Hart Crane, in a poem. And my ode to him below.
To Hart Crane
By John Healy Murray
Far past the golden stabs of this lighted shore
Drifts the matter of one heart, ground into pulp
By the tide’s insatiable tongue. This titanic diaspora
Of remotest mind falls to climb the leaven heights
Of that long, aquatic, inviolable night.
Of the gulf he made a living grave, forgoing
The spectacle of public spade. He could no more
Live by laughter! . . . Now he chuckles with the sea,
Stitched within its timeless jive.
He did and he died like a storm in the night:
Yesterday’s tomorrow he resurrected alone, in a vision
No plan could recommend. Because he drove himself to poetry,
Into the amatory agon of this hurting sport,
Refusing the comfort of common cause, to tour,
Instead, the divided mind’s private hell.
The possum outlived him only in years.
Coiling lightning in his veins, blooming thunder
On the page, he neighbored unfriendly words
In ecstatic phrase, which will beat each other senseless
Through all their coming days, until
A new ignorance of eternity is gained—
How could mere toil have sponsored such lines!
Now in this talented hour, when we still know death,
And can still kindle dread in the anteroom of flesh,
Let our foolish tongues of burning want
Hammer blest announcements in each verbal trade,
As we sing in turn his natal praise, as sibling tremors
Of the common blaze, but without thou
Broken poet—without you who made
A tempest of the page, yet a pilot of this pen, until
Goodbye, goodbye, you said and went, seeking
Your sense of the sun.
Where the waters meet the light
Along that horizon you thought a shrine—
For so swam a friend into darkness.