(After Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You”)
…feels more foreign than being a Midwesterner in Madrid, Morocco, Montmartre
or trying on red skirts for flamenco-dancing lessons in Salamanca
if I ignore your right sock and the hair gel on my bathroom counter
if I ignore your allusions to my hometown restaurants or to my cousins
if I ignore the familiarity my words assume when I address you, bracing
for the October wind that will seep into my apartment after you leave for work,
the cold exhale of some crafty mouse hiding in my drywall while I dress
myself, and the chill that settles over my mirror like snow across a lawn
which heightens the strangeness of the blue cotton, as if it were something
I was supposed to wear in another life but certainly not this one
I smell
your cologne on the collar and it’s like a cuisine I tasted somewhere that
more or less can’t be explained by most ontological accounts of the universe
though if you’ve read Leibniz we could laugh about a different reality where you’ve
conversed in the language of some pretend country like Uqbar or even Wonderland
and I’ll say I stumbled upon you like how people say that a monkey could type Macbeth
if you let it at the typewriter long enough or how despite all of Zeno’s infinitesimals Diogenes
walked away
which is exactly why I’m rolling up your oversized sleeves this morning
because of some miracle that’s maybe just you walking but you knew that already
