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Frank O' Hara: For Grace, after a Party

For Grace, After A Party
 
  You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,

and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn’t there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn’t
you like the eggs a little

different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

How casually O Hara captures the elisions between one thought and another and the spontaneous contradictions of the moment! Finds the revelation of presence. You are here and I find my warrior soul speech…

The voice of the speaker gestures this way and that; a shrug of the vocal chords and away we go from the awkwardness of acknowledged love to the bathetic security of ‘plain scrambled eggs.’ Perhaps bathos in O’Connor’s witty world is more a philosophy of being? Somehow the final note of the poem engenders a note of tender acceptance and security. Our promises deliver differently and that is life! And it is and ‘and’ rather than a ‘but’…

I wonder if the ‘You’ who begins the poem as addressee ends the poem as addresser?

Carelessly wonderful. Smoky too…

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