Flowers for Frank

by | Mar 6, 2014 | Poetry

When a friend died

From an overdose and

Strewn about, all those

Flowers. I’d never noticed

Flowers until that day

I thought in hindsight:

Alstroemeria in small

Explosions all agog

With color and swept

As the sky was with

Thick blue paste, some

Aureate calm like

A dull summer mist.

Well, the photograph of

Frank O’Hara, hand

Beneath chin like

The conqueror of my personal

Life, because before,

Pre-Frank, I hadn’t noticed

Chasm between casual

And causal, though, slight

Lent me first sight, as

If seeing, parting the

Lush green leaves for

The first time, to

Really get at the day’s

Meaning. Well, between

The passion I now have

For clouds and my,

That first flush of,

What nervy balm to

Carry me through that

Room, that I carried you

In my pocket, Frank

And for the first time

Really saw.

Each specific

Stitch from where it yawned

There, as I then, floating

Found new eyes.

 

 

Photo By: TANAKA Juuyoh (田中十洋)

About The Author

Larry Sawyer

Larry Sawyer curates the Myopic Books reading series in Chicago and is the co-director of The Chicago School of Poetics. His books include Unable to Fully California (Otoliths Press), Vertigo Diary (BlazeVox Books), and Breaking Lorca (White Hole Press). Cy Gist Press will publish his BESTIARY in 2014. Larry also edits milk magazine (since 1998). His poetry and literary reviews have appeared in publications including The Chicago Tribune, Action Yes, Forklift Ohio, Vanitas, Skanky Possum, Exquisite Corpse, Court Green, Shampoo, Rain Taxi, Van Gogh’s Ear, and elsewhere. Chicago Reader picked him as Best Poet in its 2012 and 2013 Readers’ Poll. About Vertigo Diary: “ … Larry’s poetry gives me the best kind of vertigo: the kind where you’re afraid of falling, but when you do you fall into a soft, meaty, sensual, smart ravine that shakes you pretty good, but instead of killing you it turns you into a Thinking Cocktail. What a scary and fine artist Mr. Sawyer is!” —Andrei Codrescu