Possibilities

Every poem starts with possibilities
and then wends its undetermined way
through the nooklets of thought
The surreal possibilities narrow
until we reach the
ORANGES and SARDINES.

This poem was something related to a poem by Frank O'Hara titled, "Why I am not a Painter". O'Hara was from the New York school who were influenced by the surrealists.

His poem is below:

Why I Am Not a Painter


by Frank O'Hara


I am not a painter, I am a 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.



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