Hart Crane - Postscript

Carrier Letter

My hands have not touched water since your hands, --
No;--nor my lips freed laughter since "farewell."
And with the day, distance again expands
Between us, voiceless as an uncoiled shell.

Yet, -- much follows, much endures...Trust birds alone:
A dove's wings clung about my heart last night
With surging gentleness; and the blue stone
Set in your tryst-ring has but worn more bright.

The Return

The sea raised up a campanile... The wind I heard
Of brine partaking, whirling spout in shower
Of column kiss -- that breakers spouted, sheared
Back into bosom -- me -- her, into natal power...

The Hive

Up the chasm-walls of my bleeding heart
Humanity pecks, claws, sobs and climbs;
Up the inside, and over every part
Of the hive of the world that is my heart.

And of all the sowing, and all the tear-tendering,
And reaping, have mercy and love issued forth;
Mercy, white milk, and honey, gold love --
And I watch, and say, "These the anguish are worth."

October-November

Indian-summer-sun
With crimson feathers whips away the mists,--
Dives through the filter of trellises
And gilds the silver on the blotched arbor-seats.

Now gold and purple scintillate
On trees that seem dancing
In delirium;
Then the moon
In a mad orange flare
Floods the grape-hung night.

Annunciations

The anxious milk-blood in the veins of the earth,
That strives long and quiet to sever the girth
Of greenery...Below the roots, a quickening shiver
Aroused by some light that had sensed, -- ere the shiver
Of the first moth's descent, -- day's predestiny...
The sand of a dove's flight waved over the lawn...
The moan of travail in one dearest beside me ...
Then high cries from great chasms of chaos withdrawn--
Hush! these things were all heard before dawn.

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless --
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest! -- or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, --
White as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the G-ds.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

A Traveler Born

Of sailors - those two Corsicans at Marseille, -
The Dane at Paris, and those weeks of May
With distance, lizard-like, green as Pernot...
This Connecticut rain, its smashing fall, its wet inferno-

Enforces memory - prison, perfume of women, and the
fountain-
Oh, final apple-math of ripe night fallen!
Concluding handclasp, cider, summer-swollen,
Folds, and is folden in the echoing mountain...
Yields and is shielded, wrapt in traffic flame.

Reply

Thou canst read nothing except through appetite,
And here we join eyes in that sanctity
Where brother passes brother without sight,
But finally knows conviviality...

Go then, unto thy turning and thy blame.
Seek bliss then, brother, in my moment's shame.
All this that balks delivery through words
Shall come to you through wounds prescribed by swords:

That hate is but the vengeance of a long caress,
And fame is pivotal to shame with every sun
That rises on eternity's long willingness...
So sleep, dear brother, in my fame, my shame undone.

Reliquary

Tenderness and resolution!
What is our life without a sudden pillow,
What is death without a ditch?

The harvest laugh of bright Apollo
And the flint tooth of Sagittarius,
Rhyme from the same Tau (closing cinch by cinch)
And pocket us who, somehow, do not follow,
As though we knew those who are variants,
Charms that each by each refuse the clinch
With desperate propriety, whose name is writ
In wider letters than the alphabet,-
Who is now left to vary the Sanscrit
Pillowed by

My wrist in the vestibule of Time?--Who
Will hold it -- wear the keepsake, dear, of time --
Return the mirage on a coin that spells
Something of sand and sun the Nile defends?

The Visible The Untrue

To E. O.

Yes, I being
the tenible puppet of my dreams, shall
lavish this on you -
the dense mine of the orchid, split in two.
And the finger-nails that cinch such
environs?
And what about the staunch neighbor tabulations,
with all their zest for doom?

I'm wearing badges
that cancel all your kindness. Forthright
I watch the silver Zeppelin
destroy the sky. To
stir your confidence?
To rouse your sanctions?

The silver strophe... the canto
bright with myth ... Such
distances leap landward without
evil smile. And, as for me...

The window weight throbs in its blind
partition. To extinguish what I have of faith.
Yes, light. And it is always
always, always the eternal rainbow
And it is always the day, the day of unkind farewell.

Postscript

Though now but marble are the marble urns,
Though fountains droop in waning light, and pain
Glitters on the edges of wet ferns,
I should not dare to let you in again.

Mine is a world foregone though not yet ended,--
An imagined garden grey with sundered boughs
And broken branches, wistful and unmended,
And mist that is more constant than your vows.