Home > Poetry Magazine > Poem (The day gets slowly started)

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

Poem (The day gets slowly started)

By James Schuyler 1923–1991 James Schuyler

The day gets slowly started.

A rap at the bedroom door,

bitter coffee, hot cereal, juice

the color of sun which

isn’t out this morning. A

cool shower, a shave, soothing

Noxzema for razor burn. A bed

is made. The paper doesn’t come

until twelve or one. A gray shine

out the windows. “No one

leaves the building until

those scissors are returned.”

It’s that kind of a place.

Nonetheless, I’ve seen worse.

The worried gray is melting

into sunlight. I wish I’d

brought my book of enlightening

literary essays. I wish it

were lunch time. I wish I had

an appetite. The day agrees

with me better than it did, or,

better, I agree with it. I’ll

slide down a sunslip yet, this

crass September morning.

Excerpt from Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by James Schuyler, edited by James Meetze and Simon Pettet, to be published in April 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by the Estate of James Schuyler. All rights reserved.

Source: Poetry (November 2009).

Biography

Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Schuyler was a central member of the New York School. He was born in Chicago, Illinois and spent his teen years in East Aurora, New York, before attending Bethany College in West Virginia. During World War II, Schuyler served on a destroyer in the North Atlantic and remained in the US Navy until 1947. Before moving to New York in 1950, Schuyler lived for two years on the Isle of Ischia in Italy . . .

Continue reading this biography