Les Etiquettes Juanes

Frank O’Hara adopts a distinctly W. C. Williamsian style:

I picked up a leaf
today from the sidewalk.
This seems childish.

Leaf! you are so big!
How can you change your
color, then just fall!

As if there were no
such thing as integrity!

You are too relaxed
to answer me. I am too
frightened to insist.

Leaf! don’t be neurotic
like the small chameleon.

The last two lines puzzle me. The simile is not immediately appealing, and after further contemplation I am only a little closer to grasping its motivation. The word “neurotic” is not one I can imagine Williams using, so, if these lines are meant as a parody, the effect is less than compelling. “I am too / frightened to insist” would have been a fine place to leave off.

It comforts me that these lines also reduced Marjorie Perloff, Stanford’s own O’Hara scholar, to mere summarization: “A simple thing like a wet leaf, found on one’s path, becomes comically emblematic of neurotic behavior. The poet begs the leaf not to be ‘like the small chameleon.’” Perloff then forces the rather vague conclusion that “‘Les Etiquettes Juanes’ is no more than a charming slight poem, but we can already see O’Hara’s own aesthetic emerging: even the falling of a single leaf, the poem implies, is worthy of notice. ‘Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial, and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.’”

Would O’Hara have wanted “Les Etiquettes Juanes” to be judged by those criteria?