James Schuyler

The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away The sand. The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.” The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made: There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be Never again the same. “Why, this is hell.” Out of the death breeding Soil, here, rise emblems of innocence, snowdrops that struggle Easily into life and hang their white enamel heads toward the dirt And in the yellow grass are small wild crocuses from hills goats Have cropped to barrenness. The corms come by mail, are planted. Then do their thing: to live! To live! So natural and so hard Hard as it seems it must be for green spears to pierce the all but Frozen mold and insist that they too, like mouse-eared chickweed, Will live. The spears lengthen, the bud appears and spreads, its Seed capsule fattens and falls, the green turns yellowish and withers Stretched upon the ground. In Washington, magnolias were in bud. In Charlottesville early bulbs were up, brightening the muck. Tomorrow Will begin another spring. No one gets many, one at a time, like a long Awaited letter that one day comes. But it may not say what you hoped Or distraction robs it of what it once would have meant. Spring comes And the winter weather, here, may hold. It is arbitrary, like the plan Of Washington, D.C. Avenues and circles in asphalt web and no One gets younger: which is not, for the young, true, discovering new Freedoms at twenty, a relief not to be a teen-ager anymore. One of us Had piles, another water on the knee, a third a hernia—a strangulated Hernia is one of life’s less pleasant bits of news—and only One, at twenty, moved easily through all the galleries to pill Free sleep. Oh, it’s not all that bad. The sun shines on my hand And the myriad lines that criss-cross tell the story of nearly fifty Years. Sorry, it’s too long to relate. Once, when I was young, I Awoke at first light and sitting in a rocking chair watched the sun Come up beyond the houses across the street. Another time I stood At the cables of a liner and watched the wake turning and Turning upon itself. Another time I woke up and in a bottle On a chest of drawers the thoughtful doctor had left my tonsils. I Didn’t keep them. The turning of the globe is not so real to us As the seasons turning and the days that rise out of early gray —The world is all cut-outs then—and slip or step steadily down The slopes of our lives where the emotions and needs sprout. “I Need you,” tree, that dominates this yard, thick-waisted, tall And crook branched. Its bark scales off like that which we forget: Pain, an introduction at a party, what precisely happened umpteen Years or days or hours ago. And that same blue jay returns, or perhaps It is another. All jays are one to me. But not the sun which seems at Each rising new, as though in the night it enacted death and rebirth, As flowers seem to. The roses this June will be different roses Even though you cut an armful and come in saying, “Here are the roses,” As though the same blooms had come back, white freaked with red And heavily scented. Or a cut branch of pear blooms before its time, “Forced.” Time brings us into bloom and we wait, busy, but wait For the unforced flow of words and intercourse and sleep and dreams In which the past seems to portend a future which is just more Daily life. The cat has a ripped ear. He fights, he fights all The tom cats all the time. There are blood gouts on a velvet seat. Easily sponged off: but these red drops on a book of Stifter’s, will I remember and say at some future time, “Oh, yes, that was the day Hodge had a torn ear and bled on the card table?” Poor Hodge, battered like an old car. Silence flows into my mind. It Is spring. It is also still really winter. Not a day when you say, “What a beautiful spring day.” A day like twilight or evening when You think, “I meant to watch the sun set.” And then comes on To rain. “You’ve got to take,” says the man at the store, “the rough With the smooth.” A window to the south is rough with raindrops That, caught in the screen, spell out untranslatable glyphs. A story Not told: so much not understood, a sight, an insight, and you pass on, Another day for each day is subjective and there is a totality of days As there are as many to live it. The day lives us and in exchange We it: after snowball time, a month, March, of fits and starts, winds, Rain, spring hints and wintry arrears. The weather pays its check, Like quarreling in a D.C. hotel, “I won’t quarrel about it, but I made No local calls.” Strange city, broad and desolating, monuments Rearing up and offices like monuments and crowds lined up to see The White House inside. “We went to see the White House.   It was lovely.” Not so strange though as the cemetery with guttering flame and Admirals and generals with bigger gravestones than the lesser fry Below Lee’s house, false marble pillars and inside all so Everyday, in every room a shawl tossed untidily upon a chair or bed Created no illusion of lived-in-ness. But the periwinkles do, in beds That flatten and are starred blue-violet, a retiring flower loved, It would seem, of the dead, so often found where they congregate. A Quote from Aeschylus: I forget. All, all is forgotten gradually and One wonders if these ideas that seem handed down are truly what they were? An idea may mutate like a plant, and what was once held basic truth Become an idle thought. like, “Shall we plant some periwinkles there By that bush? They’re so to be depended on.” The wind shakes the screen And all the raindrops on it streak and run in stems. It’s colder. The crocuses close up. The snowdrops are brushed with mud. The sky Colors itself rosily behind gray-black and the rain falls through The basketball hoop on a garage, streaking its backboard with further Trails of rust, a lovely color to set with periwinkle violet-blue. And the trees shiver and shudder in the light rain blasts from off The ocean. The street wet reflects the breakup of the clouds On its face, driving over sky with a hissing sound. The car Slides slightly and in the west appear streaks of different green: A lid lifted briefly on the spring. Then the moon burns through Racing clouds, its aureole that of rings of oil on water in a harbor Bubbling up from an exhaust. Clear the sky. Beside a rim of moon. Three stars and only three and one planet. So under lilacs unleaved Lie a clump of snowdrops and one purple crocus. Purple. A polka-dotted Color little girls are fond of: “See my new dess!” and she twirls On one foot. Then, crossed, bursts into tears. Smiles and rain, like These passing days in which buds swell, unseen as yet, waiting For the elms to color their further out most twigs, only the willow Gleams yellow. Life is hard. Some are strong, some weak, most Untested. These useless truths blow about the yard the day after Rain the soft sunlight making softer shadows on the faded lawn. The world looks so old in the spring, laid out under the sky. One Gull coasts by, unexpected as a kiss on the nape of the neck. These Days need birds and so they come, a flock of ducks, and a bunch of Small fluffy unnamed balls that hide in hedges and make a racket. “The gift of life,” as though, existing in expectancy and then Someone came up and said, “Here,” or, “Happy Birthday.” It is more Mysterious than that, pierced by blue or running in the rain Or simply lying down to read. Writing a postponed letter which may Bring no pleasure: arduous truths to tell. And if you thought March was bad Consider April, early April, wet snow falling into blue squills That underneath a beech make an illusory lake, a haze of blue With depth to it. That is like pain, ordinary household pain, Like piles, or bumping against a hernia. All the signs are set for A OK A day to visit the National Gallery—Velázquez, Degas—but, and What a but, with water on the knee “You’ll need a wheelchair, Mummy.” Coasting among the masterpieces, of what use are they?Angel with a Hurdy-Gurdy

