Ocean Park (for Richard) after Frank O’Hara with Cigarette

Ocean Park (for Richard)
after Frank O’Hara with Cigarette

Well Richard,
I came in out of the sun
(it was too much even for July)
and now your painting is here
cool as a gin and tonic,
pale green buzzing like it wants to be
both a plane window at 35,000 feet
and that music you don’t notice
until it stops.

It’s like Santa Monica decided
to shut up for once
and let the architecture speak
or hesitate, politely. 

I love how it tries to stay
in the lines
but forgets itself halfway through --
like me trying to remember
if I turned off the stove
or told Vincent I loved him
before the cab pulled away.

What I mean is,
thank you for this not-quite-window,
this blue that doesn’t perform,
this geometry of restraint.
God knows we need more of that 
and fewer poems about feelings.

But now I’m thinking about pastrami, 
loneliness, 
the light on the mailbox at 4:47.

So I'll go. You stay.
And keep being so goddamn quiet 
about everything.

Shared with Open Link Night #404  at dVerse Poets Pub.

This poem is entirely a fantasy, of course.

Frank O’Hara never saw Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series, which he began in Santa Monica in 1967, a year after O’Hara’s death in an accident on Fire Island. The paintings are luminous abstractions of layered color and geometric scaffolding — suggesting windows, streets, and coastal light –balancing precision and improvisation in quiet, meditative restraint.

No review, essay, or direct comment from O’Hara on Diebenkorn’s work is known. Yet the two moved in overlapping circles: O’Hara, while at MoMA and writing for ARTnews, selected one of Diebenkorn’s abstract Berkeley paintings for the 1957 Fourth International Art Exhibition of Japan, a clear mark of professional esteem.

“After Frank O’Hara” imagines how the poet’s attentiveness and associative leaps might have met these cool, restrained canvases  — and with what quick, talky, affectionate spirit he might record the encounter.

The featured image shows five paintings from the Ocean Park series From left to right: #7 1968; #24 1969; #30 1970; #39 1971 and #41 1971.

Below are five more paintings from the same series.