James Schuyler

And accustomed ungentle hands of two blue-uniformed attendants wrap the patient in suffering’s white bed gown sewn with bright invisible emblems of virtues, or pinned with them, as with fraternity pins, or mosaic pins, meaning travel. Has he always only just arrived? Really suffering, within and without his head burn hot wires of pain: “I cannot bear this”: and does, and does the time and place outwardly expound what is within? To be well, to wear new clothes, to decimate his wage for a necktie, a scarf or gloves, love “your magic spell” scabbed his fevered lips, lay no cold cloths, though to be him bent on him eyes of those called to selflessness, lonely for more selfish days.

Crying is a habit with me. You mustn’t mind: onions make me smog headlines in the

Drew down the curse of heaven on her umbrella furled and smelling of wet cigarettes, Jo ran off in rain one pitchy night, one bloody a.m. found her staring, snoring. “Why do we all stay up so late?” Jo queried. “Though I don’t stay up so late as my friends.” She tripped the little bomb of wasps. They got her. Tears for Jo, four, each perfect, waspish. A silver tongue and piss-blond hair decants a funeral oblation for the mouse. “She was a rare sight, a winning wonder. Jo cultivates her toothaches elsewhere.”

December 26, 1969 Dear Kenward, What a pearl of a letter knife. It's just the thing I needed, something to rest my eyes on, and always wanted, which is to say it's that of which I felt the lack but didn't know of, of no real use and yet essential as a button box, or maps, green morning skies, islands and canals in oatmeal, the steam off oyster stew. Brown agate, veined as a woods by smoke that has to it the watery twist of eel grass in a quick, rust-discolored cove. Undulating lines of northern evening—a Munch without the angst—a hint of almost amber: to the nose, a resinous thought, to the eye, a lacquered needle green where no green is, a present after-image. Sleek as an ax, bare and elegant as a tarn, manly as a lingam, November weather petrified, it is just the thing to do what with? To open letters? No, it is just the thing, an object, dark, fierce and beautiful in which the surprise is that the surprise, once past, is always there: which to enjoy is not to consume. The un- recapturable returns in a brown world made out of wood, snow streaked, storm epi- center still in stone.

last night locked in the castle of pride and egotism goes on two legs Webern orchestrated a sky the clouds move to a bass on an instrument not an oboe, gray on light-gray in blue and green goes by on glass

The day gets slowly started. A rap at the bedroom door, bitter coffee, hot cereal, juice the color of sun which isn’t out this morning. A cool shower, a shave, soothing Noxzema for razor burn. A bed is made. The paper doesn’t come until twelve or one. A gray shine out the windows. “No one leaves the building until those scissors are returned.” It’s that kind of a place. Nonetheless, I’ve seen worse. The worried gray is melting into sunlight. I wish I’d brought my book of enlightening literary essays. I wish it were lunch time. I wish I had an appetite. The day agrees with me better than it did, or, better, I agree with it. I’ll slide down a sunslip yet, this crass September morning.

