I thought, if this person can do it, maybe too can I….and so it began.
I take the book by Frank O’Hara to the top of a park in Praha. I find a strange, gigantic metronome keeping time for no one. Sitting in the winter chill among colorful graffiti, I read the book in it’s entirety whilst the sun sets on the city below.
page 1 “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.”
page 11 “Whole days would go by, and later their years, while I thought of nothing but its darkness drifting like a bridge against the sky.”
page 19 “If I am ever to find these trees meaningful I must have you by the hand. As it is, they stretch dusty fingers into an obscure sky.”
page 37 “I am troubled as I salute the crocus. There shall be no more reclining on the powdered roads, your veins are using up the redness of the world.”
page 39 “It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.”
page 51 “Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”
Fingers are frozen and blue as I make my way down the hill, poetry swirling like soft serve ice cream on a child’s tongue.
Pure heaven.
