My Grandmother’s Love Letters (by Hart Crane)

Hart Crane, 1899-1932

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

There are no stars tonight
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.




* * * *


“My Grandmother’s Love Letters” was composed circa Nov/Dec 1919 and first published in April 1920
It also appeared in Crane’s 1926 collection White Buildings

For an index of Hart Crane poems in the Crisis Chronicles Online Library, click here.

More Hart Crane is available in these volumes from Amazon:

   

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Pastorale (by Hart Crane)

Hart Crane, 1899-1932

Pastorale

No more violets,
And the year
Broken into smoky panels.
What woods remember now
Her calls, her enthusiasms.

The 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?”


* * * *


“Pastorale” was composed circa July 1921 and first published in October 1921
It also appeared in Crane’s 1926 collection White Buildings

For an index of Hart Crane poems in the Crisis Chronicles Online Library, click here.

More Hart Crane is available in these volumes from Amazon:

   

The Fernery (by Hart Crane)

Hart Crane, 1899-1932


The Fernery

The lights that travel on her spectacles
Seldom, now, meet a mirror in her eyes.
But turning, as you may chance to live 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!

* * * *


“The Fernery” was first published in September 1922
It also appeared in Crane’s 1926 collection White Buildings

For an index of Hart Crane poems in the Crisis Chronicles Online Library, click here.

More Hart Crane is available in these volumes from Amazon:

   

In Shadow (by Hart Crane)

Hart Crane, 1899-1932


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.

* * * *


“In Shadow” composed c. September 1917 and first published in December 1917
It also appeared in Crane’s collection White Buildings

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Praise for an Urn (by Hart Crane)

Hart Crane, 1899-1932


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.

* * * *


“Praise for an Urn” composed 1921-1922, first published in June 1922
It also appeared in Crane’s collection White Buildings

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Legende (by Hart Crane)

Hart Crane, 1899-1932


Legende

The tossing loneliness of many nights
Rounds off my memory of her.
Like a shell surrendered to evening sands,
Yet called adrift again at every dawn,
She has become a pathos,–
Waif of the tides.

The sand and sea have had their way,
And moons of spring and autumn,–
All, save I,
And even my vision will be erased
As a cameo the waves claim again.

* * * *


“Legende” originally appeared in The Modernist, 3 [November 1919]

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Black Tambourine (by Hart Crane)

Hart Crane, 1899-1932


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.

Aesop, 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.

* * * *


“Black Tambourine” composed in 1921
 and first published in June 1921

It also appeared in Crane’s White Buildings (1926)

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North Labrador (by Hart Crane)

Hart Crane, 1899-1932


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 moments
That journey toward the Spring—
No birth, no death, no time nor sun
In answer.

* * * *


“North Labrador” composed in September 1917
and first published in November 1919

It also appeared in Crane’s White Buildings (1926)


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Chaplinesque (by Hart Crane)

Hart Crane, 1899-1932


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.

* * * *


“Chaplinesque” composed and first published in 1921

It also appeared in Crane’s White Buildings (1926)


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Garden Abstract (by Hart Crane)

Hart Crane, 1899-1932

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.




“Garden Abstract” composed and first published in 1920

It also appeared in Crane’s White Buildings (1926)


* * * *

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