Thoughts on… Frank O’Hara, “Windows”
"no spring breeze to soften the sky"
Thoughts on… Frank O’Hara, “Windows”
Windows
This space so clear and blue
does not care what we put
into it Airplanes disappear
in its breath and towers drown
Even our hearts leap up when
we fall in love with the void
the azure smile the back of a
woman’s head and takes wing
never to return O my heart!
think of Leonardo who was born
embraced life with a total eye
and now is dead in monuments
There is no spring breeze to
soften the sky In the street
no perfume stills the merciless
arc of the lace-edged skirt
*
Frank O’Hara was known for writing drafts or even finished poems that would become misplaced, forgotten, or a victim of lost interest. “Windows,” my favorite of his poems, a a work not included in Collected Poems, didn’t surface until after his death – in American Poetry Review and in O’Hara’s posthumously published Poems Retrieved (1977). John Ashberry, if memory serves, fortunately found the poem on a loose piece of paper tucked away in one of his own books – rescuing it from the void. I don’t fully know – or need to – the story behind the writing of this poem, but I know the lines affect me in ways that aren’t easily explained. That’s part of the work’s greatness.
The opening is quite powerful: a space that can hold everything we place in it. I like the fact that the window is not judgmental about what becomes part of its field but is very accepting. The scope of the imagery is magnificent – an endless sweep through windows (note the plural) into an infinity of sorts: (the universal or object/non-human oriented) space so clear, airplane, tower, monuments, window’s breath, no breeze, taking wing, the void; (and the specific and very human – mostly in the poem’s second half) azure smile, a woman’s head, Leonardo’s eye, the absence of perfume, the arc of a skirt). I read drowning towers as an urban reference to the skyline – appropriate to a poet firmly rooted in every aspect of New York City – a skyline that swallows the great buildings and people in its own striking beauty.
Two specific references – “our hearts leap” and “O my heart” – may focus more on O’Hara himself, or at least his view of himself as a writer. Unlike the impressive window that opens the poem, urging the reader to become lost in that space, the artist (Leonardo, O’Hara, you, me) dies “in monuments,” a more disturbing window. “Monuments” could stand for the view that imposes limits – of any kind – on the artist or the art – or imposes those limits on the human in all of us.
In this short poem, the reader is pulled from a secure place and made to “fall in love with the void” – the unreachable, the unsayable. The poem ends with the sweep of the “merciless arc of the lace-edged skirt,” taking the reader into a void of a different kind. “Lace-edged skirt” implies society, time, restrictions, human physicality, desire. “Merciless” is a strong word choice here. O’Hara could intend the reader to take this as time’s relentless force – even Leonardo, great embracer of life, came to dust. He also could be making a statement about sexuality – and here read society’s restrictions and expectations about who and how we love, a different sort of window – the lace boundaries of conformity and roles. Either way, the poem ends with an upward sweep into a puzzling but fecund unknown.
I drift… I disappear…
