Blowout

Having a Diet Coke with You

83 Having a Diet Coke with You is even more fun than going to the spa in Mexico where I get three free massages— hand, scalp, foot—in return for teaching a poetry class to which only two people show up since it’s scheduled against water aerobics so I barely have to work I want us to sip fountain drinks sitting on stools at a diner counter to be discovered like people used to be discovered but instead of starring in movies we’ll go on to star in poems what I’m trying to say is I love you partly because you taste better than the blueberry smoothies I’d get every day at 3 p.m. after my writing workshop partly because you are the smartest person I’ve ever met and I want to ask what it is like to work on a farm or groom a horse partly because I want to slide into your head and swim there surely I can find a slit right where your skin and hairline meet so I can paddle around in your brain partly because of the way you flex your arm it is hard to believe I am writing a love poem after years of telling my students who wants to read about your giddy happiness meaning I suppose that I didn’t want to read about their giddy happiness and I would announce with great authority that love poems are the most difficult poems to write because each love poem contains its opposite its loss and that no matter how fierce the love of a couple one of them will leave the other if not through betrayal then through death 84 last semester a young student sulked thanks a lot for that information and I felt like an asshole because even though I was mostly right I shouldn’t have pissed all over her goofy ode to her boyfriend that though not a piece of literature meant a lot to her and I actually apologized after class and wished her well and said don’t listen to me what do I know about love I told myself starting out that I was going to use Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You” to model this poem he has four lines that begin with “partly because” too but after the anaphora I could no longer follow his path and I broke away from his form but not from his essence O’Hara in his manifesto Personism one time thinking about his sweetheart realized he “could use the telephone instead of writing the poem” and so I think you and I have been talking our collaborative poems with each Skype encounter the blue-clouded S icon resting at the bottom of my screen and yours the way I want you to rest your head on my pillow and why would I want to go to a museum in Florence or Bilbao or anywhere else when I have your face to study in O’Hara’s poem he wants to take his lover to the Frick since the lover has never been and Frank wants to see each painting again through his new guy’s eyes just as I want to take you to the boardwalk where you have never strolled and to the empty lifeguard hut against which you have never sat we can climb up the ramp at night 85 and if we wake up early enough we can bike to the turtle park where mothers lay their eggs and a woman from the city comes to pick the hatchlings out of the sand to bring them to the ocean because the baby turtles are confused by the lights from all the development on the beach and often can’t figure out their way back to the sea I want to pick you up if you lose your way and carry you in the same kind of bucket she hauls with her fists I want to take you to a safe place which is not to say you are a baby but rather to say you are my baby, baby that comma is the first and only comma in this poem and I hope you will forgive this punctuation mark that doesn’t quite fit but I want you to pause on the second mention of the word baby as though it is...