for Kenward Elmslie Up from the valley now and then a chain saw rising to a shriek, subsiding to a buzz “Someone” is “cutting in his wood lot” another day shows they are not someone is two men clearing shoulders of a narrow high-crowned road stacked poles were lately sapling the leaves on the slash gone limp, unstarched, unsized one man with one fierce eye and where the other should be an ill-knit cicatrix men who don’t make much aren’t much for spending what they do on glass eyes, tooth-straightening devices (“a mouth like the back of a switchboard”), nose jobs, dewenning operations a country look prevails and a vestigial fear of the evil eye lurks “. . . my skin creeps . . .” Out of Adamant Co-op men in “overhauls” step into evening rising in long-shadowed bluish haze to gold and pink by Sodom Lake (was it that any Bible name was an OK name?) and boys stare unabashed and unaggressive not what the man on the bus fled from his one day job talking excitedly about “teen-age Puerto Rican tail-bait” and “You can have New York!” Some present you’d rather have wouldn’t you an apple tree that climbed up into keels over sad, and too bad, the best apples on Apple Hill still, it can be propped or budded on new stock or just that it once was there Driving past, driving down, driving over along the Winooski through the home of Granite City Real Ice Cream The Monument Capitol buildings of rusticated granite marred to our eyes by etched polished granite remodeled downstairs may be found by a future happily heterodox “There’s a touch of autumn— there’s another touch of autumn” and the dark tranquility of hemlocks encroaching on untilled fields “You can’t make a living plowing stones” subsistence farming is well out of style: “You can’t call it living without the margin” coveted obsolescence! a margin like that on this page a paper luxury “Collectors” the lady in the antique shop said “are snapping up silver” “Since we’re off the silver standard?” “Why, maybe so” Perhaps six 1827 Salem coin-silver spoons for $18 or what about “Have you The Pearl of Orr’s Island?” “That’s a book I’d want to read myself. I’m from here but live in Florida. Winters are too hard: 40 below. You don’t feel it though like zero in Boston. I’ll take St. Johnsbury any day over Boston.” Over St. Johnsbury the clouds shift in curds and a street goes steeply down into Frenchtown by the railroad station into which anachronistically comes a real train: yesterday’s torment of dust-exhaling plush on the backs of bare knees today’s nostalgia but not much. Curls cut out of wood, brick of a certain cut and color, a hopped-up cripple on a hill above his pond, a slattern frowning at the early-closed state liquor store, an attic window like a wink, The Scale Co., St. Johnsbury has everything Not this high hill a road going in undergrowth leads up to by walls of flat cleared-field stones so many and so long a time to take so much labor so long ago and so soon to be going back, a host to hardhack and blueberry baby steps first fallings from a sky in which the wind is moving furniture the upholstery of summer coming all unstitched the air full of flying kapok and resolutions: “remember to fetch the ax whack back pine intrusions” from the road turning down to a lower field and across the roughest one the County keeps a woman and a boy come up on heavy horses. “Morning! Had frost last night at Adamant. Might have a killing frost tonight.” Quick and clear as the water where cress grows the cold breaks on the hills to the soft crash of a waterfall beyond a beaver pond and slides on flinging imaginary fragments of cat’s ice from its edges to flash a bright reality in the night sky and it — the cold—stands, a rising pool, about Sloven’s farmhouse and he dreams of dynamite. A bog sucks at his foundations. Somewhere a deer breaks branches. The trees say Wesson. Mazola replies a frog. It doesn’t happen though the cold that is not that night. It happens all right not then when the white baneberry leans secretively where a road forks met with surprise: “Why here it is: the most beautiful thing.” The spirit of Gelett Burgess sets Mother Nature gabbing. “That’s my Actea pachypoda, dear, we call it Doll’s-Eyes.” Got up as smart as ever in muck and dank she belches —“’Scuse: just a touch of gas”— swamp maple flames and ambles over and plunks down on a dead rubber tire to contemplate smashed glass and a rusty tin and “some of my choicer bits: that I call Doctor’s Dentures. These are Little Smellies.” Not the sort you look to meet so near gold-domed, out of scale Montpelier a large-windowed kind of empty public bigness so little to show, so much to take pride in rather more than on the way to Stowe a pyrocrafted maple board in a Gyp-to-teria IF MORE MEN WERE SELF STARTERS FEWER WIVES WOULD HAVE TO CRANK. Welcome to the chair lift and cement chalet. Days of unambiguous morning when dawn peels back like a petal to disclose blue depths deep beyond all comprehending and tall field growth bends with a crushing weight of water cut into sac-shaped portions, each less than a carat and which streak an early walker’s trouser legs “You’re soaked!” crossing on a door the spill to where Nodding Ladies’ Tresses pallidly braid their fragrance and the woods emit their hum. Days when the pond holds on its steel one cloud in which thin drowned trees stand spare shapes of winter when summer is just loosening to fall and bits of ribbon from an electric typewriter patch a screen. Croquet days, scissor-and-paste nights after dinner on the better sort of ham and coffee strong enough to float a goose egg. Are those geese, that V, flying so early? Can it be so late? in the green state needles, leaves, fronds, blades, lichens and moss create Can it be so soon before the long white refrozen in frost on frost on all twigs again will flash cross cutting star streaks—the atoms dance—on a treacherous night in headlights? “Horrible Cold Night Remain at Home” “Clear and Beautiful Remain at Home”

