UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:______

I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:

It is entitled:

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: ______

Ghost of Fashion

A dissertation submitted to the

Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences

2008

by

Lesley Marie Jenike

B.F.A., Emerson College, 2000 M.F.A. The Ohio State University, 2003

Committee Chair: Dr. Don Bogen

ii Lesley Marie Jenike

Dissertation Abstract

My dissertation, Ghost of Fashion, consists of both a collection of original poems and a critical essay, “In an Age of Nomalcy: How Hart Crane’s The Bridge Spans a

Decade.” The poetry collection is divided into five sections, the first of which explores how uniquely American art forms like musical theatre can reify American values while simultaneously subverting them. These poems are generally dramatic monologues in the tradition of Robert Browning, Ezra Pound and Richard Howard, and take as their speakers characters from popular musical productions like Guys and Dolls, and Show

Boat. The middle three sections consist of a series of poems that investigates both the inherent insidiousness and freeing possibilities of the splintered self by invoking, to quote

Donne, a “three person’d” speaker. The final section, as a way to synthesize the first four, depicts a family history that reveals itself in the iconic sounds and images of

Hitchcock, Elizabeth Taylor, and Frank Sinatra, for example. The suggestion is that we’ve slowly and surely become a society without any real connection to our past but through popular cultural references that work as common denominators and links between the generations.

The essay portion of my dissertation historicizes Hart Crane’s The Bridge in an attempt to explore the ways it exemplifies the conflicted social, cultural, and political atmosphere of America in the 1920s. I posit that The Bridge’s ultimate (and well- documented) “failure” doesn’t necessarily stem from a formal miscalculation, but rather from its inconsistent ideological stance—a problem that also plagued the 1920s as a unique moment in American history.

iii iv Acknowledgements

I want to thank my teachers and friends Don Bogen, John Drury, Jim Cummins, and Norma Jenckes. They’ve been extraordinary role models in that they’ve shown me how to balance writing, teaching, and living and how to do it gracefully. I want to thank

Joanie Mackowski; many of the poems in Ghost of Fashion originated in her workshop. I would also like to thank Stan Corkin for his help with the critical essay portion of this dissertation. My many thanks go to past mentors and teachers Andrew Hudgins, David

St. John, Molly Peacock, C.D. Wright, Jeredith Merrin, and David Citino. I appreciate, also, Blackbird, Failbetter, La Petite Zine, Court Green, POOL, Verse, Washington

Square, Permafrost, Redivider, Sou’Wester, the Alaska Quarterly Review, and the

Brooklyn Review for accepting several of these poems for publication, and of course

WordTech Press for accepting Ghost of Fashion as a whole for publication. I’ve been blessed with an enormous amount of help and support from friends and colleagues

Sophia Kartsonis, Cindy King, Kevin Oberlin, Jillian Weise, Kristi Maxwell, Michael

Rerick, Joe DeLong, Jesseca Cornelson and Erica Dawson. I want to thank my family for hanging in there for my twelve years of higher education. My mother Melanie Fish and my father Tom Jenike have always stressed the importance of learning. Because of them, it’s become an integral part of who I am and I’m grateful; it’s brought me an inordinate amount of joy. I want to thank my sister Laura Rupp, my brother Tom Jenike, my stepmother Debbie Jenike and my stepfather Tom Fish. My great appreciation and love go to Virginia and John Butts. Thanks also go to my best and oldest friend Hannah Reck for making me laugh and laugh and laugh. Most of all and finally, I want to thank my husband Joshua Butts. He’s the reason for the season.

v Contents

I.

Luck 2

Bye-Bye Birdie 3

Kismet 5

Camelot 7

Brigadoon 8

Show Boat 10

Gigi 12

The Unsinkable Molly Brown

13

Trouble in River City 15

Calamity Jane 18

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers 22

Annie Get Your Gun 25

Oklahoma! 27

II.

Three Enter the Dark Wood 30

Three Go to the Zoo 32

Three Go Confessional 34

vi Three Go Cul-de-Sac 36

Three Drifts into the Back Catalog 38

Three Goes Hollywood Babylon 40

Three Arrow Sparrow 42

Three Escapes Death (and Barely) 44

Three Enter the Maze Center 46

III.

Three Go Psychic 52

Three’s Inheritance 54

Three in a Maze and a Monster (Vertigo) 56

Three Go Daedalus 58

Three Go Ingénue 60

Three Contemplate Infinity 65

Three Mythology 67

IV.

Three Go Norma Desmond 71

Three Go Aquarium 73

Hold On, Three. Three, Hold On 75

Three Winter 76

Three’s Brainchild Is 78

vii Three Go to the Show 82

Three Goes Starlet 83

Three Embraces Her Darkness and, Conversely, Her Light 85

Three Are Living Proof 87

Three Go West 88

Three Reaches the Core and Is 90

Three Go Neutral Zone Orchard Fruit 93

V.

Ophelia Stars as All the Women We’ve Loved Before 95

Sunset Boulevard 97

High Society 99

The Absolute Ultimate

101

Poem Beginning with a Joke, Ending with a Seriousness 103

Bell, Book and Candle

105

Andy Warhol Wants to a Machine, and So Do I 107

Refusing Sinatra 109

All Sculpture is Butter

111

Isis Talkin Blues 113

Little Women 114

viii Musical to be Performed in a Cul-de-sac 116

Ghost of Fashion 118

Gypsy 120

In an Age of Nomalcy: How Hart Crane’s The Bridge Spans a Decade” 122

ix I.

