.para que sepas que te hago caso.

si en algún mometo recibes una llamada

de larga distancia sugiriendo que leas algo,

es recomendable que lo hagas. lo más pro-

bable es que valga la pena. que sea interes-

ante. o que, en le peor de los casos, la per-

sona que llamó sabe que los minutos cob-

rados no fueron malgastados.

mi humilde opinión.

[Poem (Some days I feel...)] de Frank O'Hara

Some days I feel that I exude a fine dust

like that attributed to Pylades in the famous

Cronica nera areopagitica when it was found

and it's because an excavationist has

reached the inner chamber of my heard

and rustled the paper bearing your name

I don't like that stranger sneezing over our love

[Why I Am Not a Painter]

I am not a painter, I am poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg

is starting a painting. I drop in.

"Sit down and have a drink" he

says. I drink; we drink. I look

up. "You have SARDINES in it."

"Yes, it needed something there."

"Oh." I go and the days go by

and I drop in again. The painting

is going on, and I go, and the days

go by. I drop in. The painting is

finished. "Where's SARDINES?"

All that's left is just

letters. "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of

a color: orange. I write a line

about orange. Pretty soon it is a

whole page of words, not lines.

Then another page. There should be

so much more, not of orange, of

words, of how terrible orange is

and life. Days go by. It is even in

prose, I am a real poet. My poem

is finished and I haven't mentioned

orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call

it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery

I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.