Thursday 9 November 2017

Schuyler's Elegy

Born on this day in 1923 was the poet James Schuyler. I've posted a couple of his poems before (here and here), and today I'm posting another one that I think shows him at his best (too much of his work, like his friend Frank O'Hara's, doesn't quite rise above the level of clever in-crowd chit-chat).
 Buried at Springs, Schuyler's elegy for O'Hara, demonstrates, among other things, his remarkable sensitivity to nature; it's almost a nature poem – a strange way to elegise the most urban of New Yorkers; but this is a very oblique elegy, its emotion tightly contained. It's probably the best of the poems written for O'Hara after his sudden, incongruous death (run over by a jeep on Fire Island).
 At the funeral, John Ashbery read O'Hara's own To the Harbormaster – or tried to: he was overcome by emotion, as were many on that extraordinary day, when the whole of artistic New York descended on the cemetery at Springs, Long Island (the picture above shows a distraught Allan Ginsberg and Kenneth Koch leaving the funeral). There were outpourings of raw grief galore – the most extreme a grisly tirade by the painter Larry Rivers – but Schuyler's elegy, written after the event, at Fairfield Porter's home on Great Spruce Island (where O'Hara had visited some years before), is a work of art...

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. 

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