“For two weeks I gambled in green pastures. The dice were my cousins and the dolls were agreeable with nice teeth and no last names.”

-Guys and Dolls

1 Luck

be a lady. Or be a chump and let it all ride on this horse right here, dapple grey, power-house legs long and hot as Miami beaches. Be a man. Be cruel.

Be a doll and get me a sandwich. Be a soul

and search yourself. Be a religion. See white everywhere, white linen, white hands, great white screens that replay Casablanca goodbye kisses.

Be a good girl and turn on the lights.

Be a good boy and turn them off again.

Be a jewel and lose yourself so I can know what it is to search you back to me. Be a tree in Havana I’ll never rest under.

Be a knife pressed into my back so my life spins by in black or red, black or red, but what number?

2 Bye-Bye Birdie

The army’s got you now

So the Lord came down, said, Lemme make you sovereign of Heaven and I said, Man, take me back to that long brown torso of a desert, Jordan a scar dragged through the land and I would’ve kissed him, would’ve held a sign and waited on the tarmac for his plane to land ‘cause, Lord, see if you can stand when the wind comes in playing a man playing

a woman playing the guitar all hips and lips and ass. You be his bitch, his décolletage glowing star- bright symbol, his choir of teen angels singing in paradise forever. “Do you know how to twist?”

Boy, do I. My little river and fruitless lake can mambo even in the middle of a horror of a winter when the sky is an eye clouded over

3 and mother comes in, just as his song pitches a fit on the radio. The phone’s tucked between my jaw and shoulder and I’m talking to God and I’m telling God I’ve loved more. More have I spent so bye-bye now to my holier-than- thou baby digging his pin into my naked chest saying, Now we’re going steady. Now we’re official.

4 Kismet

We were meant to meet at the Desert’s Martini Rock, that holy of holies, that colossus. The sun burnt our backs as we turned toward Baghdad. Babylon’s swinging

paradise waved goodbye. You called light light.

You named the lamp, said my love is a lion-share.

I aped you. No rib was so talkative. You said,

Be quiet and listen. Honey’s being made.

So I sat down with a good book, oldest story there is: cities burning. Masts of salt sail the Sinai

away. It’s fate. I thought I had a witness but

I’m all there is. We stopped by the Sahara Club, cocktail before Genesis. When I fall down

5 drunk, when I seize, stop me from swallowing…

Promise me we’ll meet here, say Valentine’s of each year. Each year we’ll drag in, an unplucked

splinter in your eye. A jet will buzz over. I might hold you but Baghdad’s so hot that time of year.

I would rename the chasm. I would rename the thrush,

but kismet tucks its fingers in my mouth. One dead root caused this. One sweet too many kills. Tear it out.

I’ll suck gas, won’t feel a thing. Sleep, sleep, there, there.

You’ll tell me to groove out to the soft rock, creation- lite, easy-listening, barely breathing. Across the abandon brush catches fire. Witness. It’s your voice I hear.

6 Camelot

Where are the simple joys of maidenhood?

Signing off on eternal spring, my bond to you is like an Italian greyhound to its master. O the bottles of spring water you bring! O the closets of shoes!

Camelot, you freed me from Kentucky and from Tennessee, put me on- screen till all my faults made me, called me the glued-together daughter of the royal family, a filly and just, sequined gown cut to the crotch, fur draping my shoulder. Arthur, famous remover of swords, was once a hawk, then a robin. He killed and was killed, all before the age of twenty. Funny,

I turned into queen, spun this body and let knights scramble the message: Magic. If might’s for right then I might, Camelot, come to you in drag, singing down your turret, through your garden, my train a torrent.

Tighten the frame on my topiary face, eyes heart-shaped, bones the anvil on the stone that holds Excalibur like a kid in the bitch of its embrace.

I wasn’t there to build myself but anyway I grew, twisted into a tree pretending to be a tree. Camelot, pull this blade from my breast and May Day crown me.

7 Brigadoon

This city creeps away from me.

Every street is a puzzle of trees and numbers, trees

and numbers. I’m getting off at the evaporating station, platform to peek-a-boo, almost

empty parking lot. Fiona, flash your brights so through the fog

I can find you. You be a yellow light

and kill all color. I’ll be Bonnie Jean.

Conundrum-ho! Onward, risk!

There’s a map on the dash all smoky

longitude, bluish nonsense.

Wring a day. Get a century.

The sun will burn off its defense.

8 As ghosts let’s cruise the block, be witness to the same darkness, these freeways just husks

for holding us, us wisped and ribboned. Face it, we’re ruined memory, thin white nothing clouds

in the center of town. Pity the lad who goes home with us.

We’re traveling. We’re filament.

We’re lunatic translucent, no good liar moons. The spastic dancing,

Fiona, the spinouts, the crackups—

We could fib and say it’s the town but stars’ plots are thickening.

The sky doubles over with them.

9 Show Boat

The Cotton Blossom steams south, rocked to sleep by Kentucky. For good-time remedy, to pay passage, my voice sins six times a week and twice—Cain’t help lovin’ dat man. History is a moss-gagged body.

I won’t scream. I’m carrying the black me, white me. Wicked stage ain’t nothing for a girl. Mommy said my purring, soft shoeing, my cotton candy parasol, my fake kissing, that’s what sold me.

Love is better dumb, one less bead to string, one less blood embrace. There’s trouble ahead: the sun is in black face. Every port we pass thrums. The flood will come and I’ll be ready. I set the VCR’s timer

to record me, mulatto, me two-timing, me Bill-loving till analog gives way to digital. Aboard this ark we are of two minds. We cut ourselves into equal parts, down to medulla, down to the middle. Chorus joins in.

