Frank O’Hara

Poet Frank O’Hara and painter Larry Rivers were close friends. This poem was inspired by Rivers’s 1957 painting—a revision of the Emanuel Leutze painting—that hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where O’Hara worked as an assistant curator.

Now that our hero has come back to us

in his white pants and we know his nose

trembling like a flag under fire,

we see the calm cold river is supporting

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our forces, the beautiful history.

To be more revolutionary than a nun

is our desire, to be secular and intimate

as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile

and pull the trigger. Anxieties

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and animosities, flaming and feeding

on theoretical considerations and

the jealous spiritualities of the abstract,

the robot? they’re smoke, billows above

the physical event. They have burned up.

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See how free we are! as a nation of persons.

Dear father of our country, so alive

you must have lied incessantly to be

immediate, here are your bones crossed

on my breast like a rusty flintlock,

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a pirate’s flag, bravely specific

and ever so light in the misty glare

of a crossing by water in winter to a shore

other than that the bridge reaches for.

Don’t shoot until, the white of freedom glinting

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on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.

(1957)