Frank O’Hara is alive.
He lives in Red Hook.
When the B61 bus
pulls onto Van Brunt Street,
you can see him down
at the Chinese bus depot.
He buys single cigarettes from the drivers
and says we should all be learning Mandarin.
When they roll out for Atlantic City,
he walks down to watch the stevedores.
If the Queen Mary is docked at the terminal,
he can’t help but recite the names
of all the Croatian ports he never got to see.
He takes his lunch in a Hitachi crane
in an abandoned, grassy lot.
He has rechristened all the Fairway coffee beans
in Esperanto and gives unsolicited advice
to the single women in the produce section.
He has undertaken precautions
to ensure his shoes don’t end up on the telephone wires.
The Swedish meatballs dinner at Ikea is $2.49
on Tuesday nights. He assumes his regular perch
at the windows which overlook the remains of the piers.
His wrists are a sticky ash from so many refills of Coke.
We observe a Muslim man praying under one of the giant cranes
at sunset. That makes up for a lot, he whispers.
Afterward, we walk down to the Beard Street pier.
The boats do their sidereal dance in the bay
and suddenly it’s clear that people would’ve gotten Van Gogh
if he said he’d done all his painting aboard ships.
He never looks at Manhattan, and when he sees the Verrazano,
all he can do is talk about the Golden Gate.
A lantern is a lantern, even if your eyes are closed, he says.
If you call his name in the street, he’ll look back at you
with the wistfulness of a girl with a pearl earring.
If he walks too close to Carroll Gardens, he’ll start to dissolve
like it’s a scene out of Field of Dreams.
If you run into him, don’t bring up the MOMA.
The last time I see him is in line
to go swimming at the rec center.
He doesn’t write anymore, he says,
beach towel tucked under his arm.
His shoes still have no laces.
I ask Fanni why.
Fanni is seventeen
but she is also very smart.
She calls me phlegmatic
when I am slow
to answer her questions
in class,
and during break,
I beat myself
with a dictionary.
Girls with short hair
are especially vexing.
Girls wear black leggings
as if to destroy men.
Girls are very feminine
by nature.
Fanni is the only student
at Thursday detention.
I am supposed
to help her
with math.
Instead we watch
The Hangover
twice in a row.
I tell her
about Vegas,
about the time
I studied
for spring finals
in a window
of the Luxor pyramid,
show her
the shard of
Grey Goose glass
lodged in my index finger.
When we talk,
every time she chooses
the wrong preposition
it hangs me
like a lovely dress
on a broken hanger.
Fanni’s boyfriend
is older than me.
She pronounces
my name Shone.
Fanni and I
never liked math.
Sean Edgely is a native of Northern California finishing his MFA at City College this winter. He has lived and worked abroad in Asia and Europe and these experiences abroad inform much of his worldview, including his poetry. He has been published most recently in HTMLGIANT, Literary Bohemian, and Lyre Lyre and has poetry forthcoming in the anthology Some Stories Are True that Never Happened. He spent last spring translating contemporary Korean poetry and currently teaches in Midtown.