Dolce far niente
Badende Jünglinge door Ludwig von Hofman, 1905
The Bathers
After the immersion and the stance
how the blood bubbles like a firefly!
and the many flies come clipping through
the cumulus. Paradise melts its wings,
the shingle shows a red flag, lit,
incandescent, and chattering forth.
Crushing as always the pale leaves
of children’s feet, the shells crush,
the petals thrash, a lifeguard weeps
for his dead mother who has just sailed on.
Rumpling and rolling over, the rain
dumps its burden of restraint stonily,
without pressure from above. Be it killing
or caressing, the unhappy bathers moan
and remonstrate, hurtling through indifferences
and colors. On the sandbar lovers
hound each other to the salt, afraid of
neither running paralyzed nor trembling
hung, longing only to drift totally
in the garrulous frequency of their immanence.
Striding like statues the tremendous
arches, partially concealed by sunlight,
bounce. From barges grey with carrion
seem to rise the frenzied-whimpers of those
who are not thrusting their cheeks
against the wicker chests of heroes and
Desdemonas. Shall they drown that passion
they remember best? glinting and passing,
that discord scratching them a future
white-embossed and streaked? The delicacy
of birds eating fleas, so the sand may have
an eye at last, that crater and that sun.
Frank O’Hara (27 juni 1926 – 25 juli 1966)
Baltimore Beach. Frank O’Hara werd geboren in Baltimore.
Lees verder “Dolce far niente, Frank O’Hara, Tom Lanoye, Jeanette Winterson, Kristien Hemmerechts”