10 Old man Pisces, he’s rolling my bones down-river, saying nothing, not while the flavor lasts. I hear just static patter, my body de-caramelizing, turning

11 Gigi

Thank Heaven for little girls

You’re a gloriously dressed paradise, Gigi. Men, snakes, appletrees all love you, so bring down the Garden, the market. Detonate the volcano.

God is as pitiless, so thank Heaven I’m a modern girl, saying yes, saying it like I made it. Gigi, I put your name into Google, got ladies in stilettos, a Japanese trick turner thin as smoke against a jag, a mini-poodle, pet python, in other words the jungle. Here’s my advice to you: Say yes but keep your bad hair, your drug, your bruise. Be strange on a veranda that overlooks a pool. Let others halloo to you. Only wave then move alone to an adjoining room, a study hung with paintings of forests and fields before corn, which is squalling come-early anonymous everything, before our mothers named us for champagne that like us tumbles into sleek and sexy glasses, legs bubbles over the lip dangling.

12 The Unsinkable Molly Brown

The ship speeds its magnificence, bodies under more bodies lit

by dark. My skin is

a contract. Husband, remember the cash we caught on fire?

What’s lost can be

found: my animal furs, million dollar collar. Ice can’t dupe

a miracle. The mountain

that is every mountain, is the mountain where Time’s first

Titantic slammed ashore. Roars:

She is come, half of a sinning pair. Her feet stung on rock.

Her hair tangled in trees.

13 Now she’s back on water. Time forgot what was past is happening.

Shake the deep.

Scream fall into my unsinkable.

Around us: the terrible opera.

Around: ocean’s deep bass.

I’m the soprano. My highest note knifes for good tragedy. The ship

folds in. Home again years later

in Denver, dark is only a shadow of a shadow of the fever back

on the ocean. Sweat starts to run

down my cheek. Sweetly you lick

away the salt.

14 Trouble in River City

Music man, no one wants your trumpet.

This place is all silence

all the time. We’re crouching in the ear of a great shell, the wind blowing through, not you.

We like our prehistoric sea as is.

We love our provisions: If

this one is a dark one then this is a light one, is a lighter one. The difference is obvious.

See how the sun seems to come striking the cheekbones of our best and brightest,

river a mirror marking the line between what we are

and what we see? You want to make trouble but we do no longer.

15 All the couches have stopped burning in the houses that have stopped burning

and from the conch’s chamber we are reborn the color

of a mute at the end of a trombone, or downtown after six: gone and

gone and gone, one shadow passing frantically over the ghetto.

In this silence we can hear our breathing which is beautiful and frightening. Listen,

we don’t want you. Your songs break the radio broadcast, drowning us all in their heavy rain.

You want trouble?

We’ll bury you

16 in your own vice: a suit jacket, single note caught in your teeth. Then you’ll see quiet

is best. Quiet can cure the headache, backache, cockache. Stop

the music in all its verisimilitude, O the useless guitar, useless

beat! We know reality. It comes in wearing black, wearing white, wearing

for a costume the delicate inner ear,

God howling electric through

bones until the hammer.

17 Calamity Jane

Your daddy he’s an outlaw

At the filling station I saw you cock a nozzle into the tank’s humble muzzle.

I love you.

Remember?

West was wild, let us run the country’s backyard back

when trains ran

the land’s poor body that with one shot I made beg for mercy. The shit hit

the glass, hit

18 the knuckle. Slide a sarsaparilla down my mind. We were born

engines in this

city. City divided our original cell into

Black hills echoing our black

black names. Bro,

after Deadwood never again say love’s not a bullet in the back, hate’s not a four-

letter world

or one swift sucking breath. Let that breath be mine. Ring me up, Wild Bill,

sometime. Be

19 Houston to my space shuttle. I’m on a corner,

Winslow, Arizona.

Heart of gold.

We came. We come to find in the flood that one glinting Corazón but

found instead

an owl humming through the blue, found calamity when day grew

its night, a blight

on the face of every decent story. Oh hold me. Say you’re sorry, say the land

20 forgives, say

we’re animals, say our hearts beat faster, say we’re that much closer

21 Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

There were never so many springs.

Again and again the sun swings up

from the New World where December is summer. Down there I’d call January

and she’d dance in with her delicious sisters. I’d steal the lightest one.

If the dams burst she’d buoy me.

I’d tell my brother to take the red head,

the calypso who rings the others in to supper. She seems strong, six

in seven. I count on my knuckles: seven chances to undo. Seven to be

22 forgiven. No more tent pitching, no more cabin building. We’ve swung

our last hammer. They’ll enter two by two, then mine: the tip of a knife,

a pitched roof, a Madonna carried on a man’s shoulder. Jubilation.

There are seven buttons to unbutton, seven pairs of shoes to slip off seven

pairs of feet good like Heaven. I refuse the original connotation—sins

breaking the backs of my seven selves, the sad ones, those who’ve lost

the thread back to satellite, to circling crux. There are seven hearts

in my chest and every one’s arresting.

She might be the one to tuck me in.

23 I look forward to our wedding and the stories she’ll tell our children:

“I was filthy dirty when we met. I was mouth filled with snow. I was roach motel,

stumped contestant, coal-miner’s daughter.

I was seven times the sorrow, seven

times the rupture. Then there he was: a Pentecost whistling through town.”

