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Title: White buildings Author: Hart Crane Contributor: Allen Tate Release date: February 2, 2026 [eBook #77837] Language: English Original publication: NYC: Boni & Liveright, 1926 Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE BUILDINGS ***  White Buildings: Poems by Hart Crane _With a Foreword by_ ALLEN TATE [Illustration] BONI & LIVERIGHT, 1926 COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES [Illustration] To WALDO FRANK Ce ne peut être que la fin du monde, en avançant. -RIMBAUD. Certain of these poems have appeared in the following magazines: _Broom_, _The Dial_, _Double Dealer_, _Fugitive_, _Little Review_, _1924_, _Poetry_, _Secession_, and _The Calendar_ (London). FOREWORD The poetry of Hart Crane is ambitious. It is the only poetry I am acquainted with which is at once contemporary and in the grand manner. It is an American poetry. Crane’s themes are abstractly, metaphysically conceived, but they are definitely confined to an experience of the American scene. In such poems as The Wine Menagerie, For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen, Recitative, he is the poet of the complex urban civilization of his age: precision, abstraction, power. There is no _pastiche_; when he employs symbols from traditional literature, the intention is personally symbolic; it is never falsely pretentious with the common baggage of poetical speech, the properties coveted by the vulgar as inherently poetic. Hart Crane’s first experiments in verse are not, of course, collected in this volume, which contains with one or two exceptions only those poems exhibiting the qualities likely to be permanent in his work. Of these exceptions there is the perfectly written piece of Imagism, Garden Abstract. This poem evinces several properties of the “new poetry” of a decade ago, the merits and the limitations of the Imagists. To the Imagists Crane doubtless went to school in poetry. He learned their structural economy; he followed their rejection of the worn-out poetic phrase; he must have studied the experiments in rhythm of Pound, Aldington, Fletcher. From Pound and Eliot he got his first conception of what it is, in the complete sense, to be contemporary. But Crane suddenly and profoundly broke with the methods of Imagism, with its decorative and fragmentary world. To the conceptual mind a world set up not by inclusive assertion but by exclusive attention to the objects of sense lacks imaginative coördination; a method which refuses to exceed the dry presentation of _petites sensations_ confines the creative vision to suggestions, to implicit indications, but it cannot arrive at the direct affirmation, of a complete world. A series of Imagistic poems is a series of worlds. The poems of Hart Crane are facets of a single vision; they refer to a central imagination, a single evaluating power, which is at once the motive of the poetry and the form of its realization. The poet who tries to release the imagination as an integer of perception attempts the solution of the leading contemporary problem of his art. It would be impertinent to enumerate here the underlying causes of the dissociation of the modern consciousness: the poet no longer apprehends his world as a Whole. The dissociation appears decisively for the first time in Baudelaire. It is the separation of vision and subject; since Baudelaire’s time poets have in some sense been deficient in the one or the other. For the revolt of Rimbaud, in this distinction, was a repudiation of the commonly available themes of poetry, followed by a steady attenuation of vision in the absence of thematic control. Exactly to the extent to which the ready-pmade theme controls the vision, the vision is restricted by tradition and may, to that extent, be defined by tradition. In The Waste Land, which revives the essence of the problem, Mr. Eliot displays vision and subject once more in traditional schemes; the vision for some reason is dissipated, and the subject dead. For while Mr. Eliot might have written a more ambitiously unified poem, the unity would have been false; tradition as unity is not contemporary. The important contemporary poet has the rapidly diminishing privilege of reorganizing the subjects of the past. He must construct and assimilate his own subjects. Dante had only to assimilate his. If the energy of Crane’s vision never quite reaches a sustained maximum, it is because he has not found a suitable theme. To realize even partially, at the present time, the maximum of poetic energy demonstrates an important intention. Crane’s poems are a fresh vision of the world, so intensely personalized in a new creative language that only the strictest and most unprepossessed effort of attention can take it in. Until vision and subject completely fuse, the poems will be difficult. The comprehensiveness and lucidity of any poetry, the capacity for poetry being assumed as proved, are in direct proportion to the availability of a comprehensive and perfectly articulated given