#MIDDLEBURY
Schuyler today and the students
Kate Angus
wake up when he mentions colors
and light, streets they’ve walked –
Second Avenue, West 20th, Park.
This guy is happy, right? they ask;
who am I to answer. What I like
about Schuyler is the way sonatas
and Coca-Cola flourish in the same stanza,
morning glories opening
their bright mouths, and trailing down
tender vines.
I don’t drink soda and I never listen
to Faure as much as I should
(What voice
is chanting always be better?). What I like is
the pyrotechnics always just past
the paper horizon,
waiting to burst from underneath.
It’s the idea that it’s enough to think
one thing and then say it: maybe a stapler sits
like a black jaw on the desk while the aloe
stretches half-parabola curves
towards the light and an avocado shell
waits to be rubbish.
There are, of course, always going to be people
who hook us under the sternum and pull
us forward with wire until our own bones break
to make us relinquish them. And in their wake we watch
their boat sail away with a mast solid as the Empire
State Building and all flags in array. Goodbye, little sailor,
I’ll miss you
when I drift down under dark water
where there are shipwrecks and bleached whale
bones and fish bright as constellations, but not enough
to keep swimming.
About this poem
“I wrote this after an afternoon class when my students fell in love with Schuyler – how joyful his poems felt to them after the other work we’d been reading (Berryman, Plath, Sexton), and how easy for them to enter. That afternoon, our seminar discussion felt like a door opened. And, of course, I was thinking also about what I love in Schuyler’s work, and about New York, and about someone I loved who I’d lost touch with, and how sad and beautiful and happy I was about everything.” – Kate Angus
About Kate Angus
Kate Angus is the author of “So Late to the Party” (Negative Capability Press, 2016). She is an editor at Augury Books, as well as the creative writing advisor for the Mayapple Center for Arts and Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New York City.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Kate Angus. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