Under the French horns of a November afternoon a man in blue is raking leaves with a wide wooden rake (whose teeth are pegs or rather, dowels). Next door boys play soccer: “You got to start over!” sort of. A round attic window in a radiant gray house waits like a kettledrum. “You got to start . . .” The Brahmsian day lapses from waltz to march. The grass, rough-cropped as Bruno Walter’s hair, is stretched, strewn and humped beneath a sycamore wide and high as an idea of heaven in which Brahms turns his face like a bearded thumb and says, “There is something I must tell you!” to Bruno Walter. “In the first movement of my Second, think of it as a family planning where to go next summer in terms of other summers. A material ecstasy, subdued, recollective.” Bruno Walter in a funny jacket with a turned-up collar says, “Let me sing it for you.” He waves his hands and through the vocalese-shaped spaces of naked elms he draws a copper beech ignited with a few late leaves. He bluely glazes a rhododendron “a sea of leaves” against gold grass. There is a snapping from the brightwork of parked and rolling cars. There almost has to be a heaven! so there could be a place for Bruno Walter who never needed the cry of a baton. Immortality— in a small, dusty, rather gritty, somewhat scratchy Magnavox from which a forte drops like a used Brillo Pad? Frayed. But it’s hard to think of the sky as a thick glass floor with thick-soled Viennese boots tromping about on it. It’s a whole lot harder thinking of Brahms in something soft, white, and flowing. “Life,” he cries (here, in the last movement), “is something more than beer and skittles!” “And the something more is a whole lot better than beer and skittles,” says Bruno Walter, darkly, under the sod. I don’t suppose it seems so dark to a root. Who are these men in evening coats? What are these thumps? Where is Brahms? And Bruno Walter? Ensconced in resonant plump easy chairs covered with scuffed brown leather in a pungent autumn that blends leaf smoke (sycamore, tobacco, other), their nobility wound in a finale like this calico cat asleep, curled up in a breadbasket, on a sideboard where the sun falls.

1 A tree, enamel needles, owl takeoffs shake, flapping a sound and smell of underwing, like flags, the clothy weight of flags. A cone of silence stuck with diamonds, the watch she hunts, the frayed band broke. It was a black night. Dawn walked on it, the sun set its heel. She won’t find: a boundary of marsh, the island in the wood.

beside me in this garden are huge and daisy-like (why not? are not oxeye daisies a chrysanthemum?), shrubby and thick-stalked, the leaves pointing up the stems from which the flowers burst in sunbursts. I love this garden in all its moods, even under its winter coat of salt hay, or now, in October, more than half gone over: here a rose, there a clump of aconite. This morning one of the dogs killed a barn owl. Bob saw it happen, tried to intervene. The airedale snapped its neck and left it lying. Now the bird lies buried by an apple tree. Last evening from the table we saw the owl, huge in the dusk, circling the field on owl-silent wings. The first one ever seen here: now it’s gone, a dream you just remember. The dogs are barking. In the studio music plays and Bob and Darragh paint. I sit scribbling in a little notebook at a garden table, too hot in a heavy shirt in the mid-October sun into which the Korean mums all face. There is a dull book with me, an apple core, cigarettes, an ashtray. Behind me the rue I gave Bob flourishes. Light on leaves, so much to see, and all I really see is that owl, its bulk troubling the twilight. I’ll soon forget it: what is there I have not forgot? Or one day will forget: this garden, the breeze in stillness, even the words, Korean mums.