Reading
Hieronymous Bosch
by Frank O’Hara
So he has a funnel instead of a penis
and has put his mediaeval pianist’s hands
on the thighs of a contemporary romance
listening to Brubeck at Birdland. It’s just
too very very. “That’s one for the apple barrel,
you can feel the North Pole kissing the shellac.”
I wear a hook in my look to be sexy, the two
of us mucking the fast in a bush. He puts his long
fingers into the wet mandolin precious with lotion
and stringy. Helplessly clandestine, that’s
my song that I sing to the dark people, the
confederate spies when I’m singing them code
over the tongue’s turnpike, dub-a-dub and
shit for your momma. We thought you were driving them
out of Finland, but St Anthony flew with his herd
of lepers and made us lie down and come. Sic
transit gloria. O make our hearts so like to Thine!
And they dried him out and hung him up. My, he swung.
Blowing his nose for the lovers; forswunken, forswot.