Poet's Choice

addicts and there goes

one handsome in

the chinless wonder way

and of a dark descent

who stops and looks at

a street sign, turns,

hesitates and goes off

like the actor one often

feels: "Frowns,

looks at watch, goes

off" and in the sky

cloud words melt

and all run together.

Here the phrase "cloud words" makes explicit a cloudiness in the nature of language that the first poem implies with its almost parodic or faux-naif use of monosyllabic names for colors, its wondering about the name of a bush, then naming it, "I guess." The nature of words is to gesture imperfectly, yet memorably, toward reality. That imperfection makes the compensating grace of these poems more meaningful.

(James Schuyler's poems can be found in his book "Collected Poems." Farrar Straus Giroux. Copyright 1993 by the Estate of James Schuyler.)