Hart Crane - Key West: An Island Sheaf
Key West: An Island Sheaf
The starry floor,
The wat'ry shore,
Is given thee 'til the break of day.
-William Blake
Key West
Here has my salient faith annealed me.
Out of the valley, past the ample crib
To skies impartial, that do not disown me
Nor claim me, either, by Adam's spine -- nor rib.
The oar plash, and the meteorite's white arch
Concur with wrist and bicep. In the moon
That now has sunk I strike a single march
To heaven or hades -- to an equally frugal noon.
Because these millions reap a dead conclusion
Need I presume the same fruit of my bone
As draws them towards a doubly mocked confusion
Of apish nightmares into steel-strung stone?
O, steel and stone! But gold was, scarcity before.
And here is water, and a little wind....
There is no breath of friends and no more shore
Where gold has not been sold and conscience tinned.
O Carib Isle!
The tarantula rattling at the lily's foot
Across the feet of the dead, laid in white sand
Near the coral beach--nor zigzag fiddle crabs
Side-stilting from the path (that shift, subvert
And anagrammatize your name)--No, nothing here
Below the palsy that one eucalyptus lifts
In wrinkled shadows--mourns.
And yet suppose
I count these nacreous frames of tropic death,
Brutal necklaces of shells around each grave
Squared off so carefully. Then
To the white sand I may speak a name, fertile
Albeit in a stranger tongue. Tree names, flower names
Deliberate, gainsay death's brittle crypt. Meanwhile
The wind that knots itself in one great death--
Coils and withdraws. So syllables want breath.
But where is the Captain of this doubloon isle
Without a turnstile? Who but catchword crabs
Patrols the dry groins of the underbrush?
What man, or What
Is Commissioner of mildew throughout the ambushed senses?
His Carib mathematics web the eyes' baked lenses!
Under the poinciana, of a noon or afternoon
Let fiery blossoms clot the light, render my ghost
Sieved upward, white and black along the air
Until it meets the blue's comedian host.
Let not the pilgrim see himself again
For slow evisceration bound like those huge terrapin
Each daybreak on the wharf, their brine-caked eyes;
--Spiked, overturned; such thunder in their strain!
And clenched beaks coughing for the surge again!
Slagged of the hurricane--I, cast within its flow,
Congeal by afternoons here, satin and vacant.
You have given me the shell, Satan,--carbonic amulet
Sere of the sun exploded in the sea.
The Mango Tree
Let them return, saying you blush again for the great
Great-gandmother. It's all like Christmas.
When you sprouted Paradise a discard of chewing-gum
took place. Up jug to musical, hanging jug just gay spiders
yoked you first, -silking of shadows good underdrawers for
owls.
First-plucked before and since the Flood, old hypno-
tisms wrench the golden boughs. Leaves spatter dawn from
emerald cloud-sprockets. Fat final prophets with lean ban-
dits crouch: and dusk is close
under your noon,
you Sun-heap, whose
ripe apple-lanterns gush history, recondite lightnings, irised.
O mister Señor
missus Miss
Mademoiselle
with baskets
Maggy, come on
Island Quarry
Square sheets--they saw the marble into
Flat slabs there at the marble quarry
At the turning of the road around the roots of the mountain
Where the straight road would seem to ply below the stone,
that fierce
Profile of marble spiked with yonder
Palms against the sunset's towering sea, and maybe
Against mankind. It is at times--
In dusk it is at times as though this island lifted, floated
In Indian baths. At Cuban dusk the eyes
Walking the straight road toward thunder--
This dry road silvering toward the shadow of the quarry
--It is at times as though the eyes burned hard and glad
And did not take the goat path quivering to the right,
Wide of the mountain--thence to tears and sleep--
But went on into marble that does not weep.
The Mermen
And if
Thy banished trunk be found in our dominions-
-King Lear
Buddhas and engines serve us undersea;
Though why they bide here, only hell that's sacked
Of every blight and ingenuity-
Can solve.
The Cross alone has flown the wave.
But since the Cross sank, much that's warped and cracked
Has followed in its name, has heaped its grave.
Oh-
Gallows and guillotines to hail the sun
And smoking racks for penance when day's done!
No --
Leave us, you idols of Futurity - alone,
Here where we finger moidores of spent grace
And ponder the bright stains that starred His Throne
- This Cross, agleam still with a human face!
The Idiot
Sheer over to the other side,- for see
That boy straggling under those mimosas, daft
With squint lanterns in his head, and it's likely
Fumbling his sex. That's why those children laughed
In such infernal circles round his door
Once when he shouted, stretched in ghastly shape.
I hurried by. But back from the hot shore
Passed him again...He was alone, agape;
One hand dealt out a kite string; a tin can
The other tilted, peeled end clapped to eye.
