night poems

nine o'clock at night and the sky is electric blue in the west, fading through midnight blue to black above my head.  soft pink tufts of cloud migrate north, brightened by the last of the afternoon light.  nine o'clock in the afternoon.

i'm listening to john coltrane, cleaning my apartment, drinking water with lemon.  today i have been reading patti smith's memoir of her life in new york with robert mapplethorpe, so i'm in an "i want to be an artist" sort of mood, which the coltrane only enhances.  i read frank o'hara's "meditation in an emergency" as sort of a literary digestif.  i think of my friend elizabeth who gave me this volume of o'hara poetry.

first this:
"Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven.  Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching.  (How discourage her?)"

then this:
"St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky.  How am I to become a legend, my dear?  I've tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, 'to keep the filth of life away,' yes, there even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines.  I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse."