Ode to Joy by Frank O'Hara

Ode to Joy 

 

We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying

on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs

for our symbol we’ll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter

over an insatiable sexual appetite

and the streets will be filled with racing forms

and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars

will swell from the walls and books alive in steaming rooms

to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably

as water flows down hill into the full-lipped basin

and the adder dives for the ultimate ostrich egg

and the feather cushion preens beneath a reclining monolith

that’s sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness

near the grave of love

No more dying

 

***

 

We shall see the grave of love as a lovely sight and temporary

near the elm that spells the lovers’ names in roots

and there’ll be no more music but the ears in lips and no more wit

but tongues in ears and no more drums but ears to thighs

as evening signals nudities unknown to ancestors’ imaginations

and the imagination itself will stagger like a tired paramour of ivory

under the sculptural necessities of lust that never falters

like a six-mile runner from Sweden or Liberia covered with gold

as lava flows up and over the far-down somnolent city’s abdication

and the hermit always wanting to be lone is lone at last

and the weight of external heat crushes the heat-hating Puritan

whose self-defeating vice becomes a proper sepulcher at last

that love may live

 

***

 

Buildings will go up into the dizzy air as love itself goes in

and up the reeling life that it has chosen for once or all

while in the sky a feeling of intemperate fondness will excite the birds

to swoop and veer like flies crawling across absorbed limbs

that weep a pearly perspiration on the sheets of brief attention

and the hairs dry out that summon anxious declaration of the organs

as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighbors

pouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways

like the ways of gods with humans in the innocent combination of light

and flesh or as the legends ride their heroes through the dark to found

great cities where all life is possible to maintain as long as time

which wants us to remain for cocktails in a bar and after dinner

lets us live with it

No more dying