a commingling sky a semi-tropic night that cast the blackest shadow of the easily torn, untrembling banana leaf or Quebec! what a horrible city so Steubenville is better? the sinking sensation when someone drowns thinking, “This can’t be happening to me!” the profit of excavating the battlefield where Hannibal whomped the Romans the sinuous beauty of words like allergy the tonic resonance of pill when used as in “she is a pill” on the other hand I am not going to espouse any short stories in which lawn mowers clack. No, it is absolutely forbidden for words to echo the act described; or try to. Except very directly as in bong. And tickle. Oh it is inescapable kiss. Marriages of the atmosphere are worth celebrating where Tudor City catches the sky or the glass side of a building lit up at night in fog “What is that gold-green tetrahedron down the river?” “You are experiencing a new sensation.” if the touch-me-nots are not in bloom neither are the chrysanthemums

Meat-eater, salt-licker, piped spring dribble-sucker, an exiled Bolshevik’s villa at Viareggio. The beach sheep shit crumby money, munificent marks, lire, dollars, Dolorous Daintyfoot, Proudass, Chinadoll, a three-way clut- ter, the piazza pizzeria. Mrs. Smith- Jones, rich, gonged aground a pissoir. At three the imprisoned poisoner’s tea tells her rice-cake fortune, it is it. Who to who? You yew alley ewes knew goatsuckers in Swedish horse-hide hid the boathouse key, locked the oarlock, sung Sam’s nutsy song, Sin Fleet, at night. Night, ketchup cup, pepper-pot, bid bound Belinda break her bracelets: the dirty photographs apostrophize mon- soons. Swimming snakes shake the lake.

A chimney, breathing a little smoke. The sun, I can't see making a bit of pink I can't quite see in the blue. The pink of five tulips at five p.m. on the day before March first. The green of the tulip stems and leaves like something I can't remember, finding a jack-in-the-pulpit a long time ago and far away. Why it was December then and the sun was on the sea by the temples we'd gone to see. One green wave moved in the violet sea like the UN Building on big evenings, green and wet while the sky turns violet. A few almond trees had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes out of the blue looking pink in the light. A gray hush in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue into the sky. They're just going over the hill. The green leaves of the tulips on my desk like grass light on flesh, and a green-copper steeple and streaks of cloud beginning to glow. I can't get over how it all works in together like a woman who just came to her window and stands there filling it jogging her baby in her arms. She's so far off. Is it the light that makes the baby pink? I can see the little fists and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts. It's getting grayer and gold and chilly. Two dog-size lions face each other at the corners of a roof. It's the yellow dust inside the tulips. It's the shape of a tulip. It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in. It's a day like any other.

