hotel room that I hope was small and charming and made her glad to dream there.
With apologies to F O’H