“I love all beauteous things, I seek and adore them...” “No wonder the old grouch got to be such a crab. He was travel tired: footsore, weary and blue.” “Footsore? English shoes really are very well made.

 

“It’s hard to believe it wasn’t built to look that way,” Alice said, turning her back on the Forum. “Listen, Marshall, I want you to write to them about that furnace. I refuse to spend another winter like the last one.”

on Greenwich Avenue 
staring down Jane Street 
into the sunset 

Look, Mitterand baby, your telegram
of condolence to Yves
Montand tells it like it is

. . . and the curtain rose in that theatre so long ago
and the music is playing
the first song I fell in

are all we have. So count them as they pass. They pass 
too quickly 
out of breath. Don’t dwell on the grave which yawns for  

In the garden. Sun
on the river
flashing past. I

The smell of snow, stinging in nostrils as the wind lifts it from a beach
Eye-shuttering, mixed with sand, or when snow lies under the street lamps and on all

A thin brown stain 
down the white brick wall 
I guess yes 

The sky is pitiless. I beg
your pardon? OK then
the sky is pitted. The yard

twas the night before Columbus Day, ’70
and the humidity gave a semblance
of warmth to a day not unchilly, even somewhat clammy.

Then I do not know what
to paste next in the
Trash Book: grass, pretending

Dear Kenward,
                              What a pearl
of a letter knife. It’s just

an orange devours
the crusts of clouds and you,
getting up, put on

Visitor to Witley Court
enter at your peril

We were wise to say.
Goodbye, cheap lamps

Serene and purple twilight of the South
the wind-distorted olives
so dim beside the road

We cannot fight on this glue
give us the bread we are used to

For her size the moor hen
lays a large egg
and many of them

I hate my disordered
backyard fence

I love crystal fringe on a dance frock
and the ripple of light as you pass
in a plain little chemisette bodice

A cherry colored picture hat
of Tagal straw, its only trimming
a black and white big windmill bow

where droop the little ivy shoots
the sun slants down to kiss
the heaps of mellow headstones

The search for health and pleasure
leads to no fairer clime

Thank you for your letter
and its extenuations.

I'll tell you who I am: someone
you never met
though on a train you studied a boil on my neck

It’s time again. 
Tear up the violets 
and plant something more difficult to grow. 

There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go

A garnering squirrel makes a frantic chatter at a posse of cats
that sit and stare while their coats thicken

“The Dog Wants His Dinner,” a poem by James Schuyler, first appeared in our Winter 1972 issue; it’s part of his collection The Crystal Lithium. Schuyler was born on this day in 1923. He died in 1991. for Clark CoolidgeThe sky is pitiless. I beg
your p…

In bohemian postwar Manhattan, poets (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch) naturally gravitated to painters (Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers) whose work they appreciated on its own terms. Certain poets were lauded for their perceptive, unbiased eye; some painters instinctively sensed a resonant poem. Painter Helen Frankenthaler and poet James Schuyler had such a mutual appreciation. Their run-in during the 1954 Venice Biennale was memorable enough to open Schuyler’s poem “Torcello” (they must have met previously to have recognized each other, though it is unclear when). In any case, they kept circling: Schuyler reviewed Frankenthaler’s shows at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1957 and at the André Emmerich Gallery in 1960.