24 Annie Get Your Gun

When I’m with a pistol I sparkle like a crystal

Happiness is a warm December, a warm mouth, cruel tongue forked, uh oh route inescapable, love of knives

dead fainting, or Indians indian-giving and O to go naked: bludgeon tucked in enigma, wrapped in invisible

woman bionic in her understanding: We can’t beat the fire, we must turn bodily down the hill. Yes sir!

In a plot of land where a semi-automatic grew, in a small and almost imperceptible side pocket you could keep a cell,

keep a calculator or knife or wicked pearl-handled pistol to thrust deep into the chest of a beloved stranger on a street

you couldn’t name even if a gun was swaddled in your…

Press that thing, hissing body the body of a swan, to a temple

25 and pull the trigger until all of you, even the most secret place where the mystery with her woman’s face bursts into…

A trigger lets your lover decide later what went wrong.

Keep quiet and still in your heap of crinoline while here

in the middle of the country it’s clear we’re all packing.

Happiness is a warm city draped in sun descending over

a river long and useless: silt hardened into a jewel.

At the Oscars I’ll be the writer of some cruel film while in

my pocket the hope diamond turns weapon. No one will see but there in the folds of my dress, couture for sure, deep in

the warp and woof of my skirt, I’ll wrap my tender fingers, fastest in the land, around the lever O my word and pull—

26 Oklahoma!

I’m sick of the farmer, the rancher, the prairie between them. I’m the milky-white surrey-puller,

part woman, part mare. I dream of California.

There’s a native gal out there: Lady of Sorrows.

She can go black bird and call the tornado down.

I see Her picture everywhere. In Kansas City

everything’s up to date, but I love LA, highways crossing deserts as kids cross fingers over hearts

to stop a fib from taking. O, She of the Thrilling of the Sky, She of the Gracing of the Plain!

Her hair tumbles in waves of celluloid. At night

She crouches whispering on the drive-in screen.

She says, Pocahontas was a fool but knew enough to change her name. Call me Marilyn. Make me

27 a star and mob me in the checkout line. My heart will be drawn on a dirty napkin. I’ll kiss the air.

Oklahoma, someday when I hold a gold study of the world’s True Moving Picture Queen,

at the mic I’ll say I come from a trailer, a holler, from Her body that spreads, a blanket of skin,

all the way from Carolina to here. Thank you.

Thank you. With Her in my hand, I’ll disappear.

28 II.

“Now comes the strangest part of all. You have been in the maze several days and nights, and you are just beginning to realize you have changed several times. Not just you, either, but your whole idea of the maze and the maze itself.”

-John Ashbery, The Heroes

29 Three Enter the Dark Wood

It’s the one about the bears and their blonde:

In their many beds I left many cells, called my multiple personalities down, their faces to the sky a slide show of cheap reference, chanteuses

orphaned by a wave of bear.

Life should have piano accompaniment— so as Goldilocks (in my delusion)

I staged a three-part musical. Flowers crooned.

I burned the script into my hand: Ingénue

crosses a whistling Mason-Dixon toward a tomorrow not to be believed, puts down among the blooms, hums a tune, loses her mind. Mind wanders to a stage, becomes a voice, multifarious, shot

30 to the balcony. A sound engineer asks her to say her name into the mic.

Test. Test. Test. She writes three chapters. She sleeps in three beds. There are three movements to this, one too soft, two too hard but Child

Mind falls asleep, dreams of wood, whole houses under her weight crumbling. Perfection is cruel, the detonator, what unbraids her hair, those three strands forgiving themselves for the trouble of coming together.

31 Three Go to the Zoo

These cells are worthless, still they saved my life.

They turn out at increasing rates offspring full of DNA that say this face is my face. What a zoo.

You’d think I’d fall under the pressure of so many nuclei clamoring at their bars, those chimps.

I’m privy suddenly to sex, to dumb lump banana

and orange breakfast blistering as they bang away.

I’m not one to talk. I’ve been used too.

I’ve been jilted, been on my back, genes gone

manic. But revolt is revolt however good the end.

Someone will die. Someone will be lost. Amelia in her plane would say these same three things.

I smother my own caw. In the dark of the birdhouse

I lie down before the osprey and February flies in.

She opens my back to ice then in spring, disintegration.

32 No better than I was before, I’m the vanished dodo, the last passenger pigeon down. To be the only of a kind means diner counters, deeper

discounts, the window seat on an airplane. Look out below, Unfathomable Trinity. Son, Pop, Ghost, triangulate your mystery, triple your torture map.

East. East. All I want is to crash into the sun, scramble the seasons till summer falls then winters all over me. Heat in the mouth, I

swallow, I nightingale. Wanderlust is nothing but a single engine parting the air like a curtain.

Three-Personed God, my selves will muddle through.

33 Three Go Confessional

Hide the diamonds and cocaine; a monster with my face is deep inside her bullheaded dream, dragging pleasure behind her by its hair. My bungalow is lined with photos

of a nude naked but for a towel around her very human torso. Blame it on bovine or the past that, like chiffon, caresses, never clings. In truth a course of events is one

hoof in front of another. Follow: Before talkies silence made love with its eyes. Follow: The Minotaur is a girl.

The bodies she scatters aren’t bodies surrendered

to please some disease, but dresses she wore once and once only. No designer could make an evening gown for that kind of pain. What fabric? What color?

She’d rend the seams, sickness in her cells zooming toward an invisible sun, the way the insolent fly toward the real one, close enough to raze their own

34 and in one blinding rush burn every calorie, every imaginable envy, every last doll, last lover, every last memory. But for the Minotaur in me reality is

maze-shaped. It’s back to these champagne-made visions, the bold strokes of my artful incarceration.

