Frank O’Hara wrote very rapidly
on a typewriter he kept about chest
height on top of a bureau of drawers
where he’d shove the finished poems amid
underwear and shirts and socks that he wore
to his job at MOMA selling postcards
and ultimately curating abstract
expressionist canvases by his
drinking buddies late at night—the Cedar
was one place in particular where they
passionately declaimed the theories
scribbled like promises of Catullus’
married paramour on sheets of water,
erasing figurative art with the tide.