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
He pulls the chair out for her, because he's a gentleman like that. After the way things went, after spending four years apart… this is their time. They beat the odds. Everyone said they wouldn't make it. Everyone said that long-distance doesn't work. But they did it. They're still Fabian and Nina. Even after spending four years on opposite sides of the globe. Nina went to America for college, for her gran. Fabian stayed in London, for his father who has Cancer. And when they're both being forced to be apart, they need to keep their love together.
He would rather be here with her than anywhere else in the world. It's an honest fact. He wouldn't want to be anywhere else.
They both order a coke.
Mick and Joy are in Italy.
Patricia and Eddie are in Greece.
But Fabian… Fabian would rather be here. Here in a plastic chair, drinking coke with Nina, than anywhere.
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
Fabian watches as the orange tulips move in the wind. But they don't compare to the smile Nina throws him, that smile that she gives him and only him. He knows that they spent forever apart. He knows that they didn't see each other in person in so long. He knows that he got so lucky that it worked out. He knows that it only worked because it's true love. And not the length of the ocean that separated them or even the length of time they spent apart could break them apart.
He could see people around him. They give smiles at the two, because even they could see that it's love. Because it is.
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 London (changed, the real poem is New York) 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
He wants to never leave this. He want to pick her up and kiss her right there. She speaks of America, he can tell she's still sad about her grans death. But it's not that. She tells him that she cheated. There was a random guy in America, who she has no feelings about, but she cheated. They made-out, that's it she told him. Fabian is frozen as the ice still in his coke. There are tears running from her eyes. But all Fabian can do is freeze.
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
She tells him to say something. He splutters something incoherent, something he can't even understand. She's crying harder now and he wants to know why. Why is she so upset? He was the one who got cheated on! He's so hurt he can't even speak coherent sentences and yet she's the one crying.
And even though she's hurt him, all Fabian does is get up and cradle her in his arms. He strokes her hair and tells her he forgives her, that everything will be okay.
Because maybe he still loves her.
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
He says that he understands. That things like that happen, especially when you're away from the one you love for so long. This makes her cry even harder, as she says I love you over and over again as well as the occasional I don't deserve you. He assures her she does.
Scratch that, he definitely still loves her.
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 am telling you about it
People cheat, that's life. But some people don't have the ability to sit down and have a coke with that person again.
Even after he admits that he cheated too.
Poem by Frank O'Hara