But escape is imminent; a trap door, yes, will open.

35 Three Go Cul-de-Sac

Three summer lawns hiss. Birds circle. Three kiss.

Three’s compromise: If we go then so? Three fertilize futile. Into a hollow

three go unbeknownst. An eye’s a hedgerow.

A strange hand raises a sword from the lake.

Don’t speak. No light for no waking, ocean for rocking. No grasses still blonde

bent to near breaking on hills a glacier built by stopping. Three can’t remember what garden choked by what ivy and what star over what party and what house snapping

from the weight of three in just one body.

Three are begging you. Three are so humble.

Who asked the river to trickle its blood into the foreign ocean? Three in one

36 car drive crazed down new streets where new machines plunge humble muzzles into earth. The rain and its vehicle the cloud are fashioned by you into a vase holding one flower.

Three suck the marrow and out of what life!

37 Three Drifts into the Back Catalog

And gathers to her chest discs and slices open with one nail the plastic that keeps each cool as a swimming pool. Three

sunbathes, gliding on nuanced melody, tender phrases fusing what was tripled that morning, that spring, till even now

the dappled sun too moodily drifts on her plastic raft, reflecting in her oiled and shinning skin, Three old and Three

young, fresh-faced as a mandolin. Yes, folk songs tend to sink her like a stone.

What movie is this? Everyone’s so sad,

soundtrack grooving behind diamond tears. Sun, don’t interrupt that sorrow.

Allow the clouds, darling, sea-shaped

38 boughs, to float in the sky where each current is another street or another train or another town or the warm sound

of a room or a womb or a girl spinning records again for her wannabe friend.

The sail unfurls. Three goes nowhere.

She never meant this swimming pool, never meant to leave that silvery disc on her towel. It melted into rainbow, rainbow!

39 Three Goes Hollywood Babylon

Hollywood giveth and Hollywood taketh away; this is the lesson of the Pacific Coast Highway.

Three, in gold with verve, screws the party and up glittering hills drives, coming to rest at a manse choked by wood. Past a crumbling

swimming pool: A maze of hedgerow. Lust for center starts her drifting through no glaze of chlorine, gliding, an ingénue

in Three face, “April Come She Will,” as in that movie. Three covers her mouth (horror) and arrows straight for the frozen center.

Holding her hand: dead fingers, bangles sliding up and down a missing arm. Someone is floating shot and face-down.

40 Light recast as dark on the sky’s casting couch,

Each greeny room a different theme: death by a weird disease a woman unfolding

her palms like flowers on a psychic’s table:

You won’t live to see forty. All plot points to tragedy. Three turns a corner. Down

some growing aisle, Three comes to understand:

To be a single filament in the bulb, incandescent, of this life means to hold

the hand of a ghost sometimes when the maze calls and the party dulls, and a sparrow falls.

41 Three Arrow Sparrow

We three had a dirty fantasy like spit dammed in our throat, or an arrow of anger. No nest to glue, nothing

to hide from danger, excess grew triple the window to fly into. All futures matured at once. Even veined leaves went numb.

We were dropped by fate into that quadrant of the constellation that drives us crazy to crazy, traps us in hangars, flushes

from brush us three who pierce clouds till clouds cry.

But bull’s eye, we missed your point. Our plumage dragged us down with the wind, with the dream

of a three-point landing. The target was not to kill, but to rocket with joy in our one body though the elegant

42 camber of the blued, bowed sky. So goodbye, you one steady in our blurry field of smudged golden

we rise above with flocks of nobody

and with nothing.

43 Three Escapes Death (and Barely)

The New Jerusalem grows like crystal in the dark, latching onto the rock of my regret in the basement of my body. I can stand fascinated outside pressing

my hands against the jar’s glass till even my palms seem to be the jeweled towers I throw myself from, the crystallizing bones of a new life not a life, but

growing as a life grows. I say, Halleluiah! I say,

Praise Be! I make my way down to the finite sea: a glass sky starred by fingerprints static though

deep in this tissue change calls itself paradise.

I will walk unafraid down streets mirror-lucid, a cheek, a brow echoed in the windows of a passing—

Three, where are you going? This quartz tree beside this slate sea, it falls down to rise enduring.

As a child you mixed your chemicals till you

44 were as beautiful and as brief as a woman.

I saw you cut a prism across your proverbial wrist.

I felt your diamond pain. Yet, somewhere change

is relative, is the crystal that keeps Swiss time, or the mammoth rock against which we break ourselves. Which is it— which terror is growing?

45 Three Enter the Maze Center

*

My skin stretching to capacity: I see the entrance

and immediately

strap my selves in.

You’re growing beetles, gardenias, censures.

Erase all trace.

Better now.

There are knots in knots. You told me to come.

Where did you go?

An eye is

*

a hedgerow. You were known by the banging

of silver against itself,

against your arm.

46 The kitchen on Losantiville waited. On the stove:

A pot of meadow. You rode

that bay deep

into family. You leapt your own thread. Cut it

when you will.

Forty is

*

the age they said. I’ll never see the room

where you slept, dark

banded light like

landing strips. Amelia took off there. Here

in this Jupiter-lit cemetery

hedgerow hides me

from me. Around a corner: the very edge

of your skirt. Architect of my

affection, make my days

47 *

less appropriation! You opened your palms up

on the table. You will have

a thousand and

forty. You will have Bermuda Triangle,

have a papoose who won’t forgive

you this quickening cloud,

tulle for scaffolding, raw silk for skin.

