'It is not like this at all'

 On this day 60 years ago, the New York Poet Frank O'Hara died, following a bizarre night-time accident in which he was run over by a jeep on a Fire Island beach. The literary world was shocked, and his friends thrown into convulsions of grief. At his funeral John Ashbery, fighting back his tears, read 'To the Harbormaster', perhaps O'Hara's finest poem: 

I wanted to be sure to reach you;

though my ship was on the way it got caught   

in some moorings. I am always tying up   

and then deciding to depart. In storms and   

at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide   

around my fathomless arms, I am unable   

to understand the forms of my vanity   

or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder   

in my hand and the sun sinking. To   

you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage   

of my will. The terrible channels where   

the wind drives me against the brown lips   

of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet   

I trust the sanity of my vessel; and   

if it sinks, it may well be in answer   

to the reasoning of the eternal voices,

the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

Some while after the death, his friend James Schuyler wrote an elegy for O'Hara, 'Buried at Springs'. It's an oblique, considered, surprisingly pastoral work, written at the painter Fairfield Porter's home on Great Spruce Island (which O'Hara had visited some years before)...

There is a hornet in the room   

and one of us will have to go   

out the window into the late   

August midafternoon sun. I

won. There is a certain challenge   

in being humane to hornets   

but not much. A launch draws   

two lines of wake behind it   

on the bay like a delta

with a melted base. Sandy   

billows, or so they look,

of feathery ripe heads of grass,   

an acid-yellow kind of

goldenrod glowing or glowering   

in shade. Rocks with rags   

of shadow, washed dust clouts   

that will never bleach.

It is not like this at all.   

The rapid running of the   

lapping water a hollow knock

of someone shipping oars:   

it’s eleven years since   

Frank sat at this desk and   

saw and heard it all   

the incessant water the   

immutable crickets only   

not the same: new needles   

on the spruce, new seaweed   

on the low-tide rocks   

other grass and other water   

even the great gold lichen   

on a granite boulder   

even the boulder quite   

literally is not the same

      II

A day subtle and suppressed   

in mounds of juniper enfolding   

scratchy pockets of shadow

while bigness—rocks, trees, a stump—

stands shadowless in an overcast   

of ripe grass. There is nothing   

but shade, like the boggy depths   

of a stand of spruce, its resonance   

just the thin scream

of mosquitoes ascending.

Boats are light lumps on the bay   

stretching past erased islands   

to ocean and the terrible tumble   

and London (“rain persisting”)   

and Paris (“changing to rain”).   

Delicate day, setting the bright

of a young spruce against the cold

of an old one hung with unripe cones   

each exuding at its tip

gum, pungent, clear as a tear,   

a day tarnished and fractured   

as the quartz in the rocks

of a dulled and distant point,   

a day like a gull passing

with a slow flapping of wings   

in a kind of lope, without

breeze enough to shake loose   

the last of the fireweed flowers,

a faintly clammy day, like wet silk   

stained by one dead branch

the harsh russet of dried blood.