Lucie Brock-Broidio

Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements

                                for Harry Ford

I was not ready for your form to be cold
Ever. Even in life

You did not inhabit, necessarily, a form,
But a mind of

Rarer liquid element. It had not occurred to me
You would take

Leave and it will be winter from now on, not only
Here, in the ordinary,

But there too, in the extraordinary elegance
Of calcium and finery

And loss. Keep me

Tethered here, breathtakingly awkward and alive.

If you had a psyche it was not known to me.

If you had a figure it would be heavy ivory.

If you were a man, you would be

An autumn of black carriages filled red with leaves
From sycamore; trees,

Not scattering. I was not ready for such
Earthward and unease.

Good-bye to the imperium, the rinsing wind. You, cold
As God and the great

Glassed castle in which I've lived, simply
Now a house.

A girl ago, a girlhood gone like a vial of ether
Thrown on fire—just

A little jump of flame, like grief, or,

Like a penicillin that has lost its skill at killing
Off, it then is gone.

Robert Lowell

Waking In The Blue

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore, 
rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head 
propped on The Meaning of Meaning. 
He catwalks down our corridor. 
Azure day 
makes my agonized blue window bleaker. 
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway. 
Absence! My hearts grows tense 
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill. 
(This is the house for the "mentally ill.") 

What use is my sense of humour? 
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties, 
once a Harvard all-American fullback, 
(if such were possible!) 
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties, 
as he soaks, a ramrod 
with a muscle of a seal 
in his long tub, 
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing. 
A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap, 
worn all day, all night, 
he thinks only of his figure, 
of slimming on sherbert and ginger ale-- 
more cut off from words than a seal. 
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's; 
the hooded night lights bring out "Bobbie," 
Porcellian '29, 
a replica of Louis XVI 
without the wig-- 
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale, 
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit 
and horses at chairs. 

These victorious figures of bravado ossified young. 

In between the limits of day, 
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts 
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle 
of the Roman Catholic attendants. 
(There are no Mayflower 
screwballs in the Catholic Church.) 

After a hearty New England breakfast, 
I weigh two hundred pounds 
this morning. Cock of the walk, 
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey 
before the metal shaving mirrors, 
and see the shaky future grow familiar 
in the pinched, indigenous faces 
of these thoroughbred mental cases, 
twice my age and half my weight. 
We are all old-timers, 
each of us holds a locked razor. 

Hart Crane

 

The Air Plant

Grand Cayman

This tuft that thrives on saline nothingness,
Inverted octopus with heavenward arms
Thrust parching from a palm-bole hard by the cove⎯
A bird almost⎯of almost bird alarms,

Is pulmonary to the wind that jars
Its tentacles, horrific in their lurch.
The lizard’s throat, held bloated for a fly,
Balloons but warily from this throbbing perch.

The needles and hack-saws of cactus bleed
A milk of earth when stricken off the stalk;
But this,⎯defenseless, thornless, sheds no blood,
Almost no shadow⎯but the air’s thin talk.

Angelic Dynamo! Ventriloquist of the Blue!
While beachward creeps the shark-swept Spanish Main
By what conjunctions do the winds appoint
Its apotheosis, at last⎯the hurricane!

Hart Crane

Voyages III

Infinite consanguinity it bears 
This tendered theme of you that light 
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky 
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones; 
While ribboned water lanes I wind 
Are laved and scattered with no stroke 
Wide from your side, whereto this hour 
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands. 

And so, admitted through black swollen gates 
That must arrest all distance otherwise, 
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, 
Light wrestling there incessantly with light, 
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto 
Your body rocking! 
and where death, if shed, 
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,- 
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn 
The silken skilled transmemberment of song; 

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands . .

Hart Crane

Voyages I

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.  
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,  
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed  
Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections  
The sun beats lightning on the waves,  
The waves fold thunder on the sand; 
And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,  
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; 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

photograph by Richard Benson (1981)

At Melville's Tomb

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy.  Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.