for Frank O’Hara
The old man declined any breakfast cereal not containing the color purple. For a while, we were able to satisfy him with an off-brand cereal that featured little purplish O’s among a rainbow of green, orange, yellow, and red ones. But one morning he insisted the proportion of purple O’s to all the other colors was simply not acceptable. He shoved away from the table and stood by the window, brooding. We solved this problem by picking the purple O’s out from several boxes and sprinkling them in with the other O’s. Yet one morning his spoon, laden with cereal, paused on the way to his lips. He froze like that. When we asked him why, he patiently explained that the quality of purple in his O’s was a shade too intense, now that he had the chance to examine them carefully.
We spoke to him as he sat with the spoon poised a few inches from his wrinkled mouth.
Father, perhaps we’ve put too many purple O’s in with the others.
You don’t understand. It’s about texture and subtlety, an exact pigmentation.
Give us another chance, father.
No. It’ll never work. You’ll never understand purple, how terrible and beautiful and hopeless it is.
With some difficulty we managed to loosen the spoon from his grip.
You should read some of David Ignatow’s prose poems from the 70s. Similar attitude.
The first sentence is almost a prototypical Russell Edson set-up. Of course, he would probably write, “AN old man….” plus it wouldn’t be purple cereal, but dog tails or feces in the cereal, or maybe his monkey paws or his wife’s earlobes.
Andrew — you may have caught me. I found this in my notebook of exercises from writing camp over the summer, and trey brought in a bunch of edson stuff to riff on; i can’t remember if we were taking first lines or not, but it’s certainly in that mode. i’ll have to ask trey.
steve — i’ll check out ignatow when i have a chance…