That kite aloft - you should have watched him scan
Its course, though he'd clamped midnight to noon sky!
And since, through these hot barricades of green,
A Dios gracias, grac - I've heard his song
Above all reason lifting, halt serene-
My trespass vision shrinks to face his wrong.
A Name For All
Moonmoth and grasshopper that flee our page
And still wing on, untarnished of the name
We pinion to your bodies to assuage
Our envy of your freedom--we must maim
Because we are usurpers, and chagrined--
And take the wing and scar it in the hand.
Names we have, even, to clap on the wind;
But we must die, as you, to understand.
I dreamed that all men dropped their names, and sang
As only they can praise, who build their days
With fin and hoof, with wing and sweetened fang
Struck free and holy in one Name always.
Royal Palm
For Grace Hart Crane
Green rustlings, more than regal charities
Drift coolly from that tower of whispered light.
Amid the noontides blazed aspertities
I watched the sun's most gracious anchorite
Climb up as by communings, year on year
Uneaten of the earth or aught earth holds,
And the gray trunk, that's elephantine, rear
Its frondings sighing in ethereal folds.
Forever fruitless, and beyond that yield
Of sweat the jungle presses with hot love
And tendril till our deathward breath is sealed-
It grazes the horizons, launched above
Mortality -- ascending emerald-bright,
A fountain at salute, a crown in view --
Unshackled, casual of its azured height,
As though it soared suchwise through heaven too.
The Air Plant
Grand Cayman
This tuft that thrives on saline nothingness,
Inverted octopus with heavenward arms
Thrust parching from a palm-bole hard by the cove --
A bird almost -- of almost bird alarms,
Is pulmonary to the wind that jars
Its tentacles, horrific in their lurch.
The lizard's throat, held bloated for a fly,
Balloons but warily from this throbbing perch.
The needles and hack-saws of cactus bleed
A milk of earth when stricken off the stalk;
But this, -- defenseless, thornless, sheds no blood,
Almost no shadow -- but the air's thin talk.
Angelic Dynamo! Ventriloquist of the Blue!
While beachward creeps the shark-swept Spanish Main
By what conjunctions do the winds appoint
Its apotheosis, at last -- the hurricane!
Imperator Victus
Big guns again
No speakee well
But plain.
Again, again -
And they shall tell
The Spanish Main
The Dollar from the Cross.
Big guns again.
But peace to thee,
Andean brain.
That defunct boss.
Big guns again,
Atahualpa,
Imperator Inca-
Slain.
The Hurricane
Lo, L-rd, Thou ridest!
L-rd, L-rd, Thy swifting heart
Naught stayeth, naught now bideth
But's smithereened apart!
Ay! Scripture flee'th stone!
Milk-bright, Thy chisel wind
Rescindeth flesh from bone
To quivering whittlings thinned -
Swept - whistling straw! Battered,
L-rd, e'en boulders now out-leap
Rock sockets, levin-lathered!
Nor, L-rd, may worm out-deep
Thy drum's gambade, its plunge abscond!
L-rd G-d, while summits crashing
Whip sea-kelp screaming on blond
Sky-seethe, high heaven dashing-
Thou ridest to the door, L-rd!
Thou bidest wall nor floor, L-rd!
Bacardi Spreads The Eagle's Wings
Pablo and Pedro, and black Serafin
Bought a launch last week. It might as well
Have been made of - well, say paraffin,
- That thin and blistered, just a rotten shell.
"Hell! out there among the barracudas
Their engine stalled. No oars, and leaks
Oozing a-plenty. They sat like baking Buddhas.
Luckily the Cayman schooner streaks
"By just in time, and lifts' em high and dry...
They're back now on that mulching job at Pepper's.
- Yes, patent-leather shoes - hot enough to fry
Anyone but these native high-steppers!"
And Bees Of Paradise
I had come all the way here from the sea,
Yet met the wave again between your arms
Where cliff and citadel- all verily
Dissolved within a sky of beacon forms-
Sea gardens lifted rainbow-wise through eyes
I found.
Yes, tall, inseparably our days
Pass sunward. We have walked the kindled skies
Inexorable and girded with your praise,
By the dove filled, and bees of Paradise.
To Emily Dickinson
You who desired so much - in vain to ask -
Yet fed your hunger like an endless task,
Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest -
Achieved that stillness ultimately best,
Being, of all, least sought for: Emily, hear!
O sweet, dead Silencer, most suddenly clear
When singing that Eternity possessed
And plundered momently in every breast;
- Truly no flower yet withers in your hand,
The harvest you descried and understand
Needs more than wit to gather, love to bind.
Some reconcilement of remotest mind -
Leaves Ormus rubyless, and Ophir chill.
Else tears heap all within one clay-cold hill.