theme. Crane wields a sonorous rhetoric that takes the reader to Marlowe and the Elizabethans. His blank verse, the most sustained medium he controls, is pre-Websterian; it is measured, richly textured, rhetorical. But his spiritual allegiances are outside the English tradition. Melville and Whitman are his avowed masters. In his sea poems, Voyages, in Emblems of Conduct, in allusions to the sea throughout his work, there is something of Melville’s intense, transcendental brooding on the mystery of the “high interiors of the sea.” I do not know whether he has mastered Poe’s criticism, yet some of his conviction that the poet should be intensely local must stem from Poe. Most of it, however, he undoubtedly gets from Whitman. Whitman’s range was possible in an America of prophecy; Crane’s America is materially the same, but it approaches a balance of forces; it is a realization; and the poet, confronted with a complex present experience, gains in intensity what he loses in range. The great proportions of the myth have collapsed in its reality. Crane’s poetry is a concentration of certain phases of the Whitman substance, the fragments of the myth. The great difficulty which his poetry presents the reader is the style. It is possible that his style may check the immediate currency of the most distinguished American poetry of the age, for there has been very little preparation in America for a difficult poetry; the Imagistic impressionism of the last ten years has not supplied it. Although Crane is probably not a critical and systematic reader of foreign literatures, his French is better than Whitman’s; he may have learned something from Laforgue and, particularly, Rimbaud; or something of these poets from Miss Sitwell, Mr. Wallace Stevens, or Mr. T. S. Eliot. He shares with Rimbaud the device of oblique presentation of theme. The theme never appears in explicit statement. It is formulated through a series of complex metaphors which defy a paraphrasing of the sense into an equivalent prose. The reader is plunged into a strangely unfamiliar _milieu_ of sensation, and the principle of its organization is not immediately grasped. The _logical_ meaning can never be derived (see Passage, Lachrymae Christi); but the _poetical_ meaning is a direct intuition, realized prior to an explicit knowledge of the subject-matter of the poem. The poem does not _convey_; it _presents_; it is not topical, but expressive. There is the opinion abroad that Crane’s poetry is, in some indefinite sense, “new.” It is likely to be appropriated by one of the several esoteric cults of the American soul. It tends toward the formation of a state of mind, the critical equivalent of which would be in effect an exposure of the confusion and irrelevance of the current journalism of poetry, and of how far behind the creative impulse the critical intelligence, at the moment, lags. It is to be hoped, therefore, that this state of mind, where it may be registered at all, will not at its outset be shunted into a false context of obscure religious values, that a barrier will not be erected between it and the rational order of criticism. For, unless the present critic is deceived as to the structure of his tradition, the well-meaning criticism since Poe has supported a vicious confusion: it has transferred the states of mind of poetry from their proper contexts to the alien contexts of moral and social aspiration. The moral emphasis is valid; but its focus on the consequences of the state of mind, instead of on its properties as art, has throttled a tradition in poetry. The moral values of literature should derive from literature, not from the personal values of the critic; their public circulation in criticism, if they are not ultimately to be rendered inimical to literature, should be controlled by the literary intention. There have been poetries of “genius” in America, but each of these as poetry has been scattered, and converted into an _impasse_ to further extensions of the same order of imagination. A living art is new; it is old. The formula which I have contrived in elucidation of Crane’s difficulty for the reader (a thankless task, since the difficulty inheres equally in him) is a formula for most romantic poetry. Shelley could not have been influenced by Rimbaud, but he wrote this “difficult” verse: _Pinnacled dim in the intense inane._ The present faults of Crane’s poetry (it has its faults: it is not the purpose of this Foreword to disguise them) cannot be isolated in a line-by-line recognition of his difficulty. If the poems are sometimes obscure, the obscurity is structural and deeper. His faults, as I have indicated, lie in the occasional failure of meeting between vision and subject. The vision often strains and overreaches the theme. This fault, common among ambitious poets since Baudelaire, is not unique with them. It appears whenever the existing poetic order no longer supports the imagination. It appeared in the eighteenth century with the poetry of William Blake. ALLEN TATE. CONTENTS PAGE FOREWORD, _by