Apart from love
I read Frank O’Hara
who never made it
to the twenty-first century
but I imagine
he would have loved it
and all the people in it
all the artists and musicians
and poets and writers
busy inventing it
just as they always did
in centuries gone by
time immemorial
Listen to Duke Ellington
and you can appreciate
Frank O’Hara’s ear
or to Rachmaninoff
and you get a real sense
of O’Hara’s nimble fingers
shuffling along the keyboard
or slip into the gallery
to cast a cold eye over
a Rauschenberg or a Pollock
and it will tell you something
of what it was like
to see the world through
O’Hara’s blue-tinted eyes
and then in a poem
he uses the phrase
apart from love
and you realise that
that line is a great divide
a real line in the sand
that apart from love
to Frank at least
nothing else really mattered
not culture not wealth
not status not ambition
not age not youth
nothing really matter
apart from love
his poetics
in a nutshell
and I guess
I just have to agree
John Lyons
