There’s a distinct feeling to an afternoon in New York, newly in love, sitting across from your lover at a café or next to them on a park bench. It’s poetry in real life – was the poetry inspired by the feeling, or the feeling by the poetry? And there is such beautiful poetry to describe this completeness – “Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne… 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,” wrote Frank O’Hara, describing a simple lunch with the man he loves.

Or a poem from the New York City subway:

Its beauty struck me in the late summer, so much so that I felt compelled to write it down, send it as a text to my own newly found partner. “All we want is a metropolis of Sundays, an empire of hand-holding and park benches,” I read, and thought about how we had spent the summer the same way, holding hands on park benches or on picnic blankets, thinking only about the effect we had on each other and ourselves. But the point isn’t the art itself, it’s the person it makes you think about, and Frank O’Hara describes this – “I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.”

Troye Sivan captures the same feeling of lightness,  of infatuation, in “Youth.” He uses the video to depict himself, a young gay man, finding a lover at a party, and the lyrics describe the way that this consumes you – “My youth is yours, run away now and forevermore.”

Or in Grimes’ song “Artangels,” a love letter to a city (Montréal), a theme which we so often see dedicated to New York. We see the power of cities, the way they make us feel, in encouraging these wonderful, over-the-top feelings, and she is also describing that feeling of devotion to another person, of doing anything they want and listening to anything they have to say – “You’re my darling girl, tell me what’s on your mind, tell me anything, anything you feel like… Think I need you and you know the things that I would do…”

But though we don’t need the art when we’ve fallen for another person, though they are all the art we need, we have all this poetry about that feeling, about the artist’s lover. This poetry is best when it’s light, casual, comfortable, like the love affair itself, and we need a way to express that feeling to our lover and to the world. Frank O’Hara says it best as he, in this reading, looks into the camera to say his final line – “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…  it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it.”