Air From Canada

 So many fine poets were born in the 1920s – Richard Wilbur, Philip Larkin, Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice, Thom Gunn – and most of them, Gunn (b.1929) excepted, are now past their centenary. Three years past his now is the New York poet James Schuyler, who was born on this day in 1923. Here is one of his best, a poem imbued with the 'wonderful freshness' and Nova Scotian light that it describes, but with a very dark edge, and a stark closing image... 

Air from Canada

A wonderful freshness, air
that billows like bedsheets
on a clothesline and the clouds
hang in a traffic jam: summer
heads home. Evangeline,
our light is scoured and Nova
Scotian and of a clarity that
opens up the huddled masses
of the stolid spruce so you
see them in their bristling
individuality. The other
day, walking among them, I
cast my gaze upon the ground
in hope of orchids and,
pendant, dead, a sharp shadow
in the shade, a branch gouged
and left me "scarred forever
'neath the eye." Not quite. Not
the cut, but the surprise, and
how, when her dress caught fire,
Longfellow's wife spun
into his arms and in the dying
of its flaring, died. The
irreparable, which changes
nothing that went before
though it ends it. Above the wash
and bark of rumpled water, a gull
falls down the wind to dine
on fish that swim up to do the same.

'Evangeline' references Longfellow's epic poem – hugely popular in its day – about an Acadian girl expelled from Nova Scotia. 'Scarred forever 'neath the eye' is a quotation from Schuyler's fellow New York poet Frank O'Hara's 'A City Winter': 'You are not how the gods refused to die, And I am scarred forever 'neath the eye'.