memory & desire

orangerie II

Why I am not a Painter
- by Frank O’Hara –

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting
is finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.       

from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Copyright 1995 [1971] by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O'Hara. Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc, www.randomhouse.com/category/poetry/        
Source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171361 

orangerie I

Tangerine
- by Ruth L. Schwartz -

It was a flower once, it was one of a billion flowers

whose perfume broke through closed car windows,

forced a blessing on their drivers.

Then what stayed behind grew swollen, as we do;

grew juice instead of tears, and small hard sour seeds,

each one bitter, as we are, and filled with possibility.

Now a hole opens up in its skin, where it was torn from the

branch; ripeness can’t stop itself, breathes out;

we can’t stop it either. We breathe in.

From Dear Good Naked Morning, Autumn House Press, 2005. First printed in Crab Orchard Review, Vol. 8, No. 2.