Page:The Collected Poems of Hart Crane.djvu/39

The bearings glint, —O murmurless and shined
In oilrinsed circles of blind ecstasy!

Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas,
The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space…
O sinewy silver biplane, nudging the wind’s withers!
There, from Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk
Two brothers in their twinship left the dune;
Warping the gale, the Wright windwrestlers veered
Capeward, then blading the wind’s flank, banked and spun
What ciphers risen from prophetic script,
What marathons new-set between the stars!
The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches
Already knows the closer clasp of Mars, —
New latitudes, unknotting, soon give place
To what fierce schedules, rife of doom apace!

Behold the dragon’s covey—amphibian, ubiquitous
To hedge the seaboard, wrap the headland, ride
The blue’s cloud-templed districts unto ether…
While Iliads glimmer through eyes raised in pride
Hell’s belt springs wider into heaven’s plumed side.
O bright circumferences, heights employed to fly
War’s fiery kennel masked in downy offings, —
This tournament of space, the threshed and chiselled height,
Is baited by marauding circles, bludgeon flail
Of rancorous grenades whose screaming petals carve us
Wounds that we wrap with theorems sharp as hail!

Wheeled swiftly, wings emerge from larval-silver hangars.
Taut motors surge, space-gnawing, into flight;