Frank O’Hara, working at the Museum of Modern Art, was famous for taking a lunchtime walk and turning his impressions into poems. The glancing, fragmentary apprehensions made by this walker in the city became poetic material for verse that was similarly glancing, oblique, and indirect, like words moving through crowds. There was always a sense of camouflage about O’Hara: he stood out by blending in, becoming the perfect observer of the society around him. O’Hara was an incredibly attractive subject for artists and, a shape-shifter, seems to appear somewhat different in each likeness. This portrait cutout by Alex Katz catches the poet both present and absent: he is the outline of a figure, not the figure itself—as always, O’Hara was in his own imaginative world even in the midst of life.