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Chez Jane

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

The white chocolate jar full of petals

swills odds and ends around in a dizzying eye

of four o’clocks now and to come. The tiger,

marvellously striped and irritable, leaps

on the table and without disturbing a hair

of the flowers’ breathless attention, pisses

into the pot, right down its delicate spout.

A whisper of steam goes up from that porcelain

urethra. “Saint-Saëns!” it seems to be whispering,

curling unerringly around the furry nuts

of the terrible puss, who is mentally flexing.

Ah be with me always, spirit of noisy

contemplation in the studio, the Garden

of Zoos, the eternally fixed afternoons!

There, while music scratches its scrofulous

stomach, the brute beast emerges and stands,

clear and careful, knowing always the exact peril

at this moment caressing his fangs with

a tongue given wholly to luxurious usages;

which only a moment before dropped aspirin

in this sunset of roses, and now throws a chair

in the air to aggravate the truly menacing.

Frank O’Hara, “Chez Jane” from Meditations in an Emergency. Copyright © 1957 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted with the permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc., www.groveatlantic.com.

Source: Poetry (November 1954).

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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