---

Harold Hart Crane - For The Marriage of Faustus and Helen
Work rating: Low

"And so we may arrive by Talmud skill 
And profane Greek to raise the building up 
Of Helen`s house against the Ismaelite, 
King of Thogarma, and his habergeons 
Brimstony, blue and fiery; and the force 
Of King A baddon, and the beast of Cittim; 
Which Rabbi David Kimchi, Onkelos, 
And A ben Ezra do interpret Rome. " 
-THE ALCHEMIST. 
I 

The mind has shown itself at times 
Too much the baked and labeled dough 
Divided by accepted multitudes. 
Across 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 evening 
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 evening 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-riant 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 limbs 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 
Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes; 
White, through white cities passed on to assume 
That world which comes to each of us alone. 

Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane, 
Bent axle of devotion along companion ways 
That beat, continuous, to hourless days- 
0ne inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise. 

II 

Brazen hypnotics glitter here; 
Glee shifts from foot to foot, 
Magnetic to their tremulo. 
This crashing opera bouffe, 
Blest excursion! this ricochet 
From roof to roof- 
Know, Olympians, we are breathless 
While nigger cupids scour the stars! 

A thousand light shrugs balance us 
Through snarling hails of melody. 
White shadows slip across the floor 
Splayed like cards from a loose hand; 
Rhythmic ellipses lead into canters 
Until somewhere a rooster banters. 

Greet naively-yet intrepidly 
New soothings, new amazements 
That cornets introduce at every turn- 
And you may fall downstairs with me 
With perfect grace and equanimity. 
Or, plaintively scud past shores 
Where, by strange harmonic laws 
All relatives, serene and cool, 
Sit rocked in patent armchairs. 

0, I have known metallic paradises 
Where cuckoos clucked to finches 
Above the deft catastrophes of drums. 
While titters hailed the groans of death 
Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen 

The incunabula of the divine grotesque. 
This music has a reassuring way, 

The siren of the ` springs of guilty song- 
Let us take her on the incandescent wax 
Striated with nuances nervosities 
That we are heir to: she is still so young, 
She cannot frown upon her as she smiles, 
Dipping here in this cultivated storm 
Among slim skaters of the gardened skies. 


III 

Capped arbiter of beauty in this street 
That narrows -darkly into motor dawn, 
You, here beside m/e, delicate ambassador 
Of intricate slain numbers that arise 
In whispers, naked of steel; 
religious gunman! 
Who faithfully, yourself, will fall too soon, 
And in other ways than as the wind settles 
On the sixteen thrifty bridges of the city: 
Let us unbind our throats of fear and pity. 

We even, 
Who drove speediest destruction 
In corymbulous formations of mechanics,- 
Who hurried the hill breezes, spouting malice 
Plangent over meadows, and looked down 
On rifts of torn and empty houses 
Like old women with teeth unjubilant 
That waited faintly, briefly and in vain: 

We know, eternal gunman, our flesh remembers 
The tensile boughs, the nimble blue plateaus, 
The mounted, yielding cities of the air! 

That saddled sky that shook down vertical 
Repeated play of fire-no hypogeum 
Of wave or rock was good against one hour. 
We did not ask for that, but have survived, 
And will persist to speak again before 
All stubble streets that have not curved 
To memory, or known the ominous lifted arm 

That lowers down the arc of Helen`s brow 
To saturate with blessing and dismay. 

A goose, tobacco and cologne- 
Three winged and gold-shod prophecies of heaven, 
The lavish heart shall always have to leaven 
And spread with bells and voices, and atone 
The abating shadows of our conscript dust. 

Anchises` navel, dripping of the sea,- 
The hands Erasmus dipped in gleaming tides, 
Gathered the voltage of blown blood and vine; 
Delve upward for the new and scattered wine, 
0 brother-thief of time, that we recall. 
Laugh out the meager penance of their days 
Who dare not share with us the breath released, 
The substance drilled and spent beyond repair 
For golden, or the shadow of gold hair. 

Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile 
Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height 
The imagination spans beyond despair, 
Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer.
Source
The script ran 0.002 seconds.