A City Winter by Frank O’Hara is an unseasonal poem that i’ve been rereading lately. I don’t know if it’s helping my relationship with the city. It is a poem in part’s and while I very much like the first section (included below), I do not feel like the rest of the sections are of the same caliber. Poem’s with sections sometimes have this issue, because of that, the poems that do have sections, that all work well together, but hold there own, are truly remarkable. Mark Strand’s A Suite of Disappearances is a good example of a poem of sections, that works well throughout, and whose parts can function separately when need be.

I marvel in how O’Hara uses rhyme unexpectedly in this poem. I very much admire the strong mood and tone that lingers, after the last line.

A City Winter

1

I understand the boredom of the clerks
fatigue shifting like dunes within their eyes
a frightful nausea gumming up the works
that once was thought aggression in disguise.
Do you remember? then how lightly dead
seemed the moon when over factories
it languid slid like a barrage of lead
above the heart, the fierce inventories
of desire. Now women wander our dreams
carrying money and to our sleep’s shame
our hands twitch not for swift blood-sunk triremes
nor languorous white horses nor ill fame,
but clutch the groin that clouds a pallid sky
where tow’rs are sinking in their common eye.