Page:The Collected Poems of Hart Crane.djvu/38

Near Paumanok—your lone patrol—and heard the wraith
Through surf, its bird note there a long time falling…
For you, the panoramas and this breed of towers,
Of you—the theme that’s statured in the cliff.
O Saunterer on free ways still ahead!
Not this our empire yet, but labyrinth
Wherein your eyes, like the Great Navigator’s without ship,
Gleam from the great stones of each prison crypt
Of canyoned traffic… Confronting the Exchange,
Surviving in a world of stocks, —they also range
Across the hills where second timber strays
Back over Connecticut farms, abandoned pastures, —
Sea eyes and tidal, undenying, bright with myth!

The nasal whine of power whips a new universe…
Where spouting pillars spoor the evening sky,
Under the looming stacks of the gigantic power house
Stars prick the eyes with sharp ammoniac proverbs,
New verities, new inklings in the velvet hummed
Of dynamos, where hearing’s leash is strummed…
Power’s script, —wound, bobbin—bound, refined—
Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools, spurred
Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the stars.
Towards what? The forked crash of split thunder parts
Our hearing momentwise; but fast in whirling armatures,
As bright as frogs’eyes, giggling in the girth
Of steely gizzards—axle-bound, confined
In coiled precision, bunched in mutual glee