← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

Talking to Yourself on a Plane

Frank O’Hara’s one of the few poets UD recalls reading for the very first time. She was a teenager grazing some poetry anthology, and when she got to O’Hara’s happy meanderings she laughed out loud. She wanted to be walking with him in Manhattan, noticing what he noticed, being hip and funny like him.

O’Hara never got terminally hip, like John Ashbery; his poetry always has heart.

***************************

SLEEPING ON THE WING

Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness,
as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries “Sleep!
O for a long sound sleep and so forget it!”
that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city,
veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon
does when a car honks or a door slams, the door
of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.

Fear drops away too, like the cement, and you
are over the Atlantic. Where is Spain? where is
who? The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,
was it? A sudden down-draught reminds you of gravity
and your position in respect to human love. But
here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.
Once you are helpless, you are free, can you believe
that? Never to waken to the sad struggle of a face?
to travel always over some impersonal vastness,
to be out of, forever, neither in nor for!

The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind
and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.
The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible!
and was and is, and yet the form, it may be sleeping
too. Those features etched in the ice of someone
loved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space
and speed, your hand alone could have done this.
Curiosity, the passionate hand of desire. Dead,
or sleeping? Is there speed enough? And, swooping,
you relinquish all that you have made your own,
the kingdom of your self sailing, for you must awake
and breathe your warmth in this beloved image
whether it’s dead or merely disappearing,
as space is disappearing and your singularity.

*******************************


[We take a closer look, ja?
]

*******************************

SLEEPING ON THE WING


[He’s on an airplane, leaving New York for Europe I guess. Heading out over the Atlantic. He’s gradually falling asleep, and this poem is simply his thoughts as he nods off. Seems to be sleeping right over a wing — sleeping on the wing as he renders it in his title. But the title also suggests – on the wing – catching a quick nap in the midst of a busy life. And sleeping while flying — while thoughts, images, bits of dreams fly through your half-awake mind.]

Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness,
as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries “Sleep!
O for a long sound sleep and so forget it!”
that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city,

[and so forget it! O’Hara puts New York slang in the mouth of a Restoration actor because that’s what comes to the New York poet as he sits in his seat. He doesn’t remember the exact line; this is his streetwise rendering of it. Flight is escape, escape from the grounded tragedies of our lives into a special sort of sleep. Soaring and shoreless have a nice assonance to them, but there’s also the idea that the city, looked at from above at this moment, has no borders, no seashores visible, whereas, metaphorically, the tragedy of our lives is how constantly bounded they are by death.]

veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon
does when a car honks or a door slams, the door
of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.


[Jolted upward and away from our painful lives, from the failure of our efforts to perpetuate our lives through lots of different love affairs with their beautiful lies about, say, fidelity, we escape to the air.]

Fear drops away too, like the cement, and you
are over the Atlantic.

[The writer speaks to himself in the second person, with its odd distances and ironies.]

Where is Spain? where is
who? The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,
was it?


[A wonderful capture of the vague stupid material that floats in and and out of the floating mind…]

A sudden down-draught reminds you of gravity
and your position in respect to human love.


[You fall in love; and you will continue, in these thoughts, to ponder the treacherous nature of love.
]

But here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.
Once you are helpless, you are free, can you believe
that? Never to waken to the sad struggle of a face?
to travel always over some impersonal vastness,
to be out of, forever, neither in nor for!

[A deepening of the idea of escape from earthly sorrow, struggle. You’re up in the clouds with the gods, which means you’re above all daily human struggle, free, impersonal, untethered to tragic bounded sublunary life. But to have that condition be permanent, you’d have to be dead.]

The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind
and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.


[Lovely simile, the eyes fluttering open a bit like the ailerons. The poet is not quite awake, not quite asleep.]

The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible!

[We see only the tip of things; the depth of ourselves and others and existence is invisible to us.]

and was and is,

[Always was. Always will be.]

and yet the form, it may be sleeping
too.

[It’s possible we can to some extent melt or sculpt the ice and create/perceive more depth than we have so far. If icy depth is asleep, maybe we can warm and shape it through imagination, through art.]

Those features etched in the ice of someone
loved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space
and speed, your hand alone could have done this.

[Even those we love the most are icebergs. We understand very little of them. Yet as we think of them, as we bring their images to mind, as we reanimate them through our specific passionate remembrance after their death, we become godlike sculptors.]

Curiosity, the passionate hand of desire. Dead,
or sleeping?


[Is the loved one dead or merely, like the speaker, asleep, or half-asleep? Maybe one way to understand love is to say that it is the power of reanimation, the power to make the loved one and oneself truly live.]

Is there speed enough?

[Can I keep going? Can this plane keep going? Can I – do I want to – keep my life airborne and godly, or should I head back to earth?]

And, swooping,
you relinquish all that you have made your own,
the kingdom of your self sailing,

[The plane swoops down; maybe we’re about to land. Returning to earth, in any case, is the only way. The only way to proceed. You have to give up your fantasies of godlike creation, solipsistic control of everything.]

for you must awake
and breathe your warmth in this beloved image
whether it’s dead or merely disappearing,
as space is disappearing and your singularity.

[Eyes open now. Flight of fancy over. The extremity and abstraction of the high-altitude cosmic iceberg gives way to the temperate specificity of this one self in need of the beloved for the breath of life. Landing, perhaps preparing to greet the loved one at the airport, the poet returns by way of conclusion to the anguish of time’s arrow, the always-transitional moment in which we find ourselves. The chill, absolute space up there now gives way. What also gives way is the poet’s spacy conviction, which he had when he was suspended mid-air (rather than rushing through a terminal crowd), of his singular omnipotent being. Restored to himself, the poet ends the restoration tragedy.]

Margaret Soltan, November 21, 2009 4:25PM
Posted in: poem

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=19546

One Response to “Talking to Yourself on a Plane”

  1. University Diaries » Shelter From the Storm Says:

    […] (Odd coincidence: I spent the day before yesterday laboring over a poem by O’Hara…) […]

Comment on this Entry

Latest UD posts at IHE

Archives

Categories