Allen Tate_ xi LEGEND 3 BLACK TAMBOURINE 5 EMBLEMS OF CONDUCT 6 MY GRANDMOTHER’S LOVE LETTERS 7 SUNDAY MORNING APPLES 9 PRAISE FOR AN URN 11 GARDEN ABSTRACT 13 STARK MAJOR 14 CHAPLINEQSUE 16 PASTORALE 18 IN SHADOW 19 THE FERNERY 20 NORTH LABRADOR 21 REPOSE OF RIVERS 22 PARAPHRASE 24 POSSESSIONS 25 LACHRYMAE CHRISTI 27 PASSAGE 30 THE WINE MENAGERIE 32 RECITATIVE 35 FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN 37 AT MELVILLE’S TOMB 45 VOYAGES, I, II, III, IV, V, VI 49 _White Buildings_ WHITE BUILDINGS LEGEND As silent as a mirror is believed Realities plunge in silence by.... I am not ready for repentance; Nor to match regrets. For the moth Bends no more than the still Imploring flame. And tremorous In the white falling flakes Kisses are,-- The only worth all granting. It is to be learned-- This cleaving and this burning, But only by the one who Spends out himself again. Twice and twice (Again the smoking souvenir, Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again. Until the bright logic is won Unwhispering as a mirror Is believed. Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry Shall string some constant harmony,-- Relentless caper for all those who step The legend of their youth into the noon. BLACK TAMBOURINE The interests of a black man in a cellar Mark tardy judgment on the world’s closed door. Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle, And a roach spans a crevice in the floor. Æsop, driven to pondering, found Heaven with the tortoise and the hare; Fox brush and sow ear top his grave And mingling incantations on the air. The black man, forlorn in the cellar, Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies, Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall, And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies. EMBLEMS OF CONDUCT By a peninsula the wanderer sat and sketched The uneven valley graves. While the apostle gave Alms to the meek the volcano burst With sulphur and aureate rocks ... For joy rides in stupendous coverings Luring the living into spiritual gates. Orators follow the universe And radio the complete laws to the people. The apostle conveys thought through discipline. Bowls and cups fill historians with adorations,-- Dull lips commemorating spiritual gates. The wanderer later chose this spot of rest Where marble clouds support the sea And where was finally borne a chosen hero. By that time summer and smoke were past. Dolphins still played, arching the horizons, But only to build memories of spiritual gates. MY GRANDMOTHER’S LOVE LETTERS There are no stars to-night But those of memory. Yet how much room for memory there is In the loose girdle of soft rain. There is even room enough For the letters of my mother’s mother, Elizabeth, That have been pressed so long Into a corner of the roof That they are brown and soft, And liable to melt as snow. Over the greatness of such space Steps must be gentle. It is all hung by an invisible white hair. It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air. And I ask myself: “Are your fingers long enough to play Old keys that are but echoes: Is the silence strong enough To carry back the music to its source And back to you again As though to her?” Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand Through much of what she would not understand; And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof With such a sound of gently pitying laughter. SUNDAY MORNING APPLES _To William Sommer_ The leaves will fall again sometime and fill The fleece of nature with those purposes That are your rich and faithful strength of line. But now there are challenges to spring In that ripe nude with head reared Into a realm of swords, her purple shadow Bursting on the winter of the world From whiteness that cries defiance to the snow. A boy runs with a dog before the sun, straddling Spontaneities that form their independent orbits, Their own perennials of light In the valley where you live (called Brandywine). I have seen the apples there that toss you secrets,-- Beloved apples of seasonable madness That feed your inquiries with aerial wine. Put them again beside a pitcher with a knife, And poise them full and ready for explosion-- The apples, Bill, the apples! PRAISE FOR AN URN _In Memoriam: Ernest Nelson_ It was a kind and northern face That mingled in such exile guise The everlasting eyes of Pierrot And, of Gargantua, the laughter. His thoughts, delivered to me From the white coverlet and pillow, I see now, were inheritances-- Delicate riders of the storm. The slant moon on the slanting hill Once moved us toward presentiments Of what the dead keep, living still, And such assessments of the soul As, perched in the crematory lobby, The insistent clock commented on, Touching as well upon our praise Of glories proper to the time. Still, having in mind gold hair, I cannot see that broken brow And miss the dry sound of bees Stretching across a lucid space. Scatter these well-meant idioms Into the smoky spring that fills The suburbs, where they will be lost. They are no