Page:The Collected Poems of Hart Crane.djvu/17

                                   the rapid tongues
That flittered from under the ash heap day
After day whenever your stick discovered
Some sunning inch of unsuspecting fibre—
It flashed back at your thrust, as clean as fire.

And Rip was slowly made aware
             that he, Van Winkle, was not here
        nor there. He woke and swore he’d seen Broadway
                       a Catskill daisy chain in May—

So memory, that strikes a rhyme out of a box,
Or splits a random smell of flowers through glass—
Is it the whip stripped from the lilac tree
One day in spring my father took to me,
Or is it the Sabbatical, unconscious smile
My mother almost brought me once from church
And once only, as I recall—?

It flickered through the snow screen, blindly
It forsook her at the doorway, it was gone
Before I had left the window. It
Did not return with the kiss in the hall.

Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny’s belt,
Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate….
Keep hold of that nickel for car-change, Rip, —
Have you got your
“Times”—?

And hurry along, Van Winkle—it’s getting late!