The Bridge Poem Text

The Bridge Poem Text

To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest

The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,

Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes

As apparitional as sails that cross

Some page of figures to be filed away;

—Till elevators drop us from our day ...

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights

With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene

Never disclosed, but hastened to again,

Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver paced

As though the sun took step of thee yet left

Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—

Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft

A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,

Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,

A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,

A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene;

All afternoon the cloud flown derricks turn ...

Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,

Thy guerdon ... Accolade thou dost bestow

Of anonymity time cannot raise:

Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,

(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)

Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,

Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift

Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,

Beading thy path—condense eternity:

And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited

Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

The City’s fiery parcels all undone,

Already snow submerges an iron year ...

O Sleepless as the river under thee,

Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,

Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

And of the curveship lend a myth to God

Atlantis

Through the bound cable strands, the arching path

Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,—

Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate

The whispered rush, telepathy of wires.

Up the index of night, granite and steel—

Transparent meshes—fleckless the gleaming staves—

Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream

As though a god were issue of the strings. . . .

And through that cordage, threading with its call

One arc synoptic of all tides below—

Their labyrinthine mouths of history

Pouring reply as though all ships at sea

Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry,—

“Make thy love sure—to weave whose song we ply!”

—From black embankments, moveless soundings hailed,

So seven oceans answer from their dream.

And on, obliquely up bright carrier bars

New octaves trestle the twin monoliths

Beyond whose frosted capes the moon bequeaths

Two worlds of sleep (O arching strands of song!)—

Onward and up the crystal-flooded aisle

White tempest nets file upward, upward ring

With silver terraces the humming spars,

The loft of vision, palladium helm of stars.

Sheerly the eyes, like seagulls stung with rime—

Slit and propelled by glistening fins of light—

Pick biting way up towering looms that press

Sidelong with flight of blade on tendon blade

—Tomorrows into yesteryear—and link

What cipher-script of time no traveller reads

But who, through smoking pyres of love and death,

Searches the timeless laugh of mythic spears.

Like hails, farewells—up planet-sequined heights

Some trillion whispering hammers glimmer Tyre:

Serenely, sharply up the long anvil cry

Of inchling aeons silence rivets Troy.

And you, aloft there—Jason! hesting Shout!

Still wrapping harness to the swarming air!

Silvery the rushing wake, surpassing call,

Beams yelling Aeolus! splintered in the straits!

From gulfs unfolding, terrible of drums,

Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, tensely spare—

Bridge, lifting night to cycloramic crest

Of deepest day—O Choir, translating time

Into what multitudinous Verb the suns

And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast

In myriad syllables,—Psalm of Cathay!

O Love, thy white, pervasive Paradigm . . . !

We left the haven hanging in the night

Sheened harbor lanterns backward fled the keel.

Pacific here at time’s end, bearing corn,—

Eyes stammer through the pangs of dust and steel.

And still the circular, indubitable frieze

Of heaven’s meditation, yoking wave

To kneeling wave, one song devoutly binds—

The vernal strophe chimes from deathless strings!

O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits

The agile precincts of the lark’s return;

Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing

In single chrysalis the many twain,—

Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow

And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom—

Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time’s realm

As love strikes clear direction for the helm.

Swift peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth

Whose fell unshadow is death’s utter wound,—

O River-throated—iridescently upborne

Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins;

With white escarpments swinging into light,

Sustained in tears the cities are endowed

And justified conclamant with ripe fields

Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment.

Forever Deity’s glittering Pledge, O Thou

Whose canticle fresh chemistry assigns

To wrapt inception and beatitude,—

Always through blinding cables, to our joy,

Of thy white seizure springs the prophecy:

Always through spiring cordage, pyramids

Of silver sequel, Deity’s young name

Kinetic of white choiring wings . . . ascends.

Migrations that must needs void memory,

Inventions that cobblestone the heart,—

Unspeakable Thou Bridge to Thee, O Love.

Thy pardon for this history, whitest Flower,

O Answerer of all,—Anemone,—

Now while thy petals spend the suns about us, hold—

(O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me)

Atlantis,—hold thy floating singer late!

So to thine Everpresence, beyond time,

Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star

That bleeds infinity—the orphic strings,

Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge:

—One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay,

Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring

The serpent with the eagle in the leaves. . . . ?

Whispers antiphonal in azure swing.

The Tunnel

Performances, assortments, résumés—

Up Times Square to Columbus Circle lights

Channel the congresses, nightly sessions,

Refractions of the thousand theatres, faces—

Mysterious kitchens. . . . You shall search them all.

