James Schuyler

was a mind of such splendid particulars.


    Poem

Your enchantment
enchains me, stretched
out there, planked
like a steak or
a shad in season.
And there, where
you flower there.
You're cool to my
touch, soon growing
warm, smooth but not
sleek. I love you--
too much? Not quite
possible. The thought
of harm from you is
far from me as those
Vermont hills, en-
flamed in October,
as I by you, in their
seasonal rush. To
go up in leaves! I
wish I could, as I
sink down beside you.








Okay, a bit faggy. But nice: bite-size Eros. His poems often have a feminine presence. But some Ovidian displacement, as here where his "girlyness" sort of goes dryad...desires to be a tree...and then a funny sort of vanity implicit in that "to go up in leaves"....which also alludes to pages of poetry, implies a poetic afterlife. So, in that sense, it hearkens back to a tradition as old as the Elizabethan--the poet prostrates himself before his love object, but to immortalize himself as much as his beloved. Here the resonance of that tradition is more humorous than earnest.

And the funniest thing about this poem, its greatest negative capability, lies in the fact that we don't know if the speaker is enraptured with an actual lover or a flower or plant.

So, with that ambiguity, the poem remains very pure.

It's a love of earth for earth.

This poem was included in a very fine anthology of gay and lesbian love poems, but I think the poet might be speaking to a flowering vine tendriling across the earth, rather than a lover. But that's not a reason to exclude it from the anthology. It would still fit the theme.

Schuyler's a very competent artificer. He gets a lot into his "skinny poems." The poems are usually intricate with life and doubled meanings.

And precision made clever: "smooth but not / sleek(.)"