Frank O'Hara: Les Étiquettes Jaunes

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 Les Alyscamps, Falling Autumn Leaves: Vincent van Gogh, Arles, November 1888, oil on canvas, 92 x 72 cm (Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo)

I picked up a leaf
today from the sidewalk.
This seems childish.

Leaf! you are so big!
How can you change your
color, then just fall!

As if there were no
such thing as integrity!

You are too relaxed
to answer me.  I am too
frightened to insist.

Leaf! don’t be neurotic
like the small chameleon.

Frank O'Hara: Les Étiquettes Jaunes, Ann Arbor, September 1950, from Meditations in an Emergency, 1957

This poem comes from Frank's Hopwood manuscript, compiled in a roominghouse in Ann Arbor during the winter of 1950-1951. The Avery Hopwood awards offered a tiny cash enticement to writers at a time when the entire idea of "creative writing" (and of cash prizes for its accomplishment) still lay blissfully unhatched, as when the Alien lay slumbering in its subterranean pod. The cash prize a small withered carrot dangling from the end of the short sharp stick of a harsh frostbound Ann Arbor winter. A few years later the same dubious enticement drew me also. A few years later still --  by now Frank was dead, run down at 39 by a dune buggy on Fire Island -- I visited Ann Arbor in the winter permafrost with Ted Berrigan, who insisted on being ushered to the sacred site of Frank's temporary residence. We labored up the hill through the hard ungiving elements, nostrils frozen together, small puffs of breath poking the frigid air out ahead of us, Ted growing less committed to the quest with each tentative step into the deep snow covering what was assumed to be sidewalk. We arrived, had a look -- an ordinary drab Midwestern roominghouse, no distinguishing features. The last leaf of autumn long since withered and gone.