“To the Harbormaster” by Frank O’Hara:
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. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
Olivia Cole untangles the poem, about O'Hara's relationship with Larry Rivers:
Rivers’s involvement with O’Hara was against his better judgement, and in his autobiography he claims never to have had full sex with a man, a fact that partly explains the poem’s fixation with impossibility and insurmountable distance. O’Hara was a far more emotionally demanding lover than any of Rivers’s girlfriends. (As Rivers wrote of his relationships with women at the time: Q: “Sure, you like sex with me, Larry. But what are your intentions?” A: “To continue fucking you at the lowest possible price.”)
I find O’Hara’s hopefulness one of the most comical and touching aspects of his love poems. O’Hara was a glass-half-full revisionist of reality. He could make a virtue of anything, even a row (“That’s not a cross look, it’s a sign of life”) or of being left alone (“You never come when you say you’ll come but on the other hand you do come”).
(Photo by Evan Leeson)
The Dish 