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Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian,
Irun, 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