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2006-10-07 - 12:31 a.m.

For the MArriage of Faustus and Helen by Hart Crane

The mind has shown itself at times
Too much the baked and labeled dough
divided by accepted multitudes.
Acroos 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 eventing
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 eveing 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-0riant 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 tlimbs 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-
Beyone their million brittle, bloodshot eyes;
White, through white cityies passed on to assume
That world which comes to each of us alone.
Accept a lone eye riveted to you plane,
Bent axle of devotion along companion ways
That beat, continuous to hourless days-
One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.

 

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