Gathered Cables For Hart Crane, A Selection Poem by Warren Falcon

'... 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.' - Hart Crane, from 'Voyages 1'


He's gone crow

said one old poet of another

as if the tongue could matter less by day
than thoughts could mean more by night

entonces

I, Minimus, tongue in cheek,
creak oar, row out too into
Homeric sea, not old Greek
singer, long of breath, but
as Winslow, local seer, his
paints, straw hat consigned
to mistook heroics, pure
accident not to check radio
maritime, ask captain if row
boat worthy of even an

American sea,
a view of distant
bridges busy with light,
motion,

the spanned river,
dark, spinning toward
the deeper East;

a Star there once
a great matter,
one of the better
nights of the world
it is believed.

*
*

It is closing hour.

We lay together, two wrecks, Love,
wooden ships conjoined by forces
too great, too objective to blame.

We stretch beside a shoreline,
eels play in the one rib of our
opened selves, our rarer fingers
share at last, gesture horizon to
stars, even Sun/Moon entwine
before/behind centering a
presumably expanding circumference
curving inwardly toward itself
which is an affection, a longing,
a bottom upon which even God
can lay hidden from secret admirers
such are mirrors whose surfaces
are rarely breached.

But there is reach.

Many ways to say the word

'love'

entonces

'not bad company'
but no quarter to pay
for Virgil's rude company
here, now,

grizzled,
uncensored
keeper of the
Seven Stories of Suds.

The lousy dryer tears my
vestments,

cycles only seven minutes as
is the Seven Rungs a quarter,

just one more,
one thinks, prays,
hopes, fingering
dirty tiles,25 cents,
beneath rusty metal
chairs 'just one more'
to stay warm enough
before further
ventures, slog
confused, wade
through apparent
Hell's Level Two
with damp laundry,

but's a sleety night
in cold Manhattan

*
*

And now come poets each century heavier than
before, heavier than the other few, this new one, too,

only bards, a real few, to bar, board up the big gaps,

O great light gaping torn off, oft thee sung,
slung over shoulder, hauled, the burden,

o the load
it is now become.


I have broken my back lifting
all these my loves up to heaven.

*