Lisztiana, Much Later
I sit in your T shirt
with its spots of paint
as a certain fierceness pours
outside, perhaps, too, on you.
I’m smoking a CAMEL now
and I have a big hole in my
shoulder from washing away
a lot of dirt. Are you there?
there, are you? I am here
and the storm is not enough,
it should crash in and wet,
there should be maelstrom where
a privileged host is smiling.
And naked in debris I there
should be, but, being here, should
bend to you, pick out of rubble
a scrap of painted shirt,
as if it were soiled ivory from
a grand piano, possessed of us
both, and ruined now by storms.
— Frank O’Hara, The Paris Review, issue no. 45 (Winter 1968)