James Schuyler

 

Chelsea Hotel, 1983

Buried at Springs  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— stand 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.