The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Nine): Eugene Richie [by Angela Ball]

Early New York Evening

After Jane Freilicher

Chelsea Piers, August 15

Sometimes the very sight of you,

of your beautiful face and bare shoulders,

makes me feel faint.

In view of the Statue of Liberty,

you are ever present to me,

as when your naked arm

stretches above you in bed

or falls on my shoulders,

like a protecting aura.

The little waves on the surface

of the summery Hudson River

are like feelings coursing through me,

as I think of you,

or of that sudden blush of red

that rises to my forehead

and descends like the apron of a wave

over my bare shoulders

into the curly black and gray hair

on my chest. I see nothing

in this riverbank landscape before me

that suggests anything other than

the inimitable moments

life with you continually gives me

in the ways your beauty

shows me every day.

-Eugene Richie from Only Here, Between

Eugene Richie is the author of four collections of poems, most recently Only Here, Between (Gnosis Press 2023), with cover art by Win Knowlton, and two collaborations with the poet Rosanne Wasserman. He is the Director of Creative Writing in the English Department at Pace University in New York City.

Photo by Star Black

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Nine): Eugene Richie

The day before Valentine’s seems the perfect one for Eugene Richie’s glorious love poem, “Early New York Evening,” after Jane Freilicher’s wondrous painting: https://www.kasmingallery.com/usr/library/documents/main/artists/18/jf_press-kit.pdf

In a superb coincidence, Jane’s birthday is the same (in different years) as that of the poem’s subject, Ritchie’s spouse, Rosanne Wasserman. Jane Freilicher was one of John Ashbery’s first and most important friends in New York City, and Eugene Richie and Rosanne Wasserman were great friends and collaborators with John in Hudson, NY, in the latter part of his life. In these connections, limned so quickly here, live immensities of love.

Richie’s “Early New York Evening” is multiply ekphrastic: there’s the painting, and the subject’s and speaker’s bodies, but also a third entity: the body of their love.

The poem begins with its dominant sensory mode, vision:

Sometimes the very sight of you,

of your beautiful face and bare shoulders,

makes me feel faint.

But already, “faint” introduces a more visceral sense, that of equilibrium.

Then, in a wonderful surprise, their love’s body is conflated with the famous stature (accompanied by its own poem), The Stature of Liberty. The melding happens in form, gesture, and spirit:

In view of the Statue of Liberty,

you are ever present to me,

as when your naked arm

stretches above you in bed

or falls on my shoulders,

like a protecting aura.

It is worth noting that Freilicher’s painting is statuesque, connecting—with loving irony—the verticals of smokestacks with those of tender irises.

The word “naked” startles, shines out to remind us that love is physical as well as spiritual, as John Donne says at the end of his great “The Ecstacy”:

And if some lover, such as we,

Have heard this dialogue of one,

Let him still mark us, he shall see

Small change when we’re to bodies gone.

Along with “Early New York Evening,” the poem’s ekphrastic body of love encompasses the immediate view from the couple’s bedroom, a “riverbank landscape” including not just the famous statue, but New York’s most famous river, as well:

The little waves on the surface

of the summery Hudson River

are like feelings coursing through me,

as I think of you,

or of that sudden blush of red

that rises to my forehead

and descends like the apron of a wave

over my bare shoulders

into the curly black and gray hair

on my chest.

What a perfect descriptor, that “summery.” Love, I think, is prone to confuse inner and outer landscapes—as it certainly does here, in the intricacies of these lines, where “waves” become “feelings,” and a “sudden blush of red” . . . descends like the apron of a wave.” How fabulous, how exact, the word “apron.” As above, the female body shelters the masculine—with the descending blush she incites, riverine, over the shoulders that mirror her own; and “into” the very masculine “curly black and gray hair.”

Then there is the wonderful red-herring line break at “nothing,” the playful fake-out continuing through the next two lines before we are overwhelmed with reward in the last four:

the inimitable moments

life with you continually gives me

in the ways your beauty

shows me every day.

How moving, the ending of this splendid love poem, where a spouse’s beauty becomes both teacher and endless quotidian work of art.

Eugene Richie’s “Early New York Evening” combines body and spirit, art and ekphrasis, representation and interplay. How imagine a valentine more permanent, more true. — Angela Ball