Someday by heart you’ll learn each famous sight

And watch the curtain lift in hell’s despite;

You’ll find the garden in the third act dead,

Finger your knees—and wish yourself in bed

With tabloid crime-sheets perched in easy sight.

Then let you reach your hat

and go.

As usual, let you—also

walking down—exclaim

to twelve upward leaving

a subscription praise

for what time slays.

Or can’t you quite make up your mind to ride;

A walk is better underneath the L a brisk

Ten blocks or so before? But you find yourself

Preparing penguin flexions of the arms,—

As usual you will meet the scuttle yawn:

The subway yawns the quickest promise home.

Be minimum, then, to swim the hiving swarms

Out of the Square, the Circle burning bright—

Avoid the glass doors gyring at your right,

Where boxed alone a second, eyes take fright

—Quite unprepared rush naked back to light:

And down beside the turnstile press the coin

Into the slot. The gongs already rattle.

And so

of cities you bespeak

subways, rivered under streets

and rivers. . . . In the car

the overtone of motion

underground, the monotone

of motion is the sound

of other faces, also underground—

“Let’s have a pencil Jimmy—living now

at Floral Park

Flatbush—on the fourth of July—

like a pigeon’s muddy dream—potatoes

to dig in the field—travlin the town—too—

night after night—the Culver line—the

girls all shaping up—it used to be—”

Our tongues recant like beaten weather vanes.

This answer lives like verdigris, like hair

Beyond extinction, surcease of the bone;

And repetition freezes—“What

“what do you want? getting weak on the links?

fandaddle daddy don’t ask for change—IS THIS

FOURTEENTH it’s half past six she said—if

you don’t like my gate why did you

swing on it, why didja

swing on it

anyhow—”

And somehow anyhow swing—

The phonographs of hades in the brain

Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love

A burnt match skating in a urinal—

Somewhere above Fourteenth TAKE THE EXPRESS

To brush some new presentiment of pain—

“But I want service in this office SERVICE

I said—after

the show she cried a little afterwards but—”

Whose head is swinging from the swollen strap?

Whose body smokes along the bitten rails,

Bursts from a smoldering bundle far behind

In back forks of the chasms of the brain,—

Puffs from a riven stump far out behind

In interborough fissures of the mind . . . ?

And why do I often meet your visage here,

Your eyes like agate lanterns—on and on

Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?

—And did their riding eyes right through your side,

And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?

And Death, aloft,—gigantically down

Probing through you—toward me, O evermore!

And when they dragged your retching flesh,

Your trembling hands that night through Baltimore—

That last night on the ballot rounds, did you,

Shaking, did you deny the ticket, Poe?

For Gravesend Manor change at Chambers Street.

The platform hurries along to a dead stop.

The intent escalator lifts a serenade

Stilly

Of shoes, umbrellas, each eye attending its shoe, then

Bolting outright somewhere above where streets

Burst suddenly in rain. . . . The gongs recur:

Elbows and levers, guard and hissing door.

Thunder is galvothermic here below. . . . The car

Wheels off. The train rounds, bending to a scream,

Taking the final level for the dive

Under the river—

And somewhat emptier than before,

Demented, for a hitching second, humps; then

Lets go. . . . Toward corners of the floor

Newspapers wing, revolve and wing.

Blank windows gargle signals through the roar.

And does the Daemon take you home, also,

Wop washerwoman, with the bandaged hair?

After the corridors are swept, the cuspidors—

The gaunt sky-barracks cleanly now, and bare,

O Genoese, do you bring mother eyes and hands

Back home to children and to golden hair?

Daemon, demurring and eventful yawn!

Whose hideous laughter is a bellows mirth

—Or the muffled slaughter of a day in birth—

O cruelly to inoculate the brinking dawn

With antennae toward worlds that glow and sink;—

To spoon us out more liquid than the dim

Locution of the eldest star, and pack

The conscience navelled in the plunging wind,

Umbilical to call—and straightway die!

O caught like pennies beneath soot and steam,

Kiss of our agony thou gatherest;

Condensed, thou takest all—shrill ganglia

Impassioned with some song we fail to keep.

And yet, like Lazarus, to feel the slope,

The sod and billow breaking,—lifting ground,

—A sound of waters bending astride the sky

Unceasing with some Word that will not die . . . !

. . . . .

A tugboat, wheezing wreaths of steam,

Lunged past, with one galvanic blare stove up the River.

I counted the echoes assembling, one after one,

Searching, thumbing the midnight on the piers.

Lights, coasting, left the oily tympanum of waters;

The blackness somewhere gouged glass on a sky.

