Waiting for the Boat
The sun shimmers on the murky water
A little fish jumps
a dragonfly hovers over all
And ghosts of tigers look across the river.
The couple on the bench
Look at their watches
The boat is late, they say, annoyed.
The boat is always late.
But the sun, the fish, the dragonfly
And the tiger ghosts
Are right on time.
Nitrogen in my veins
Janet Kuypers
bonus poem from the Periodic Table of Poetry series (#007, N)
(stemming from Fingers Black, written 6/5/10)
3/29/13
You told me nothing.
You just left me.
Now wait a minute,
I’m a journalist,
so all I could do
was turn my fingers black,
scouring the newspapers,
searching for any news
about what happened
with us.
The ink from that paper
crept around my fingernails,
trying to work it’s way
under my skin.
I could feel that
darkened soybean oil,
that petroleum oil,
creeping it’s way into me.
I could feel that Nitrogen
from that petroleum oil
piggy-backing on that
hydrogen, carbon, oxygen.
I could feel that Nitrogen
butting that sulfur out of the way,
pushing it’s way
past the only trace amounts
of nickel and iron.
(Those trace elements
couldn’t stand a chance
against the power
of that Nitrogen,
that power
to spill the news
out to the world.)
I ran my hands
through those newspaper pages.
I felt that ink
seep under my skin,
and I felt the surge
of that Nitrogen in my veins.
I know they use liquid Nitrogen
to fuel cars,
to make them go
at stellar speeds…
And I know people take Nitrogen
to give their bodies
added strength,
so,
journalist or not,
maybe this is
exactly
what I need.
I’ll scour those pages,
I’ll let that Nitrogen
seep into my veins,
as I look for any way
to get you back.
Besides,
all this ink’s in me now.
This Nitrogen has given me
the impetus
for all I’ve got to say.
Francis Russell “Frank” O’Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. Because of his employment as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O’Hara became prominent in New York City’s art world.
Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen, Carcanet 2005;
The Dance of the Intellect, Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition by Marjorie Perloff, Northwestern University Press 1985;
Poetry On & Off the Page by Marjorie Perloff, Northwestern University Press 1998;
The Making of the Reader, Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry by David Trotter, Macmillan 1984;
City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara by Brad Gooch, Alfred Knopf 1993;
Some Americans, A Personal Record by Charles Tomlinson, University of California Press 1981 (reprinted by Carcanet in the volume American Essays: Making It New, 2001).