Poem (At night Chinamen jump)

By Frank O'Hara 1926–1966 Frank O'Hara

At night Chinamen jump

on Asia with a thump

while in our willful way

we, in secret, play

affectionate games and bruise

our knees like China’s shoes.

The birds push apples through

grass the moon turns blue,

these apples roll beneath

our buttocks like a heath

full of Chinese thrushes

flushed from China’s bushes.

As we love at night

birds sing out of sight,

Chinese rhythms beat

through us in our heat,

the apples and the birds

move us like soft words,

we couple in the grace

of that mysterious race.

Frank O’Hara, "Poem (At night Chinamen jump)" from Meditations in an Emergency. Copyright © 1957 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted with the permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc., www.groveatlantic.com.

Source: The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (1995)

Biography

Frank O'Hara was a dynamic leader of the "New York School" of poets, a group that included John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. The Abstract Expressionist painters in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s used the title, but the poets borrowed it. From the beginning O'Hara's poetry was engaged with the worlds of music, dance, and painting. In that complex of associations he devised an idea of poetic . . .

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