Freely Espousing

By James Schuyler
a commingling sky

                      a semi-tropic night
                      that cast the blackest shadow
                      of the easily torn, untrembling banana leaf

or Quebec! what a horrible city
so Steubenville is better?
                          the sinking sensation
when someone drowns thinking, “This can’t be happening to me!”
the profit of excavating the battlefield where Hannibal whomped the Romans
the sinuous beauty of words like allergy
the tonic resonance of
pill when used as in
“she is a pill”
on the other hand I am not going to espouse any short stories in which lawn mowers clack.
No, it is absolutely forbidden
for words to echo the act described; or try to. Except very directly
as in
bong. And tickle. Oh it is inescapable kiss.
Marriages of the atmosphere
are worth celebrating
                          where Tudor City
catches the sky or the glass side
of a building lit up at night in fog
“What is that gold-green tetrahedron down the river?”
“You are experiencing a new sensation.”

               if the touch-me-nots
               are not in bloom
               neither are the chrysanthemums

the bales of pink cotton candy
in the slanting light
                are ornamental cherry trees.
                The greens around them, and
                the browns, the grays, are the park.
It’s. Hmm. No.
             Their scallop shell of quiet
             is the S.S. United States.
             It is not so quiet and they
             are a medium-size couple who
             when they fold each other up
             well, thrill. That’s their story.

Copyright Credit: James Schuyler, “Freely Espousing” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1993 by James Schuyler. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

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Source: Collected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1993)