In a greeny room:

dresses you wore, gloves

*

for downtown, pic of a limo, you

inside. Like a pink lung. Remember:

There’s no tomorrow.

48 Amelia, beyond the pale, flies above you.

She can see Three

ebbing father then closer:

A sniveling little martyr. Green brocade curtains

can become a hornet’s nest.

Watch your back:

*

an angry snatch. On the smallest patch of grass:

A larger wonder. Show me

the way. Dawn never

did it for me. Nor did the snow when it smothered

my mother. Your body is

a drawer.

How are you calling me? I’ve pushed my thread

through the eyes of three

needles but funny,

49 *

Ghost, how the maze turns me back into

a girl in corners burning

sage. Again. Athena

gave her precious owl. You give your arrow sparrow

singing though metal,

glass eye spinning up

to truth, down to trouble. Here it’s iron or bust. Here

it’s iron then rust. Still, how kind

to send that savior.

* Coda

If you know me so well, then tell me who is this girl with my face spreading her mantle?

The maze’s center is a pill dissolving

Into blood its purpose. You were just here.

50 III.

“Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on, testing this strange little tug at his shoulder blade, and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!”

-Anne Sexton

51 Three Go Psychic

I’ll sing for him. Light will stash through stained glass its winter store of glory. But I protest. My mind will never relinquish. Still,

look at these hands. Is it better to know: three-card in my future, a dark stretch driven down streets

I’ll never understand? Or years

of white noise shooting blanks?

Daddy pitched tent in the jungle,

1970, in the never idle puzzle of family. My voice can wake him

from the terror of this double negation thrice, once to accept, once to forgive, once to lay him back down again in his dotage.

52 I’m a magician’s aid spliced just to rise again and again and again, offering my first-born to the ocean’s genius reflecting

her counter-moon, churches fists with my singing I could unfist.

Let me console him: A hundred million miracles suggest the sea’s

a mirror echoing spires that never rise but rather climb deep into the water’s immeasurable hush.

My hands are open on the table.

53 Three’s Inheritance

I appear to you in this amalgamation, alive eternally in that facet of myself not subject to fire, hovering like grace over precious metal. With a gentle finger

unclasp the watch face I transformed with garnet, amethyst, and diamond into a brooch, numinous, my body alive again. And you, in your thirtieth year,

will hold it like a dead baby, old already, turn it over to see, scratched with the point of a pin, 1870.

I don’t remember. I only know. I asked a jeweler

to set pearls in a horseshoe on the roman numeral which is lucky (three), and on the twelve and six, enameled flowers meant to mean the hours I spent

blotto, a house and garden, divorce, a tennis court all refracted in my menagerie of jewelry. I hope skin has memory and your lapel is whispering

54 this legacy: the sun was once a vain and stupid girl.

I was once your mother’s mother. Now metal, my body’s returning to ticking toward irreversible

fortune, ever closer to its conclusion: I’ll not live to see forty. I’ll die having known you intimately though we never held hands, never alone together

burned in the dark of the movie house, Liz Taylor and Monty Clift, her dignity and his brokenness, brilliantly manifest in their one-in-the-same face.

55 Three in a Maze and a Monster (Vertigo)

1.

Directed to take in with her eyes the whole of San Francisco Bay, Kim Novak saw only a hint of its immensity, wound in one reel

the scenes that turned her blonde hair to gin or the color of that which drives any woman to visit graveyards in the afternoon, the sun

already well into her daily ablution. Day is also the time we indulge in our own routine, remaking our lips the color of California,

Pacific calling to us and we come pretending to recognize the voice that leads us there, the same voice that when we speak, we hear.

56 2.

Jimmy Stewart is the Theseus in this story, the “nine-to-fiver” thinking with his kindness he can kill the thing inside her. But he can’t.

What says come to me says so urgently.

In her gray she drifts toward the headstone that bears her name, to be home, to rest.

Romantic, Hitch must’ve said, these many, many blondes and Kim Novak of course was no exception. She could reflect in one

tight close up suspense till suspense was a tower to fall from and you could see in her eyes that falling, everyone wanting

to save her, press her against their realness.

But beauty sometimes is empty. In filling a space we make our contract, shake on it.

57 Three Go Daedalus

Wisdom’s triangle is made of two human hands placed just so the tips of the middle fingers meet.

It’s the body’s rendition of a steeple. Some say

open your palms toward you and out will come the people, our many fingers becoming our many friends and lovers hidden so long in our skin

they’ve learned to love the maze and its maker, desire built on this mystery: Who am I and what am I made of? Whatever that is, I want it to begin,

stone after stone, a steel girded frame, ceiling of the skull, to birds a naturally occurring sky, a trick of the eye, but whose? There are stairs inside me,

switchbacks substitute for elevators unable to lift and descend forever. Blueprints uncurl on a table, revealing the original route, up and up and written

58 on my hands the plans: On a day unlike any other

I’ll be the youngest at the Sabbath table asking, because I am, and because I too have been so

indiscriminately cruel, Why build if just to keep someone else trapped in the jail of our hands, fingers for walls, thumbs as base, tall-men keen

on reaching the sky’s indefatigable labyrinth, as if our nails could punch a hole in its vigor?

The answer: We all have chinks in our armor.

59 Three Go Ingénue

*

The sign above the door says: Smile, you.

All day long in languages odd and new a secretary takes down dictation

for the starlet divorcing.

