Messy?

Arrowby,

“Its about time for my arrival”, sings Christina. Much dirtier, I think, is American poet Frank O’Hara's present participle:

You are gorgeous and I’m coming

Vaguely I hear the purple roar of the torn-down Third Avenue El
it sways slightly but firmly like a hand or a golden-downed thigh
normally I don't think of sounds as coloured unless I'm feeling corrupt
concrete Rimbaud obscurity of emotion which is simple and very definite
even lasting, yet it may be that dark and purifying wave, the death of boredom
nearing the heights themselves may destroy you in the pure air
to be further complicated, confused, empty but refilling, exposed to light

With the past falling away as an acceleration of nerves thundering and shaking
aims its aggregating force like the Metro towards a realm of encircling travel
rending the sound of adventure and becoming ultimately local and intimate
repeating the phrases of an old romance which is constantly renewed by the
endless originality of human loss the air the stumbling quiet of breathing
newly the heavens' stars all out we are all for the captured time of our being


Frank dares to dwell on a process that is taking place as we are reading the poem. Not the “you” to whom it is addressed, we become voyeurs (this word is not quite right, though I cannot find a sufficient term for lascivious reading rather than gazing). Christina, on the other hand hides behind euphemism, abbreviation and futurity: without offering any details, she tells of an event that is about to happen. Where she wants to “hit the spot”, Frank's poem is interested in suspending a moment of being. The refusal to end the poem with a full stop marks an attempt to leave it unfinished. Although Frank describes “captured time”, he refuses, finally, to lock it up.

But this is not a dirty poem you might say! Where are the bodies? The penetrating purple sound roars from, not a partner, but the New York Metro. The golden downed thigh does not belong to any visible, tangible actor; it is simile's limb. And it is hardly a smutty image, representing, as it does, an idealized body. Golden, it is godlike; downy, it is childlike (so with resonances of virginity and innocence). Downy also implies a body in stasis - where is the sweat? And where are the senses, smell, touch, and taste?

It is in sound, however, that we really experience the eroticism of this poem. The sparse punctuation gives us little time to breathe, we accelerate in order to get to a comma, we gasp with the poet when we reach it, we join in his breathlessness, we experience the first stanza’s “yet” as an emphatic “yes!” In the second stanza, the repetitive motions are heard, even if they are not seen: “falling”, “thundering”, “shaking”, “aggregating”, “encircling”, “rending”, “repeating”, “breathing”. These participles are spaced further apart as the poet decelerates into respite.

But perhaps we should not separate these sensory experiences from one another. Sex scrambles Frank’s senses. He hears purple. The synesthesia here is reminiscent of the poems of Rimbaud - a poet he mentions (look, for instance, at The Drunken Boat: “the blue and yellow awakening of singing phosphorescence”). ‘You are gorgeous’, in this sense, is not so much dirty, as messy (conceptually, at least). I notice this particularly in the frequent juxtaposition of apparent opposites: there is purifying and complication; emptiness and refilling; the public metro and intimacy; adventure and locality; cliché and novelty. And what is the meaning of the final line? Humanity become stars or star-like?

Frank’s experience, a happening, has not yet been converted, by memory, into an object of exchange. It cannot be given casually in return for admiration or a similarly smutty story. Because there is something about it that the poet doesn’t understand, he cannot share it with us fully. This is not the kind of deliberate holding back that seems to titillate many pre-Kerfufflians (the exposed top of a stocking is thought sexier than a fully exposed thigh). Of course, there are secrets in this poem - you'll notice it is an acrostic (V-i-n-c-e-n-t W-a-r-r-e-n). But it is also the case that the experience itself is keeping secrets.

This leads me to consider whether there are certain things we shall not be able to bring back to Hengist I. Censorship policy being as lax as it is, we don’t have to worry about presenting overly ‘dirty’ descriptions. But are some objects or experiences too messy to be properly described?