I am jealous of the sand beneath you around you what you see bright things erased lady sparkling and traveling without luggage liquidity before X you are tattooed on my back music dies down I too grew up in the soft hands of the gods and a little donkey will lead them Tears, tears, and I know just what they mean honeysuckles at night I wrote this poem for you and haven't lost it
COLUMBIA UNIV. PRESIDENTS' OFFICE
If one saves a butterfly, has one saved the world?
Rabbi says: If one saves one butterfly, even with long wings,
one butterfly that has fallen into water, it may be said:
"He has saved the whole world."
If one saves a motley moth, is it the same?
Rabbi: It is valid. If one saves a dirty monkey from a flame,
for example, it is as the saying is: He or she has saved the whole world.
It is valid for all creatures, and not more so for the creatures who know
how to recite the blessings. It is always valid, even on the Sabbath.
It is said: The creatures of the sky are owned by no one, like the land.
If one saves the Book from being destroyed, is it also saving a world?
Rabbi: God forbid, yes, saving the book from the fire,
saving the book or books from the fire, is known to be comparable.
He who saves a book and he who
writes a holy book, it should be said:
They have saved the whole world like a book.
If one saves a rose, one rose,
from the garden of your dead Teacher,
is it still appropriate to think:
She has saved the world.
The Rabbi was silent and seemed troubled. He replied:
If the house of the great teacher is in ruins,
and the garden is a scandal, and one saves
one rose from his garden it is said even
of one rose: It is like saving the world.
It is also said the rose will grow as large as the world.
We make mistakes
For example, I’m reading
The NYC Poetry Calendar
for April on this
metropolitan spring afternoon
And I read that today Cookie Mueller
whom I slightly know from an
argument with another poet
and also a review she did of
my Melancholy show
and Bernadette and Phillip Good
plus Open will be reading
I don’t know Open
I think it’s not Oppen who’s dead
and unfairly objectified
I guess it’s a young graffiti
Poet, perhaps taking a single
name, in 19th Century excess
They’re reading at the Anarchist Cellar
It’s a perfect name for a young
perhaps slightly jejune ethical anarchist
Then I see on the 16th Open is reading
again, this time with my friend Joe
Ceravolo and my former student Joe
Lewis
Now I’m really intrigued
It seems like a blitz, an Open blitz
perhaps he’s publishing his first
fundamentally daring volume
I think of my translation of
Baudelaire’s Luxe, calme et volupté
Rich calm and open
Why haven’t I thought of a decent
nom de plume like Open
Why settle down with four David
Shapiros
another living just a few blocks away
another painting in a style not mine
Perhaps this Open is the new
Rimbaud and uses my poems for
toilet paper, or perhaps we could
be friends, friends with Open
Again he appears at the Manhattan Public
Library
this time in lower case letters
and than again at Maxwell’s for $3
But my brain adjusts itself to the light
It’s simply an open reading that’s implied
This poet does not exist, though he should
Open a young poet I should have invented
as when I thought all of conceptual art
would have been decent as one short story
by B
Oh, Open, you whom I would have read,
and you who would have read me!
painting (Alex Katz), 1964
I have been diagnosed with the gospels of a paper life.
This is the sorrow of poetry in America. It is the smallest state in this 
painting by Wynn Chamberlain
“Poets Dressed and Undressed” (1964). Joe Brainard, Frank O’Hara, Joe LeSueur and Frank Lima (standing).
From Garrett Caples via Andrew Epstein
“O’Hara offered drinking and companionship, bringing Lima everywhere from the symphony to the Cedar Tavern. O’Hara took an interest in Lima’s personal well-being, allowing him, during a period of relapse and homelessness, to sleep on the couch at the East Ninth Street apartment the older poet shared with Joe LeSueur. O’Hara went as far as organizing an art sale through Tibor de Nagy to raise money for Lima to see a psychotherapist. The two Franks also collaborated on a play, Love on the Hoof, intended for an unrealized Andy Warhol film project called ‘Messy Lives.'”
Happy Birthday Kenneth Koch/Feb 27
We went to all those places where they restore sadness and joy
and call it art. We were piloted by Auden who became
Unbearably acrimonious when we dropped off Senghor into the
steamy skies of his beloved West Africa. The termites and ants
were waiting for him to unearth the sun in Elissa. The clouds
were as cool as a dog's nose pressed against our cheeks. I
notice your eggshell skin is as creamy as a lion's armpit as we
cross the horizon on strands of Yeats' silver hair. There is a
light coffee flame in his eyes guiding us like an old Irish house
cleaner holding a candle in a black and white English movie.
Yeats' lips look like an angry Rimbaud illuminating poetry with
his youth and vigorous sunlight. He knew eternity would vanish
the sun at dusk. He caught it with a rainbow tied to his finger.
There was nothing left after that. We cross the equator
heading north following Emily Dickinson's black bag containing
stems of her longer poems preserved in darkness and memory
like wild pearls thrown overboard to avoid capture by Spanish
pirates. The islands below float by like water hearts in a child's
aquarium. We are candy wrappers being blown across the
waxed floors of poetry. We land on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Whitman's past-port face is grinning at the nineteenth century
in the thorny arms of Gerard Manley Hopkins whose head was
set on fire by God's little hands. The hands that circumcised
the world. Gertrude Stein is a match flaring on a young
woman's pillow whose birthmarks have been stolen.
Santa Fe Trail I go separately The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands it is th...
