Bruce Spang

The Ghost of Frank O’Hara

            “. . .the waves have kept me from reaching you.” 
            --Frank O’Hara

I’d walked that Fire Island beach
halfway to Cherry Grove before
the ocean disrobed beside me,
sand the color of mahogany.
O’Hara had stood where I was,

where, as the driver of the jeep said,
“He was walking towards me. . . .
He didn’t even try to move, he just
kept on walking.” The jeep struck him
with such force he left a dent.

O’Hara had lain right here, a few steps
from me, liver ruptured,
leg shattered, 40 hours to live.

His friends wondered why he kept
walking toward the jeep. Maybe
it was because he was drunk—
it was 2:30 A.M.—or because
he saw a welcoming, a way out
of non-writing, his being fed up
with being too well known.

Why not walk into a gift
even if it’s coming
at twenty-five miles per hour?

Why not walk toward the lights?

I had just been to a tea-dance,
to chance I might strike someone’s
fancy. I danced one dance with someone.

Alone, the summer newly upon me,
I passed through O’Hara’s ghost
and felt him latch onto my arm, ask,
“What are you doing here?”
He spoke about how gay men get by,
for he loved language and I liked
listening as he went on and on,
never stopped, his sinewy, birdlike
body loping down the beach.

He had an advantage over me
since he never aged, never
collapsed in a stupor in his fifties
with lung cancer or cirrhosis.
Younger than me, striding
as I was toward a light
except this time the light was
my weekend rental with a balcony

and a view he and I soon share
while white waves came on,
massive overtures rising up,
crashing down as his voice—
for I was still listening—
became the voice of the sea. 

Bruce Spang, former Poet Laureate of Portland, is the author of two novels. His most recent collection of poems, All You’ll Derive: A Caregiver’s Journey. He’s also published four other books of poems, including To the Promised Land Grocery and Boy at the Screen Door (Moon Pie Press). He is the poetry and fiction editor of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. He teaches courses in fiction and poetry at Great Smokies Writing Program and lives in Candler, NC.