Earth-swinger the sun, everyday brilliant and blistering

her foundation down the sky’s big screen, was caught with a dead man in her arms.

Vamp is foil to ingénue.

They eclipse sometimes in circling or in fixedness. They will surface

and from the earth I see two sisters by some energy made into

60 *

one, by some energy made into three.

The third is secretary. Her eyes are the lens. The dark has legs, she writes.

Moving through the study, whole house quiet, she hears the last scene flap against the machine like a busted wing. Cocktail hour

ended hours ago. She recaps the conversation between herself and herself and herself: From here the light I

launch is streets innumerable and unnamed.

I grow gardens of strange. Why can’t I let you and you love me? I’m the one

listening, I take it all down. I’m the ghost, the small blue flame, the bread, the host.

61 *

The small blue flame, the bread, the host: we’re all here. We agree. Sweetness can be a trap. Take our house, its open door,

its candy window. Lick it and go ingénue crazy through. Shoot yourself, beautiful missile, into.

You’re a shiny pocketknife. You’re a young wife, not yet full fathom five. You’re a bell, tongue lolling in your copper mouth. Ring out

the news: it’s three o’clock and all’s not well.

Your bomb is flying straight toward a tart heart.

My sweet, let your newness be a gift. Leave it

on someone’s front step, a note attached:

Let me in or leave the door unlatched.

62 *

Let me in or leave the door unlatched,

That’s what the Bread said. We all call her that, the sickly kid who grew up to want

what she couldn’t have: an endless supply of sourdough and rye. She smelt of yeast.

She was desperate. In her mind no roads

led to the burnt-out field of her. One must fly in a plane to get there. In her mind she’s naked and middle-aged. Always.

Covered in rind. Sparrows arrow straight for her collarbone. In it rises dough which falls again. Then rises again.

Like a city. Like a dick. Eventually we get back to our raising. We three

63 *

get back to our raising: Me and me host while small blue flame Pentecosts, burning oddly over our heads. She’s like the dove

we’d all love. But for her dumb cooing.

Even the sun in her boudoir weeps, slips his portrait into her desk, remembers

those beds, those bears, a candied chateau, and paints lipstick not on but around her lips. And poor Bread thinks she’s only body

once she falls, Alice-like, down the tunnel of a throat. And the host welcomes guests wearing a blue ribbon to match the blue

inner sanctum no one sees into.

The sign above its door says: Smile, you.

64 Three Contemplate Infinity

I dropped my basket and apples fell

to make on the floor fruit’s panoply of stars. I slipped and tumbled

miniscule down a dark aisle.

Mom, when I was six was I lost

really or by accident? In panic

I hovered near the candy stuffing

my pockets for the trip home

to our neighborhood: the blueprint

of some reality that wasn’t. It was the strawberries’ red infinitum,

spinach’s unbearable green. It was

65 Zen in the black eye of a pea, the me

holding rice, the weight of my arms in my arms, your smile a white rabbit

shriveling. It was all this that saved me

from the confines of my own body—

but for a second only. I’m still afraid of the grocery store.

You taught me: To eat small is to rise

courageous as asparagus. To eat big

is to shrink: another lime among limes, heart citric. Eat both and fit. Caress

the cantaloupe to see if it’s ready.

66 Three Mythology

Three: Have you ever taken one thread and pulled?

Arrow Sparrow: A mechanized cloud. Athena, sick of owls, called upon the sparrow. She felt lonely and built a phony from ivory and metal, sent it whirring down. Three received the message. No dove could’ve said it better: The flood’s over; Three’s in for superior weather.

Ghost of Fashion: What aesthete is this? The context, the order, the color. Three’s hope swarming on the canvas of a missing face.

Lonely Electric Eel: No one wants to kiss that kind of power.

The Hedgerow: An eye.

The Ingénue: Erases all traces of an interior. She found the courage to seek it out weeks later by placing a blue ribbon in her hair and entering the maze, way out marked by a crumbled eraser.

67 The Secretary: Takes down dictation. Hard-boiled.

She listens to psychedelia at night after the light has killed her.

Bread: All that she’s good for is you.

Clue: Osprey is foil to Arrow Sparrow.

The Maze Center: Here Three found, instead of usual fountain, usual stone and flower constellation, her own face fluid as cumulous. Don’t flinch. It’s the law of gravity. When met with acres of the same, you’ll always fall in love with yourself.

The Architect: Wanted to obliterate, to be a Venus, equal parts infinity and swarm of balloons accidentally let go.

On her body pupils are contacting, many minds dropping their hard-won sums, miles of code, once deciphered, will say: love.

The Host: says, Welcome. I’m smiling.

68 Amelia: You’re fast approaching. A triangle can look, to the nearly-crashing, like a tomb.

Or one, exotic eye. Which will it be?

The correct answer is: What does it matter?

On July 2nd she vanished from your air-space, landing on a strip of beach near a half-drowned city.

That’s the day she became panoramic guilty nightly

The City: That is panoramic guilty nightly. Three thrusts her hands into her pants while you look away.

Rather, look down through a glass-bottomed boat, down

into Broadway.

69 IV.

“They took the idols and smashed them, the Fairbankses, the Gilberts, the Valentinos!

And who’ve we got now?”

-Sunset Boulevard

70 Three Go Norma Desmond

At Valentino’s tomb I placed my bouquet.

The past is a macaw among a flock of doves, its bones so light, bones I could crush with just one hand. Those dogs I loved, chimp I considered a son, are all buried in the garden, topiary willed into a maze, puzzling coils of green woven as if by an imaginary hand into the very picture of my inner bestiary, zoo so tangled with briar even my little red mare refused to graze there, home to condor, spinning ghost of a circus bear, lone tiger.

