Sixty years ago today, July 24, 1966, Frank O'Hara was struck by a Jeep on the beach near Crown Walk in Fire Island Pines. He died the next day and was deeply mourned by his fellow poets, artists, and arts professionals--the first, shocking death among his school of New Yorkers. He wasn't widely known at the time beyond New York art and poetry circles, but he would become one of our most vital and influential writers. Lots of us may not exactly be footnotes to Frank, but we are variations on his voice.
"To the Harbormaster" is one of my favorite of Frank O'Hara's poems. It's a little less conversational, pop, and spontaneous-seeming that poems like "Having a Coke with You" or "Poem [Lana Turner Has Collapsed!]" but it still possesses his impish, subversive voice and attitude, and a forthright plaintiveness. And I think he has a lot of sly and sexy ideas about who that harbormaster is, and he features a "Polish rudder." The ending has a poignancy to it, around alway seeking by never quite reaching that harbor and its master, whoever that master might be.
I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
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