Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian,
Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de
Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like
a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because
of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips
around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on
before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there
can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary
when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are
drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing
through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in
it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone
ever did them
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 for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more
or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude
Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or
Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the
Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand
near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t
pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated
of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is
why I’m telling you about it
From The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara by Frank O'Hara
