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 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 marvellous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it