Recitative
Regard the capture here, 0 Janus-faced,
As double as the hands that twist this glass.
Such eves at search or rest you cannot see;
Reciting pain or glee, how can you bear!
Twin shadowed halves: the breaking, second holds t,
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.
Harold Hart Crane
Other author posts
The Dance
The swift red flesh, a winter king— Who squired the glacier woman down the sky She ran the neighing canyons all the spring; She spouted arms; she rose with maize—to die And in the autumn drouth, whose burnished hands With mineral wa...
Chaplinesque
We will make our meek adjustments, Contented with such random As the wind In slithered and too ample pockets
Legend
As silent as a mirror is Realities plunge in silence by
Exile
My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands, —No, — nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell', And with the day, distance again Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell Yet, love endures, though starving and alone