Being one of those people who think about the other person first, even when in pain, even when in drizzle without an umbrella, arm extended, hair wet. Being one of those people with eyes for others. Eyes for the sky or nice shapes in mud or even for the way a human runs for the bus. Being one of those people with patience. Being one of those people who spots patterns, find gaps, fills space. Being one of those people who believe themselves to be half a person when separate in love. Being one of those people who buy gifts and leave them on beds. Being one of those people who leave notes. Being one of those people who will give in to temptation, melt into it like butter, obvious, soft. Being one of those people who give advice and take none. Being one of those people who cry when someone else cries. Being in love like it’s a bedroom without windows. Like it’s a palace with everything you could ever want. Like it’s a dark room full of sound. Like it’s a beach tilted on its side. Unnerving. Defying. Absurd. Like it’s torture. A tickle. Being in love like your love is the best version there has ever been, will ever be. Being naively in love, ‘even-after-all-this-time’ in love, ‘when-the-rhymes-make-sense’ in love, ‘eyes-closed-arms-outstretched-walking-to-the-kitchen-and-burning-your-hand-on-the-stove’ in love. ‘Being-in-a-live-band-on-a-stage-when-you-know-all-the words-and-you-don’t-even-have-to-try’ kind of love. It comes to you, like a language learned from feeling. Like a shadow on a stage as the curtain lifts. The love comes garbled. It stumbles through you. A storm you fare. It points outward. It exudes, it explodes, it drains.
I read Frank O’Hara’s Having A Coke With You for the first time in 2019. I blushed. The word ‘with’ cracked open like a hot rock on a beach. It is magic to be with. It is magic to be in love with. It is a sickness to be in love with. But what about if we turn that love inward, to ourselves. What if we are with ourselves, first? Today, I read the poem and imagine that O’Hara is writing about having a coke with himself. Visiting a gallery with himself. Seeing the world with himself. In love with himself.
I wish you all a very Happy Valentine’s Day.
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
I cant stop thinking about this post since I read it! Magic