Page:The Collected Poems of Hart Crane.djvu/40

Through sparkling visibility, outspread, unsleeping,
Wings clip the last peripheries of light…
Tellurian wind-sleuths on dawn patrol,
Each plane a hurtling javelin of winged ordnance,
Bristle the heights above a screeching gale to hover;
Surely no eye that Sunward Escadrille can cover!
There, meaningful, fledged as the Pleiades
With razor sheen they zoom each rapid helix!
Up-chartered choristers of their own speeding
They, cavalcade on escapade, shear Cumulus—
Lay siege and hurdle Cirrus down the skies!
While Cetus-like, O thou Dirigible, enormous Lounger
Of pendulous auroral beaches, —satellited wide
By convoy planes, moonferrets that rejoin thee
On fleeing balconies as thou dost glide,
—Hast splintered space!

                             Low, shadowed of the Cape,
Regard the moving turrets! From grey decks
See scouting griffons rise through gaseous crepe
Hung low… until a conch of thunder answers
Cloud-belfries, banging, while searchlights, like fencers,
Slit the sky’s pancreas of foaming anthracite
Toward thee, O Corsair of the typhoon, —pilot, hear!
Thine eyes bicarbonated white by speed, O Skygak, see
How from thy path above the levin’s lance
Thou sowest doom thou hast nor time nor chance
To reckon—as thy stilly eyes partake
What alcohol of space..! Remember, Falcon-Ace,
Thou hast there in thy wrist a Sanskrit charge