Hart Crane

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 irrefragably, 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 today 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 phoenix’ 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!
 
The imaged Word, it is, that holds  
Hushed willows anchored in its glow.  
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know.
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