In the evening of a brightly unsunny day to watch back-lighted buildings through the slits between vertical strips of blinds and how red brick, brick painted red, a flaky white, gray or those of no color at all take the light though it seems only above and behind them so what shows below has a slight evening “the day—sobs—dies” sadness and the sun marches on. It isn’t like that on these buildings, the colors which seem to melt, to bloom and go and return do so in all reality. Go out and on a cross street briefly a last sidelong shine catches the faces of brick and enshadows the grout: which the eye sees only as a wash of another diluted color over the color it thinks it knows is there. Most things, like the sky, are always changing, always the same. Clouds rift and a beam falls into a cell where a future saint sits scratching. Or a wintry sun shows as a shallow pan of red above the Potomac, below Mount Vernon, and the doctor from Philadelphia nods and speaks of further bleeding.
Source: Schuyler, James. “Greenwich Avenue.” Collected Poems. New York: Noonday Press, 1998, pp. 169-170.
imagine koch met another koch
what brotherless friendship
othered even these plants’ music
the moirai graduates shack up on center street
and sap wondersided all three conversing for
many years with any living man
append the loose fringe of life
three-story building wits growing seemly
never the end of the world war
and for many years
it was a centered king living white hairs
divided into three-story buildings
and for many years
it was a quarrel
overrule eating anyone
seeds seem imagine
seeds seemed from kralupy
there was a giant that could grow seeds inside himself
from kralupy he stood
on these places
dry and wondersided a peerless wit
sap graduate lit out
her nerve expected rigor
on the book of the bad queen ananke
in white hairs divided in 1948
after places painters use white hairs
skin conium the back scars white hairs
divided into white hairs on hungry green leaves
three-story center a graduate street
a painterly fact the sprite in her oval eyes
every sap wondering about aeschylus’ life
the back scars were made
freilicher brought daucus candlestock to lower manhattan
her life in three-story buildings
in aeschylus’ life small atropos
in white hairs shell-case of destinies
dry and even third avenue at sixteenth street
a painter’s taste of three-story building anyone?
seems imaginable so much beautiful writing
in 1948 a graduate student travels to greece
and never returns it stood on top of a spool of thread
in my life three-story buildings imagine fact
beauty in bullet form imagine kenneth koch
met aeschylus and the bad queen
nature’s fate seems by comparison its power
fact: the case of places
dry and very small
atropos in our life
he powers
the center
of hope
four inches in aeschylus’ life
three-stories at the center of a poem
fringed many years’ white hairs
skin conium their family book of brunette
with oval epitome and strong seeds
seems a comparison koch met giants who live for men
append friendship and very funny poems
imagine kralupy it was a quarrel overruled
eating graduate students’ exceptional epitome moirai
group of genealogies
the fates lick ash
nature family their family ween
ananke in aeschylus’ life powers a quarrel
overrule eating it seems from the potion of the parcae
yes, we muddle language probably because fates best god
but later the giant allots lachesis
in her english way it’s clear to fate
the book of destinies from each into each
his eating of the fates their brotherless friendship
and even the word hector all atropos inflexible
never a moiragetes but man’s appellation of hope
four inches long
seeds seeds seeds
dry and euripides’ poison hemlock
conium that centers fact
the end of places
in this dry medical form
the reflecto neveryone and
the
fairmount
school of polyrhythms i always meant to take
it boils in the
biplane dopple overheadaches toward an old
white school of the always approaches
toward teterboro
the
reflecto
neveryone and blinks
all
overhead
reflecto
never that meant
fail
fail
fail fail fail
fail
fail fail fail
fail
fail fail fail
fail fail fail fail
fail fail
fail fail fail
fail fail fail fail
fail
fail fail fail fail fail fail
fail fail fail fail
fail fail fail
fail fail
fail fail fail fail fail
fail
fail fail
fail fail
fail fail
fail
What is it now with me
And is it as I have become?
Is there no state free from the boundry lines
Of before and after? The window is open today
And the air pours in with piano notes
In its skirts, as though to say, “Look, John,
I’ve brought these and these”—that is,
A few Beethovens, some, Brahmses,
A few choice Poulenc notes. . . . Yes,
It is being free again, the air, it has to keep coming back
Because that’s all it’s good for.
