Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they’ll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.
A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.‘A Step Away From Them’ (O’Hara 1979, pp. 257–8)The poem charts the movement of the walk, ‘First, down the sidewalk’,
‘On/to Time Square’, so that the location is constantly shifting. It embraces
a changing environment. It is not only about what is happening now
(though it is very immediate, an impression which is reinforced by the use
of the first person), but what will happen in the near future: ‘the Manhat-
tan Storage Warehouse, which they’ll soon tear down’, or has happened in
the past, ‘I/used to think they had the Amory/Show there’. But there is,
nevertheless, a very strong sense of time and place: the poem is punctuated
by the clock, ‘It’s my lunch hour’ and ‘it is 12:40’.
At the same time the poet’s walk is overlaid with memories and associ-
ations from other times and places. He remembers his deceased friends
Bunny, John Latouche and painter Jackson Pollock. A café reminds him of
Juliet of the Spirits (directed by Fellini and starring Giulietta Masina). The
experience of the city is both a piecemeal affair of variegated impressions,
and also a welter of activity in which everything is interconnected. Notice,
too, how the poem pulls different ethnicities, genders and classes—African
Americans, Puerto Ricans, the workers and the affluent, ‘lady in foxes’—
into this network.
We see here how the poem is about the interaction of the self and city,
and how one moulds and changes the other. It is also about how histori-
cally and geographically times and places are always simultaneously
present: as the poet walks he also thinks of those who are no longer
alive. The poem tells us as much about the poet’s thinking as it does about
the city.
Mapping worlds, moving cities 265