Fifty years ago today, a Friday like today, was the day Lady died, and Frank O'Hara, on his lunch hour in midtown Manhattan, wrote one of his most famous poems. And yes, I know that Emma Trelles posted this poem most wittily on Basdille Day. Nevertheless, I can't resist this repetition in the cyber world of the eternal act of creation in the human I am.
The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
-- Frank O'Hara
Quiz:
1) Who was "Lady Day" and who gave her that
2) Where was the Five Spot and who played there? (Hint: he wore fun hats and took his drinks straight, without a chaser.)
3) Who were "Mike" and "Patsy"? (Last names, please.)
4) Where did Frank work? And what non-fiction book did he publish that year?
5) Whom am I paraphrasing when I write of "a repetition in the cyber world of the immortal act of creation in the human I am"? (Hint: The syntax is the same, the adjectives different.)
-- DL
