First Person Singular by Wendy Braitman

filed in Happy Ever After

You Will Marry the First Person Who Tells You Your Eyes Are Like Scrambled Eggs

October 23, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

The title of today’s post is from Frank O’Hara poem, Lines For the Fortune Cookies. (I’m resentful of fortune cookies, but I have one shredding in my wallet from years ago, which reads: The love of your life will appear in front of you unexpectedly.) MADMEN fanatics will remember the opening episode of Season 2 when Don Draper notices a man at a bar reading from O’Hara’s 1956 collection, Meditations in an Emergency. On the right are images of the poet by the artist Alex Katz, whose painting The Black Dress was such an inspiration as I was developing this site, that I decided to use it as my “emblem.”

LINES FOR THE FORTUNE COOKIES by Frank O’Hara

I think you’re wonderful and so does everyone else.
Just as Jackie Kennedy has a baby boy, so will you–even bigger.
You will meet a tall beautiful blonde stranger, and you will not say hello.
You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.
You will marry the first person who tells you your eyes are like scrambled eggs.
In the beginning there was YOU–there will always be YOU, I guess.
You will write a great play and it will run for three performances.
Please phone The Village Voice immediately: they want to interview you.
Rogers L. Stevens and Kermit Bloomgarden have their eyes on you.
Relax a little: one of your most celebrated nervous tics will be your undoing.
Your first volume of poetry will be published as soon as you finish it.
You may be a hit uptown, but downtown you’re legendary!
You will eat cake.
Who do you think you are, anyway? Jo Van Fleet?
You think your life is like Pirandello but it’s really like O’Neill.
A few dance lessons with James Waring and who knows? Maybe something will happen.
That’s not a run in your stocking, it’s a hand on your leg.
I realize you’ve lived in France, but that doesn’t mean you know EVERYTHING!
You should wear white more often–it becomes you.
The next person to speak to you will have a very intriguing proposal to make.
A lot of people in this room wish they were you.
Have you been to Mike Goldberg’s show. Al Leslie’s? Lee Krasner’s?
At times, your disinterestedness may seem insincere, to strangers.
Now that the election’s over, what are you going to do with yourself?
You are a prisoner in a croissant factory and you love it.
You eat meat. Why do you eat meat?
Beyond the horizon, there is a vale of gloom.
You too could be the Premier of France, if only… if only…

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