trophies of the sun. GARDEN ABSTRACT The apple on its bough is her desire,-- Shining suspension, mimic of the sun. The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice, Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes. She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers. And so she comes to dream herself the tree, The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins, Holding her to the sky and its quick blue, Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight. She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet. STARK MAJOR The lover’s death, how regular With lifting spring and starker Vestiges of the sun that somehow Filter in to us before we waken. Not yet is there that heat and sober Vivisection of more clamant air That hands joined in the dark will answer After the daily circuits of its glare. It is the time of sundering ... Beneath the green silk counterpane Her mound of undelivered life Lies cool upon her--not yet pain. And she will wake before you pass, Scarcely aloud, beyond her door, And every third step down the stair Until you reach the muffled floor-- Will laugh and call your name; while you Still answering her faint good-byes, Will find the street, only to look At doors and stone with broken eyes. Walk now, and note the lover’s death. Henceforth her memory is more Than yours, in cries, in ecstasies You cannot ever reach to share. CHAPLINESQUE We make our meek adjustments, Contented with such random consolations As the wind deposits In slithered and too ample pockets. For we can still love the world, who find A famished kitten on the step, and know Recesses for it from the fury of the street, Or warm torn elbow coverts. We will sidestep, and to the final smirk Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, Facing the dull squint with what innocence And what surprise! And yet these fine collapses are not lies More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane; Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise. We can evade you, and all else but the heart: What blame to us if the heart live on. The game enforces smirks; but we have seen The moon in lonely alleys make A grail of laughter of an empty ash can, And through all sound of gaiety and quest Have heard a kitten in the wilderness. PASTORALE No more violets, And the year Broken into smoky panels. What woods remember now Her calls, her enthusiasms. That ritual of sap and leaves The sun drew out, Ends in this latter muffled Bronze and brass. The wind Takes rein. If, dusty, I bear An image beyond this Already fallen harvest, I can only query, “Fool-- Have you remembered too long; Or was there too little said For ease or resolution-- Summer scarcely begun And violets, A few picked, the rest dead?” IN SHADOW Out in the late amber afternoon, Confused among chrysanthemums, Her parasol, a pale balloon, Like a waiting moon, in shadow swims. Her furtive lace and misty hair Over the garden dial distill The sunlight,--then withdrawing, wear Again the shadows at her will. Gently yet suddenly, the sheen Of stars inwraps her parasol. She hears my step behind the green Twilight, stiller than shadows, fall. “Come, it is too late,--too late To risk alone the light’s decline: Nor has the evening long to wait,”-- But her own words are night’s and mine. THE FERNERY The lights that travel on her spectacles Seldom, now, meet a mirror in her eyes. But turning, as you may chance to lift a shade Beside her and her fernery, is to follow The zigzags fast around dry lips composed To darkness through a wreath of sudden pain. --So, while fresh sunlight splinters humid green I have known myself a nephew to confusions That sometimes take up residence and reign In crowns less grey--O merciless tidy hair! NORTH LABRADOR A land of leaning ice Hugged by plaster-grey arches of sky, Flings itself silently Into eternity. “Has no one come here to win you, Or left you with the faintest blush Upon your glittering breasts? Have you no memories, O Darkly Bright?” Cold-hushed, there is only the shifting of moments That journey toward no Spring-- No birth, no death, no time nor sun In answer. REPOSE OF RIVERS The willows carried a slow sound, A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead. I could never remember That seething, steady leveling of the marshes Till age had brought me to the sea. Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves Where cypresses shared the noon’s Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost. And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them Asunder.... How much I would have bartered! the black gorge And all the singular nestings in the hills Where beavers learn stitch and tooth. The pond I entered once and quickly fled-- I remember now its singing willow rim. And finally, in that memory all things nurse; After the city that I finally passed With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts The monsoon cut across the delta At gulf gates.... There, beyond the dykes I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer, And willows could not hold more steady sound. PARAPHRASE Of a steady winking beat between Systole, diastole spokes-of-a-wheel One rushing from the bed at night May find the record wedged in his soul. Above the feet the clever sheets Lie guard upon the integers of life: For what skims in between uncurls the toe, Involves the hands in purposeless repose. But from its bracket how can the tongue tell When systematic morn shall sometime flood The pillow--how desperate is the light That shall not rouse, how faint the crow’s cavil As, when stunned in that antarctic blaze, Your head, unrocking to a pulse, already Hollowed by air, posts a white paraphrase Among bruised roses on the papered wall. POSSESSIONS Witness now this trust! the rain That steals softly direction And the key, ready to hand--sifting One moment in sacrifice (the direst) Through a thousand nights the flesh Assaults outright for bolts that linger Hidden,--O undirected as the sky That through its black foam has no eyes For this fixed stone of lust.... Accumulate such moments to an hour: Account the total of this trembling tabulation. I know the screen, the distant flying taps And stabbing medley that sways-- And the mercy, feminine, that stays As though prepared. And I, entering, take up the stone As quiet as you can make a man ... In Bleecker Street, still trenchant in a void, Wounded by apprehensions out of speech, I hold it up against a disk of light-- I, turning, turning on smoked forking spires, The city’s stubborn lives, desires. Tossed on these horns, who bleeding dies, Lacks all but piteous admissions to be spilt Upon the page whose blind sum finally burns Record of rage and partial appetites. The pure possession, the inclusive cloud Whose heart is fire shall come,--the white wind rase All but bright stones wherein our smiling plays. LACHRYMAE CHRISTI Whitely, while benzine Rinsings from the moon Dissolve all but the windows of the mills (Inside the sure machinery Is still And curdled only where a sill Sluices its one unyielding smile) Immaculate venom binds The fox’s teeth, and swart Thorns freshen on the year’s First blood. From flanks unfended, Twanged red perfidies of spring Are trillion on the hill. And the nights opening Chant pyramids,-- Anoint with innocence,--recall To music and retrieve what perjuries Had galvanized the eyes. While chime Beneath and all around Distilling clemencies,--worms’ Inaudible whistle, tunneling Not penitence But song, as these Perpetual fountains, vines,-- Thy Nazarene and tinder eyes. (Let sphinxes from the ripe Borage of death have cleared my tongue Once and again; vermin and rod No longer bind. Some sentient cloud Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam: Betrayed stones slowly speak.) Names peeling from Thine eyes And their undimming lattices of flame, Spell out in palm and pain Compulsion of the year, O Nazarene. Lean long from sable, slender boughs, Unstanched and luminous. And as the nights Strike from Thee perfect spheres, Lift up in lilac-emerald breath the grail Of earth again-- Thy face From charred and riven stakes, O Dionysus, Thy Unmangled target smile. PASSAGE Where the cedar leaf divides the sky I heard the sea. In sapphire arenas of the hills I was promised an improved infancy. Sulking, sanctioning the sun, My memory I left in a ravine,-- Casual louse that tissues the buckwheat, Aprons rocks, congregates pears In moonlit bushels And wakens alleys with a hidden cough. Dangerously the summer burned (I had joined the entrainments of the wind). The shadows of boulders lengthened my back: In the bronze gongs of my cheeks The rain dried without odour. “It is not long, it is not long; See where the red and black Vine-stanchioned valleys--”: but the wind Died speaking through the ages that you know And hug, chimney-sooted heart of man! So was I turned about and back, much as your smoke Compiles a too well known biography. The evening was a spear in the ravine That throve through very oak. And had I walked The dozen particular decimals of time? Touching an opening laurel, I found A thief beneath, my stolen book in hand. “Why are you back here--smiling an iron coffin?” “To argue with the laurel,” I replied: “Am justified in transience, fleeing Under the constant wonder of your eyes--.” He closed the book. And from the Ptolemies Sand troughed us in a glittering abyss. A serpent swam a vertex to the sun --On unpaced beaches leaned its tongue and drummed. What fountains did I hear? what icy speeches? Memory, committed to the page, had broke. THE WINE MENAGERIE Invariably when wine redeems the sight, Narrowing the mustard scansions of the eyes, A leopard ranging always in the brow Asserts a vision in the slumbering gaze. Then glozening decanters that reflect the street Wear me in crescents on their bellies. Slow Applause flows into liquid cynosures: --I am conscripted to their shadows’ glow. Against the imitation onyx wainscoting (Painted emulsion of snow, eggs, yarn, coal, manure) Regard the forceps of the smile that takes her. Percussive sweat is spreading