Moment Fugue
The syphilitic selling violets calmly
and daisies
By the subway news-stand knows
how hyacinths
This April morning offers
hurriedly
In bunches sorted freshly --
and bestows
On every purchaser
(of heaven perhaps)
His eyes --
like crutches hurtled against glass
Fall mute and sudden (dealing change
for lilies)
Beyond the roses that the flesh can pass.
To The Cloud Juggler
In Memoriam: Barry Crosby
WHAT you may cluster 'round the knees of space
We hold in vision only, asking trace
Of districts where cliff, sea and palm advance
The falling wonder of a rainbow's trance.
Your light lifts whiteness into virgin azure...
Disclose your lips, O Sun, nor long demure
With snore of thunder, crowding us to bleed
The green preemption of the deep seaweed.
You, the rum-giver to that slide-by-night, -
The moon's best lover,- guide us by a sealight
Of quarts to faithfuls - surely smuggled home -
As you raise temples fresh from basking foam.
Expose vaunted validities that yawn
Past pleasantries...Assert the ripened dawn
As you have yielded balcony and room
Or tempests - in a silver, floating plume.
Key West
Wrap us and lift us; drop us then, returned
Like water, undestroyed,- like mist, unburned...
But do not claim a friend like him again,
Whose arrow must have pierced you beyond pain.
By Nilus Once I Knew...
Some old Egyptian joke is in the air
Dear lady - the poet said - release your hair;
Come, search the marshes for a friendly bed
Or let us bump heads in some lonely shed.
An old Egyptian jest has cramped the tape.
The keyboard no more offers an escape
From the sweet jeopardy of Anthony's plight
You've overruled my typewriter tonight.
Decisive grammar given unto queens,-
An able text, more motion than machines
Have levers for,- stampede it with fresh type
From twenty alphabets - we're still unripe!
This hieroglyph is no dumb, deaf mistake.
It knows it's way through India - tropic shake!
It's Titicaca till we've trod it through
And then it pleads again, "I wish I knew,"
To Shakespeare
Through torrid entrances, past icy poles
A hand moves on the page! Who shall again
Engrave such hazards as thy might controls -
Conflicting, purposeful yet outcry vain
Of all our days, being pilot,- tempest, too!
Sheets that mock lust and thorns that scribble hate
Are lifted from torn flesh with human rue,
And laughter, burnished brighter than our fate,
Thou wieldest with such tears that every faction
Swears high in Hamlet's throat, and devils throng
Where angels beg for doom in ghast distraction
And fall, both! Yet thine Ariel holds his song:
And that serenity that Prospero gains
Is justice that has cancelled earthly chains.
This poem is a variation of:
The Tree
Great William
Through torrid entrances, by icy poles
His hand branches the page! who shall again
Command such hazard. as that trunk controls.
Strident, yet purposeful, those stresses gain
The surest leaves, He'a pilot, -tempest too.
For bolts that shield lust, thorns that scribble hate
He parries, strikes and cancels. Noble rue
With leaved laughter he can bind and mate;
And out of courses challenge desperate faction.
That oath, tempered in Hamlet's throat, is gong
To angels, demons,- both in ghast distraction!
And what of failure - so there's Ariel's song?
The clear serenity that Prospero gains
Is ever acorn in a world of chains.
The Broken Tower
The bell-rope that gathers G-d at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.
Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?
The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!
Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pag-das, campaniles with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope - cleft to despair?
The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) -or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-
And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure…
And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip
Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip
The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.
The Phantom Bark
So dream thy sails, O phantom bark
That I thy drowned man may speak again
Perhaps as once Will Collins spoke the lark,
And leave me half a-dream upon the main.
For who shall lift head up to funnel smoke,
And who trick back the leisured winds again
As they were fought - and wooed? They now but stoke
Their vanity, and dream no land in vain.
Of old there was a promise, and thy sails
Have kept no faith but wind, the cold stream
- The hot fickle wind, the breath of males
Imprisoned never, no not soot or rain.
March
Awake to the cold light
of wet wind running
twigs in tremors. Walls
are naked. Twilights raw --
and when the sun taps steeples
their glistenings dwindle
upward ...
March
slips along the ground
like a mouse under pussy
willows, a little hungry.
The vagrant ghost of winter,
is it this that keeps the chimney
busy still? For something still
nudges shingles and windows:
but waveringly,- this ghost,
this slate-eyed saintly wraith
of winter wanes
and knows its waning.
Old Song
Thine absence overflows the rose, -
From every petal gleam
Such words as it were vain to close,
Such tears as crowd the dream
So eyes that mind thee fair and gone,
Bemused at waking, spend
On skies that gild thy remote dawn
More hopes than here attend.
The burden on the rose will fade
Sped in the spectrum's kiss.
But here the thorn in sharpened shade
Weathers all loneliness.
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