I want to stay with it out of fear
That keeps me from walking up certain steps,
Knocking at certain doors, fear of growing old
Alone, and of finding no one at the evening end
Of the path except another myself
Nodding a curt greeting: “Well, you’ve been awhile
But now we’re back together, which is what counts.”
Air in My path, you could shorten this,
But the breeze has dropped, and silence is the last word.
[Frank] O’Hara’s ironically self-deprecating tone was much imitated. “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love,” he wrote. He kiddingly called his own poems “the by-product of exhibitionism” and wrote constantly about his daily life. It was O’Hara who initiated the policy of dropping names in his poems, a habit that became a New York School trademark. O’Hara peppered his work with references to his painter friends — [Jane] Freilicher, [Larry] Rivers, Mike Goldberg, Joan Mitchell, Norman Bluhm, Grace Hartigan, Al Leslie — with perfect indifference to whether readers would recognize their names. That indifference argued a certain confidence in the poet’s ability to make the details of his autobiography-in-progress so irresistible that the reader feels flattered to be regarded as the poet’s intimate. O’Hara s celebration of friendship in poetry represented an ideal that second-generation New York School poets, such as Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman, emulated in the 1960s. Everyone wanted to be, as [Ted] Berrigan put it, “perfectly frank.” James Schuyler has a marvelous rift in a letter to Berkson urging him to “be frank (if you can’t be frank, be john and kenneth). Say,” Schuyler continues, “maybe our friends’ names would make good verbs: to kenneth: emit a loud red noise; to ashbery- cast a sidewise salacious glance while holding a champagne glass by the stem; to kenward: glide from the room and not make waves; to brainard, give a broad and silent chuckle; to maehiz, shower with conversational spit drops–but I said friends, didn’t I–cancel the last. To berkson and to schuyler I leave to you.”
I took the Lexington Avenue subway
To arrive at you in your glory days
Of the Nineteen Fifties when we believed
That you could solve any problem
And I had nothing but disdain
For “self-analysis” “group analysis” “Jungian analysis”
“Adlerian analysis” the Karen Horney kind
All—other than you, pure Freudian type—
Despicable and never to be mine!
I would lie down according to your
Dictates but not go to sleep.
I would free-associate. I would say whatever
Came into my head. Great
Troops of animals floated through
And certain characters like Picasso and Einstein
Whatever came into my head or my heart
Through reading or thinking or talking
Came forward once again in you. I took voyages
Down deep unconscious rivers, fell through fields,
Cleft rocks, went on through hurricanes and volcanoes.
Ruined cities were as nothing to me
In my fantastic advancing. I recovered epochs,
Gold of former ages that melted in my hands
And became toothpaste or hazy vanished citadels. I dreamed
Exclusively for you. I was told not to make important decisions.
This was perfect. I never wanted to. On the Har-Tru surface of my emotions
Your ideas sank in so I could play again.
But something was happening. You gave me an ideal
Of conversation—entirely about me
But including almost everything else in the world.
But this wasn’t poetry it was something else.
After two years of spending time in you
Years in which I gave my best thoughts to you
And always felt you infiltrating and invigorating my feelings
Two years at five days a week, I had to give you up.
It wasn’t my idea. “I think you are nearly through,”
Dr. Loewenstein said. “You seem much better.” But, Light!
Comedy! Tragedy! Energy! Science! Balance! Breath!
I didn’t want to leave you. I cried. I sat up.
I stood up. I lay back down. I sat. I said
But I still get sore throats and have hay fever.
“And some day you are going to die. We can’t cure everything.”
Psychoanalysis! I stood up like someone covered with light
As with paint, and said Thank you.
It was only one moment in a life, my leaving you.
But once I walked out, I could never think of anything seriously
For fifteen years without also thinking of you. Now what have we become?
You look the same, but now you are a past You.
That’s Fifties clothing you’re wearing. You have some Fifties ideas
Left—about sex, for example. What shall we do? Go walking?
We’re liable to have a slightly frumpy look,
But probably no one will notice—another something I didn’t know then.
