Two by Hart Crane

"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.

***

From "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen"

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.