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.