to his hair. Mallets, Her eyes, unmake an instant of the world.... What is it in this heap the serpent pries-- Whose skin, facsimile of time, unskeins Octagon, sapphire transepts round the eyes; --From whom some whispered carillon assures Speed to the arrow into feathered skies? Sharp to the windowpane guile drags a face, And as the alcove of her jealousy recedes An urchin who has left the snow Nudges a cannister across the bar While August meadows somewhere clasp his brow. Each chamber, transept, coins some squint, Remorseless line, minting their separate wills-- Poor streaked bodies wreathing up and out, Unwitting the stigma that each turn repeals: Between black tusks the roses shine! New thresholds, new anatomies! Wine talons Build freedom up about me and distill This competence--to travel in a tear Sparkling alone, within another’s will. Until my blood dreams a receptive smile Wherein new purities are snared; where chimes Before some flame of gaunt repose a shell Tolled once, perhaps, by every tongue in hell. --Anguished, the wit that cries out of me: “Alas,--these frozen billows of your skill! Invent new dominoes of love and bile ... Ruddy, the tooth implicit of the world Has followed you. Though in the end you know And count some dim inheritance of sand, How much yet meets the treason of the snow. “Rise from the dates and crumbs. And walk away, Stepping over Holofernes’ shins-- Beyond the wall, whose severed head floats by With Baptist John’s. Their whispering begins. “--And fold your exile on your back again; Petrushka’s valentine pivots on its pin.” RECITATIVE Regard the capture here, O Janus-faced, As double as the hands that twist this glass. Such eyes at search or rest you cannot see; Reciting pain or glee, how can you bear! Twin shadowed halves: the breaking second holds In each the skin alone, and so it is I crust a plate of vibrant mercury Borne cleft to you, and brother in the half. Inquire this much-exacting fragment smile, Its drums and darkest blowing leaves ignore,-- Defer though, revocation of the tears That yield attendance to one crucial sign. Look steadily--how the wind feasts and spins The brain’s disk shivered against lust. Then watch While darkness, like an ape’s face, falls away, And gradually white buildings answer day. Let the same nameless gulf beleaguer us-- Alike suspend us from atrocious sums Built floor by floor on shafts of steel that grant The plummet heart, like Absalom, no stream. The highest tower,--let her ribs palisade Wrenched gold of Nineveh;--yet leave the tower. The bridge swings over salvage, beyond wharves; A wind abides the ensign of your will.... In alternating bells have you not heard All hours clapped dense into a single stride? Forgive me for an echo of these things, And let us walk through time with equal pride. FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN “_And so we may arrive by Talmud skill And profane Greek to raise the building up Of Helen’s house against the Ismaelite, King of Thogarma, and his habergeons Brimstony, blue and fiery; and the force Of King Abaddon, and the beast of Cittim; Which Rabbi David Kimchi, Onkelos, And Aben Ezra do interpret Rome._” --THE ALCHEMIST. I The mind has shown itself at times Too much the baked and labeled dough Divided by accepted multitudes. Across the stacked partitions of the day-- Across the memoranda, baseball scores, The stenographic smiles and stock quotations Smutty wings flash out equivocations. The mind is brushed by sparrow wings; Numbers, rebuffed by asphalt, crowd The margins of the day, accent the curbs, Convoying divers dawns on every corner To druggist, barber and tobacconist, Until the graduate opacities of evening Take them away as suddenly to somewhere Virginal perhaps, less fragmentary, cool. _There is the world dimensional for those untwisted by the love of things irreconcilable._ ... And yet, suppose some evening I forgot The fare and transfer, yet got by that way Without recall,--lost yet poised in traffic. Then I might find your eyes across an aisle, Still flickering with those prefigurations-- Prodigal, yet uncontested now, Half-riant before the jerky window frame. There is some way, I think, to touch Those hands of yours that count the nights Stippled with pink and green advertisements. And now, before its arteries turn dark I would have you meet this bartered blood. Imminent in his dream, none better knows The white wafer cheek of love, or offers words Lightly as moonlight on the eaves meets snow. Reflective conversion of all things At your deep blush, when ecstasies thread The limbs and belly, when rainbows spread Impinging on the throat and sides.... Inevitable, the body of the world Weeps in inventive dust for the hiatus That winks above it, bluet in your breasts. The earth may glide diaphanous to death; But if I lift my arms it is to bend To you who turned away once, Helen, knowing The press of troubled hands, too alternate With steel and soil to hold you endlessly. I meet you, therefore, in that eventual flame You found in final chains, no captive then-- Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes; White, through white cities passed on to assume That world which comes to each of us alone. Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane, Bent axle of devotion along companion ways That beat, continuous, to hourless days-- One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise. II Brazen hypnotics glitter here; Glee shifts from foot to foot, Magnetic to their tremulo. This crashing opera bouffe, Blest excursion! this ricochet From roof to roof-- Know, Olympians, we are breathless While nigger cupids scour the stars! A thousand light shrugs balance us Through snarling hails of melody. White shadows slip across the floor Splayed like cards from a loose hand; Rhythmic ellipses lead into canters Until somewhere a rooster banters. Greet naïvely--yet intrepidly New soothings, new amazements That cornets introduce at every turn-- And you may fall downstairs with me With perfect grace and equanimity. Or, plaintively scud past shores Where, by strange harmonic laws All relatives, serene and cool, Sit rocked in patent armchairs. O, I have known metallic paradises Where cuckoos clucked to finches Above the deft catastrophes of drums. While titters hailed the groans of death Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen The incunabula of the divine grotesque. This music has a reassuring way. The siren of the springs of guilty song-- Let us take her on the incandescent wax Striated with nuances, nervosities That we are heir to: she is still so young, We cannot frown upon her as she smiles, Dipping here in this cultivated storm Among slim skaters of the gardened skies. III Capped arbiter of beauty in this street That narrows darkly into motor dawn,-- You, here beside me, delicate ambassador Of intricate slain numbers that arise In whispers, naked of steel; religious gunman! Who faithfully, yourself, will fall too soon, And in other ways than as the wind settles On the sixteen thrifty bridges of the city: Let us unbind our throats of fear and pity. We even, Who drove speediest destruction In corymbulous formations of mechanics,-- Who hurried the hill breezes, spouting malice Plangent over meadows, and looked down On rifts of torn and empty houses Like old women with teeth unjubilant That waited faintly, briefly and in vain: We know, eternal gunman, our flesh remembers The tensile boughs, the nimble blue plateaus, The mounted, yielding cities of the air! That saddled sky that shook down vertical Repeated play of fire--no hypogeum Of wave or rock was good against one hour. We did not ask for that, but have survived And will persist to speak again before All stubble streets that have not curved To memory, or known the ominous lifted arm That lowers down the arc of Helen’s brow To saturate with blessing and dismay. A goose, tobacco and cologne-- Three winged and gold-shod prophecies of heaven, The lavish heart shall always have to leaven And spread with bells and voices, and atone The abating shadows of our conscript dust. Anchises’ navel, dripping of the sea,-- The hands Erasmus dipped in gleaming tides, Gathered the voltage of blown blood and vine; Delve upward for the new and scattered wine, O brother-thief of time, that we recall. Laugh out the meager penance of their days Who dare not share with us the breath released, The substance drilled and spent beyond repair For golden, or the shadow of gold hair. Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height The imagination spans beyond despair, Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer. AT MELVILLE’S TOMB Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath An embassy. Their numbers as he watched, Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured. And wrecks passed without sound of bells, The calyx of death’s bounty giving back A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph, The portent wound in corridors of shells. Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil, Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled, Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars; And silent answers crept across the stars. Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive No farther tides.... High in the azure steeps Monody shall not wake the mariner. This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps. VOYAGES I Above the fresh ruffles of the surf Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand. They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks, And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed Gaily digging and scattering. And in answer to their treble interjections The sun beats lightning on the waves, The waves fold thunder on the sand; And could they hear me I would tell them: O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog, Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached By time and the elements; but there is a line You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast. The bottom of the sea is cruel. II --And yet this great wink of eternity, Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings, Samite sheeted and processioned where Her undinal vast belly moonward bends, Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love; Take this Sea, whose diapason knells On scrolls of silver snowy sentences, The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends As her demeanors motion well or ill, All but the pieties of lovers’ hands. And onward, as bells off San Salvador Salute the crocus lustres of the stars, In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,-- Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal, Complete the dark confessions her veins spell. Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours, And hasten while her penniless rich palms Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,-- Hasten, while they are true,--sleep, death, desire, Close round one instant in one floating flower. Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe. O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, Bequeath us to no earthly shore until Is answered in the vortex of our grave The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise. III Infinite consanguinity it bears-- This tendered theme of you that light Retrieves from sea plains where the sky Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones; While ribboned water lanes I wind Are laved and scattered with no stroke Wide from your side, whereto this hour The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands. And so, admitted through black swollen gates That must arrest all distance otherwise,-- Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, Light wrestling there incessantly with light, Star kissing star through wave on wave unto Your body rocking! and where death, if shed, Presumes no carnage, but this single change,-- Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn The silken skilled transmemberment of song; Permit me voyage, love, into your hands.... IV Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe Chilled albatross’s white immutability) No stream of greater love advancing now Than, singing, this mortality alone Through clay aflow immortally to you. All fragrance irrefragibly, and claim Madly meeting logically in this hour And region that is ours to wreathe again, Portending eyes and lips and making told The chancel port and portion of our June-- Shall they not stem and close in our own steps Bright staves of flowers and quills to-day as I Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell? In signature of the incarnate word The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown And widening noon within your breast for gathering All bright insinuations that my years have caught For islands where must lead inviolably Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,-- In this expectant, still exclaim receive The secret oar and petals of all love. V Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime, Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast Together in one merciless white blade-- The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits. --As if too brittle or too clear to touch! The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed, Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars. One frozen trackless smile.... What words Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge, Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved And changed.... “There’s Nothing like this in the world,” you say, Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look Too, into that godless cleft of sky Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing. “--And never to quite understand!” No, In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed Nothing so flagless as this piracy. But now Draw in your head, alone and too tall here. Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam; Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know: Draw in your head and sleep the long way home. VI Where icy and bright dungeons lift Of swimmers their lost morning eyes, And ocean rivers, churning, shift Green borders under stranger skies, Steadily as a shell secretes Its beating leagues of monotone, Or as many waters trough the sun’s Red kelson past the cape’s wet stone; O rivers mingling toward the sky And harbor of the phœnix’ breast-- My eyes pressed black against the prow, --Thy derelict and blinded guest Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke, I cannot claim: let thy waves rear More savage than the death of kings, Some splintered garland for the seer. Beyond siroccos harvesting The solstice thunders, crept away, Like a cliff swinging or a sail Flung into April’s inmost day-- Creation’s blithe and petalled word To the lounged goddess when she rose Conceding dialogue with eyes That smile unsearchable repose-- Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle, --Unfolded floating dais before Which rainbows twine continual hair-- Belle Isle, white echo of the oar! 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