And this thy harbor, O my City, I have driven under,

Tossed from the coil of ticking towers. . . . Tomorrow,

And to be. . . . Hereby the River that is East—

Here at the waters’ edge the hands drop memory;

Shadowless in that abyss they unaccounting lie.

How far away the star has pooled the sea—

Or shall the hands be drawn away, to die?

Kiss of our agony Thou gatherest,

O Hand of Fire

gatherest—

Quaker Hill

Perspective never withers from their eyes;

They keep that docile edict of the Spring

That blends March with August Antarctic skies:

These are but cows that see no other thing

Than grass and snow, and their own inner being

Through the rich halo that they do not trouble

Even to cast upon the seasons fleeting

Though they should thin and die on last year’s stubble.

And they are awkward, ponderous and uncoy . . .

While we who press the cider mill, regarding them—

We, who with pledges taste the bright annoy

Of friendship’s acid wine, retarding phlegm,

Shifting reprisals (’til who shall tell us when

The jest is too sharp to be kindly?) boast

Much of our store of faith in other men

Who would, ourselves, stalk down the merriest ghost.

Above them old Mizzentop, palatial white

Hostelry—floor by floor to cinquefoil dormer

Portholes the ceilings stack their stoic height.

Long tiers of windows staring out toward former

Faces—loose panes crown the hill and gleam

At sunset with a silent, cobwebbed patience . . .

See them, like eyes that still uphold some dream

Through mapled vistas, cancelled reservations!

High from the central cupola, they say

One’s glance could cross the borders of three states;

But I have seen death’s stare in slow survey

From four horizons that no one relates . . .

Weekenders avid of their turf-won scores,

Here three hours from the semaphores, the Czars

Of golf, by twos and threes in plaid plusfours

Alight with sticks abristle and cigars.

This was the Promised Land, and still it is

To the persuasive suburban land agent

In bootleg roadhouses where the gin fizz

Bubbles in time to Hollywood’s new love-nest pageant.

Fresh from the radio in the old Meeting House

(Now the New Avalon Hotel) volcanoes roar

A welcome to highsteppers that no mouse

Who saw the Friends there ever heard before.

What cunning neighbors history has in fine!

The woodlouse mortgages the ancient deal

Table that Powitzky buys for only nine-

Ty-five at Adams’ auction,—eats the seal,

The spinster polish of antiquity . . .

Who holds the lease on time and on disgrace?

What eats the pattern with ubiquity?

Where are my kinsmen and the patriarch race?

The resigned factions of the dead preside.

Dead rangers bled their comfort on the snow;

But I must ask slain Iroquois to guide

Me farther than scalped Yankees knew to go:

Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage,

Wait for the postman driving from Birch Hill

With birthright by blackmail, the arrant page

That unfolds a new destiny to fill . . . .

So, must we from the hawk’s far stemming view,

Must we descend as worm’s eye to construe

Our love of all we touch, and take it to the Gate

As humbly as a guest who knows himself too late,

His news already told? Yes, while the heart is wrung,

Arise—yes, take this sheaf of dust upon your tongue!

In one last angelus lift throbbing throat—

Listen, transmuting silence with that stilly note

Of pain that Emily, that Isadora knew!

While high from dim elm-chancels hung with dew,

That triple-noted clause of moonlight—

Yes, whip-poor-will, unhusks the heart of fright,

Breaks us and saves, yes, breaks the heart, yet yields

That patience that is armour and that shields

Love from despair—when love forsees the end—

Leaf after autumnal leaf

break off,

descend—

descend—

Southern Cross

I wanted you, nameless Woman of the South,

No wraith, but utterly—as still more alone

The Southern Cross takes night

And lifts her girdles from her, one by one—

High, cool,

wide from the slowly smoldering fire

Of lower heavens,—

vaporous scars!

Eve! Magdalene!

or Mary, you?

Whatever call—falls vainly on the wave.

O simian Venus, homeless Eve,

Unwedded, stumbling gardenless to grieve

Windswept guitars on lonely decks forever;

Finally to answer all within one grave!

And this long wake of phosphor,

iridescent

Furrow of all our travel—trailed derision!

Eyes crumble at its kiss. Its long-drawn spell

Incites a yell. Slid on that backward vision

The mind is churned to spittle, whispering hell.

I wanted you . . . The embers of the Cross

Climbed by aslant and huddling aromatically.

It is blood to remember; it is fire

To stammer back . . . It is

God—your namelessness. And the wash—

All night the water combed you with black

Insolence. You crept out simmering, accomplished.

Water rattled that stinging coil, your

Rehearsed hair—docile, alas, from many arms.

