"I look/ at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world/ except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick/ which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time" writes Frank O'Hara in 'Having a Coke with You'. The image of the rider, or rather its force, reappears in 'To the Harbormaster', another love poem. "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." It continues, "To/ you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage/ of my will." In 'Having a Coke' we are told that "Marino Marini" "didn’t pick the rider as carefully/ as the horse". In 'Harbormaster' O'Hara offers up his vessel to his anonymous beloved, with the means to steer it held as if an absurdist extension of himself. In 'Coke' the vessel is everything--the horse leading the rider--while looking over the latter he duly tells us is a grave fault. In the painting of the Polish Rider in the Frick Collection which I visited last week, it was undoubtedly the horse that was carrying its rider. Aspects of the latter (like the hands) where thought not to be painted by Rembrandt at all, who left the work unfinished.
O'Hara might be in love with the novelty of his enamoration, just as he indulges his sense of being lost at sea in seeking his adored. Yet he affirms that it is this adored, the rider, that is the impetus of the adoration as well as the plight. It is this other who is steering him, as drive and as a sought engagement. The harbormaster we assume is more than an individual, and embraces both the force of his search and the place where it coincides with the "you" these poems address.
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.
(1954)
