For Nonnie

ON READING “THE DAY LADY DIED,”
IN FRANK O’HARA’S LUNCH POEMS

Riding the subway late at night, it was Bastille
Day, yes, and I was on the way
to see my lover, I
opened at random the book of poems you
gave to me, my birthday present, and learned
that Billie Holiday died exactly two years
to the day before I was born, my
birthday past.

And so I know what the poet was doing
at that precise moment, fifty-two years before, and how
time stood still for him like a newspaper headline
announcing death, and still enough to
permit him to
capture the moment in language.

The next day I learned that Bruce Donovan had died,
and it seemed that
time when it
stops is more like a subway train,
letting some on, others off,
before moving forward again.

And when that thought had passed, somehow
for me the lingering mystery is not
death or time or poetry
or the ways Frank O’Hara’s New York life was and was
not like mine — the subway, the newspaper, the waiting
lover, the rhythm of the lunchtime sidewalks —
but his eccentric use of line

breaks.