Yes, Eve—wraith of my unloved seed!

The Cross, a phantom, buckled—dropped below the dawn.

Light drowned the lithic trillions of your spawn.

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 wariness found out the stone

Where prayers, forgotten, streamed the mesa sands?

He holds the twilight’s dim, perpetual throne,

Mythical brows we saw retiring—loth,

Disturbed and destined, into denser green.

Greeting they sped us, on the arrow’s oath:

Now lie incorrigibly what years between . .

There was a bed of leaves, and broken play

There was a veil upon you, Pocahontas, bride—

O Princess whose brown lap was virgin May;

And bridal flanks and eyes hid tawny pride.

I left the village for dogwood. By the canoe

Tugging below the mill-race, I could see

Your hair’s keen crescent running, and the blue

First moth of evening take wing stealthily.

What laughing chains the water wove and threw.

I learned to catch the trout’s moon whisper; I

Drifted how many hours I never knew,

But, watching, saw that fleet young crescent die,—

And one star, swinging, take its place, alone,

Cupped in the larches of the mountain pass—

Until, immortally, it bled into the dawn.

I left my sleek boat nibbling margin grass . . .

I took the portage climb, then chose

A further valley-shed; I could not stop.

Feet nozzled wat’ry webs of upper flows;

One white veil gusted from the very top.

O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;

Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends

And northward reaches in that violet wedge

Of Adirondacks!—wisped of azure wands,

Over how many bluffs, tarns, streams I sped!

—And knew myself within some boding shade:—

Grey tepees-tufting the blue knolls ahead,

Smoke swirling through the yellow chestnut glade . . .

A distant cloud, a thunder-bud—it grew,

That blanket of the skies: the padded foot

Within,—I heard it; ’til its rhythm drew,

—Siphoned the black pool from the heart’s hot root!

A cyclone threshes in the turbine crest,

Swooping in eagle feathers down your back;

Know, Maquokeeta, greeting; know death’s best;

—Fall, Sachem, strictly as the tamarack!

A birch kneels. All her whistling fingers fly.

The oak grove circles in a crash of leaves;

The long moan of a dance is in the sky.

Dance, Maquokeeta: Pocahontas grieves . . .

And every tendon scurries toward the twangs

Of lightning deltaed down your saber hair.

Now snaps the flint in every tooth; red fangs

And splay tongues thinly busy the blue air . . .

Dance, Maquokeeta! snake that lives before,

That casts his pelt, and lives beyond! Sprout, horn!

Spark, tooth! Medicine-man, relent, restore—

Lie to us,—dance us back the tribal morn!

Spears and assemblies: black drums thrusting on—

O yelling battlements,—I, too, was liege

To rainbows currying each pulsant bone:

Surpassed the circumstance, danced out the siege!

And buzzard-circleted, screamed from the stake;

I could not pick the arrows from my side.

Wrapped in that fire, I saw more escorts wake—

Flickering, sprint up the hill groins like a tide.

I heard the hush of lava wrestling your arms,

And stag teeth foam about the raven throat;

Flame cataracts of heaven in seething swarms

Fed down your anklets to the sunset’s moat.

0, like the lizard in the furious noon,

That drops his legs and colors in the sun,

—And laughs, pure serpent, Time itself, and moon

Of his own fate, I saw thy change begun!

And saw thee dive to kiss that destiny

Like one white meteor, sacrosanct and blent

At last with all that’s consummate and free

There, where the first and last gods keep thy tent.

. . . .

Thewed of the levin, thunder-shod and lean,

Lo, through what infinite seasons dost thou gaze—

Across what bivouacs of thine angered slain,

And see’st thy bride immortal in the maize!

Totem and fire-gall, slumbering pyramid—

Though other calendars now stack the sky,

Thy freedom is her largesse, Prince, and hid

On paths thou knewest best to claim her by.

High unto Labrador the sun strikes free

Her speechless dream of snow, and stirred again,

She is the torrent and the singing tree;

And she is virgin to the last of men . . .

West, west and south! winds over Cumberland

And winds across the liana grass resume

Her hair’s warm sibilance. Her breasts are fanned

O stream by slope and vineyard—into bloom!

And when the caribou slant down for salt

Do arrows thirst and leap? Do antlers shine

Alert, star-triggered in the listening vault

Of dusk?—And are her perfect brows to thine?

We danced, 0 Brave, we danced beyond their farms.

In cobalt desert closures made our vows . . .

Now is the strong prayer folded in thine arms,

The serpent with the eagle in the boughs.

Hart Crane

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