For John Ashbery We pullmaned to Peoria. Was Gladys glad, Skippy missed Sookie so. So Peru-ward, home. “I’ll sew buttons on dresses yet.” Nike’s peach-knife nicked little finger Chinese straw finger-cuffed to Minna’s Siamesed. Hartford, how are your wheres, our whens? Or extirpated traumas’ gifted guilt smothered aboard a club car. Lake Ontario spilled Jo Jo’s knapsack: “Pasternak.” An alligator ate an alligator- trapping monkey. We ate because “it’s dark, it’s air-conditioned” like lurching to the movies, shot marbles in lobbies. What interests? Takes? Escapes? Eat, moth-light, part and apart, slowly we slow waiters serve hot plates.

The smell of snow, stinging in nostrils as the wind lifts it from a beach Eve-shuttering, mixed with sand, or when snow lies under the street lamps and on all And the air is emptied to an uplifting gassiness That turns lungs to winter waterwings, buoying, and the bright white night Freezes in sight a lapse of waves, balsamic, salty, unexpected: Hours after swimming, sitting thinking biting at a hangnail And the taste of the—to your eyes—invisible crystals irradiates the world “The sea is salt” “And so am I” “Don’t bite your nails” and the metal flavor of a nail—are these brads?— Taken with a slight spitting motion from between teeth and whanged into place (Boards and sawdust) and the nail set is ridged with cold Permanently as marble, always degrees cooler than the rooms of air it lies in Felt as you lay your cheek upon the counter on which sits a blue-banded cup A counter of condensed wintry exhalations glittering infinitesimally A promise, late on a broiling day in late September, of the cold kiss Of marble sheets to one who goes barefoot quickly in the snow and early Only so far as the ash can—bang, dump—and back and slams the door: Too cold to get up though at the edges of the blinds the sky Shows blue as flames that break on a red sea in which black coals float: Pebbles in a pocket embed the seam with grains of sand Which, as they will, have found their way into a pattern between foot and bedfoot “A place for everything and everything in its place” how wasteful, how wrong It seems when snow in fat, hand-stuffed flakes falls slow and steady in the sea “Now you see it, now you don’t” the waves growl as they grind ashore and roll out At your feet (in boots) a Christmas tree naked of needles Still wound with swags of tarnishing tinsel, faintly alarming as the thought Of damp electricity or sluggish lightning and for your health desiring pains The wind awards: Chapped Lips: on which to rub Time’s latest acquisition Tinned, dowel shaped and inappropriately flavored sheep wool fat A greasy sense-eclipsing fog “I can’t see Without my glasses” “You certainly can’t see with them all steamed up Like that. Pull over, park and wipe them off.” The thunder of a summer’s day Rolls down the shimmering blacktop and mowed grass juice thickens the air Like “Stir until it coats the spoon, remove from heat, let cool and chill” Like this, graying up for more snow, maybe, in which a small flock Of—sparrows?—small, anyway, dust-kitty-colored birds fly up On a dotted diagonal and there, ah, is the answer: Starlings, bullies of birdland, lousing up The pecking order, respecters of no rights (what bird is) unloved (oh?) Not so likeable as some: that’s temperate enough and the temperature Drops to rise to snowability of a softness even in its scent of roses Made of untinted butter frosting: Happy Name Day, Blue Jay, staggering On slow-up wings into the shrunk into itself from cold forsythia snarl And above these thoughts there waves another tangle but one parched with heat And not with cold although the heat is on because of cold settled all About as though, swimming under water, in clearly fishy water, you Inhaled and found one could and live and also found you altogether Did not like it, January, laid out on a bed of ice, disgorging February, shaped like a flounder, and March with her steel head pocketbook, And April, goofy and under-dressed and with a loud laugh, and May Who will of course be voted Miss Best Liked (she expects it), And June, with a toothpaste smile, fresh from her flea bath, and gross July, Flexing itself, and steamy August, with thighs and eyes to match, and September Diving into blue October, dour November, and deadly dull December which now And then with a surprised blank look produces from its hand the ace of trumps Or sets within the ice white hairline of a new moon the gibbous rest: Global, blue, Columbian, a blue dull definite and thin as the first day Of February when, in the steamed and freezing capital cash built Without a plan to be its own best monument its skyline set in stacks Like poker chips (signed “Autodidact”), at the crux of a view there crosses A flatcar-trailer piled with five of the cheaper sort of yachts, tarpaulined, Plus one youth in purple pants, a maid in her uniform and an “It’s not real Anything” Cossack hat and coat, a bus one-quarter full of strangers and The other familiar fixings of lengthening short days: “He’s outgrown them Before you can turn around” and see behind you the landscape of the past Where beached boats bask and terraced cliffs are hung with oranges Among dark star-gleaming leaves, and, descending the dizzying rough stairs Littered with goat turd beads—such packaging—you—he—she— One—someone—stops to break off a bit of myrtle and recite all the lines Of Goethe that come back, and those in French, “Connais-tu... ?” the air Fills with chalk dust from banged erasers, behind the February dunes Ice boats speed and among the reeds there winds a little frozen stream Where kids in kapok ice-skate and play at Secret City as the sun Sets before dinner, the snow on fields turns pink and under the hatched ice The water slides darkly and over it a never before seen liquefaction of the sun In a chemical yellow greener than sulphur a flash of petroleum by-product Unbelievable, unwanted and as lovely as though someone you knew all your life Said the one inconceivable thing and then went on washing dishes: the sky Flows with impersonal passion and loosening jet trails (eyes tearing from the cold) And on the beach, between foam frozen in a thick scalloped edging so like Weird cheek-mottling pillowcase embroidery, on the water-darkened sand the waves Keep free of frost, a gull strangles on a length of nylon fishline and the dog Trots proudly off, tail held high, to bury a future dinner among cut grass on a dune: The ice boats furl their sails and all pile into cars and go off to the super market Its inviting foods and cleansers sold under tunes with sealed in memory-flavor “Hot House Rhubarb” “White Rock Girl” “Citrus Futures” “Cheap Bitter Beans” and In its parking lot vast as the kiss to which is made the most complete surrender In a setting of leaves, backs of stores, a house on a rise admired for being Somewhat older than some others (prettier, too?) a man in a white apron embraces a car Briefly in the cold with his eyes as one might hug oneself for warmth for love —What a paint job, smooth as an eggplant; what a meaty chest, smooth as an eggplant —Is it too much to ask your car to understand you? the converse isn’t and the sky Maps out new roads so that, driving at right angles to the wind, clouds in ranks Contrive in diminishing perspective a part of a picture postcard of a painting Over oak scrub where a filling station has: gas, a locked toilet (to keep dirt in) A busted soda pop machine, no maps and “I couldn’t tell you thet” so The sky empties itself to a color, there, where yesterday’s puddle Offers its hospitality to people-trash and nature-trash in tans and silvers And black grit like that in corners of a room in this or that cheap dump Where the ceiling light burns night and day and we stare at or into each Other’s eyes in hope the other reads there what he reads: snow, wind Lifted; black water, slashed with white; and that which is, which is beyond Happiness or love or mixed with them or more than they or less, unchanging change, “Look,” the ocean said (it was tumbled, like our sheets), “look in my eyes”

