Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Closer Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

First of all, I just want to say thanks to my friend Joshua Gibbs for filling in for me a couple days this week.

Today's poem is by Frank O'Hara. He lived from 1926 to 1966, and he was an American writer, poet, and art critic.

He was actually also a curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

The poem that I'm going to read today is one of his more famous poems.

It is called Having a Coke with You.

Taking into account the title, Having a Coke with You, it then begins.

Is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irune,

hendai, but birets, Bayonne,

or being sick to my stomach on the Traverissa 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 my love for you, partly because of your

love for yogurt, partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches, partly because

of the secrecy our smiles take on before people in statuary. It's 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 four 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 writer occasionally. Anyway,

...