There is a hornet in the room and one of us will have to go out the window into the late August midafternoon sun. I won. There is a certain challenge in being humane to hornets but not much. A launch draws two lines of wake behind it on the bay like a delta with a melted base. Sandy billows, or so they look, of feathery ripe heads of grass, an acid-yellow kind of goldenrod glowing or glowering in shade. Rocks with rags of shadow, washed dust clouts that will never bleach. It is not like this at all. The rapid running of the lapping water a hollow knock of someone shipping oars: it’s eleven years since Frank sat at this desk and saw and heard it all the incessant water the immutable crickets only not the same: new needles on the spruce, new seaweed on the low-tide rocks other grass and other water even the great gold lichen on a granite boulder even the boulder quite literally is not the same II A day subtle and suppressed in mounds of juniper enfolding scratchy pockets of shadow while bigness—rocks, trees, a stump— stands shadowless in an overcast of ripe grass. There is nothing but shade, like the boggy depths of a stand of spruce, its resonance just the thin scream of mosquitoes ascending. Boats are light lumps on the bay stretching past erased islands to ocean and the terrible tumble and London (“rain persisting”) and Paris (“changing to rain”). Delicate day, setting the bright of a young spruce against the cold of an old one hung with unripe cones each exuding at its tip gum, pungent, clear as a tear, a day tarnished and fractured as the quartz in the rocks of a dulled and distant point, a day like a gull passing with a slow flapping of wings in a kind of lope, without breeze enough to shake loose the last of the fireweed flowers, a faintly clammy day, like wet silk stained by one dead branch the harsh russet of dried blood.

Right hand graced with writing, my left arm my secondhand new suit bestrode, from the auto I say, “Antinous, perched like a parakeet cracking sunflower seeds in a hot ice cave or cage, you’re an apogee. Acid pennies will fill your mouth, your head bowl at a soldiers’ revel. Fly the safety you despise and seek, a butcher with a butcher’s knife peers. The lice are fast. Ta ta.”