Skeletons of elephants dot croquet lawns springing up from the cloister of my inner bullet. I fired, unmooring his ark and like a Biblical boat he began to float. It rained and rained. In LA rain isn’t simply the rote articulation of our washed-up and sorrowful, but falling glass we didn’t mean to smash yet smash, flooding swimming pools into which, mad drunk, we dive. I killed him

71 but in death I bid him: To paradise carry each and every last pair of me, the males and females of the species, and the lonely.

72 Three Go Aquarium

By the moon I lived. If it was harvest

I’d swim to shore. Now shore’s here where fish eat fish. I spiral up and up

and up the ramp, my face facing sea whose eyes are blue. I’d tear them out and shred this water if it were paper,

letting it fall like snow. Dumb hump- back flies North to never reachable as lonesome electric eel sting-rays

the no one by my name sliding past this glass, not a real moon or a real see, love an hour passed unlucky.

But sea how a name on my tongue turns, spinning it as the moon spins my blood, even here where the sole

73 and bass plot against me? The spit and shit of the past pearls eventually and on my breast bright comes to rest.

74 Hold On, Three. Three, Hold On

This kitchen is a mausoleum.

Why not a puzzle to take your mind off what’s buried in a drawer from which no flour will ever spill—

She won’t come back. Yet there are days silver bangles crawl up our arms, alarms, chiming city clocks, rosemary in the air. Please,

God of Reason, let it not be. We can’t carry yet another woman on our yoke; we’re too burdened already. But a ghost might explain this tectonic swell or—smaller— in our ear a voice pleading: Leave the party.

Go to the garden. Go to the maze center.

I’ll be there.

75 Three Winter

The swirling of leaves, a thump against the deck as if what’s invisible fell down drunk: her orb circled my head, broke against a cloud. I feel no

shame in playing with the dead. The first snow is falling all over itself to tuck us in, the season of fires. Dishes smashed at night in the morning

are disappeared. Incarnation of my childlessness brought the broom and swept. I feel her youth though she has no face, no face I can understand.

A dog barks. I know what it is to want to live again. Funny. Most spirits haunt the knowable living-room sectional, danish and coffee-laden

kitchen table. Most stick to sleigh-beds even as the sun burns the sky. She tells me, Darken the room, project the movies in which we play

76 good and sane under the stars. The backyard, once a section of an otherwise unending stretch of land, crosshatches itself with snow. Nobody

makes angels anymore. But you lay your body down to make a copy only deeper and bearing tidings of the grass below. How could I know

the place where you lived as a girl, the oldest in the county, is now a small white bed waiting for me, cool and made? I lie down, waiting

for spring to multiply its pleasing body until you and I are making love to so many of them, those months with names like Mai and Avril.

77 Three’s Brainchild Is

Made from hope’s detritus, the stuff of wisdom but wider, wide enough for a hand to slide through. There’s a cut, after-all, in this baby’s skull. I can reach in and pulse the mind manually: No thought except the one I give you.

Made from the mechanics of a subway train or dormer; the fever that once flushed your cheeks I held like chicks at some farm I can’t remember, where rills in the land ran down to woods rumored to transform the ringlet to risk.

Made from a river. I nearly drowned and so had a near- death experience in which you reached from the future a hand down to extract me like a tooth from the mouth of my own loneliness. I like you. Likewise, you replied.

Made from a chessboard’s warp and woof. I can’t play but I adore the bishops, the queens. They are history but sometimes marble, sometimes plastic, so easy to move over the board that’s your body where war is good.

78 Made from cheval glass so I may tilt myself to look in at you behind my face. This fact remains: chiaroscuro is also called claire-obscure and so night’s imprecision casts its shade across me to make someone new: you.

Made from the city’s clarion call that is a clasp knife, spring-loaded, released in my pocket as I stride beside danger. Fear can put a mother’s mind at ease and power can transfer, like money, from one account to another.

Made from the click beetle or the skipjack depending on the lexicon I give you. You did Dada back when

Dada was only a scatological dream. With your honest palms you made love to sculpture. I chose the medium.

Made of megillah. You’re an Old Testament heroine, depression never stopping you from doing god’s will and I’m your god, though young and sadly subject to imagination’s singing mesmerism: look deep into—

79 Made of my womb’s long-playing record. Listen to its big black forest. Even the crickets are desperate.

So rest instead in my brain’s bower. Crown yourself with blossoms growing according to size and color.

Made of the Lord of Misrule’s mantle, seersucker and so impossible to wrinkle. My logic is many- valued. True or false is negotiable. Over dinner we’ll discuss nuance, then after, much later, I’ll cradle you.

Made of maraschino cherry, with only a tongue I can put a knot in your stem and that’s sexy, very un- motherly. But this is a world in which the marcel may appear on any head anywhere though it’s not 1920.

Made of thanatos. That’s why I bore you initially, so I’d recognize, on-screen, me in you, performing the original sin which is the manipulation of time and space. In case you’re reading this after I’m dead:

80 We’re made of the enzootic. We’re all best left in our exact jungle or specific neighborhood stumbling erratum stuck in the revolving door of this life. Script doctor daughter, make it better.

Made of scullion or scupper, whatever is dreck or close to the water, you’re the kid I hoped for: quiet till I say go. Then you row our golden barge across the Nile. On Cleopatra’s Needle I prick my finger.

81 Three Go to the Show

Pick me up at the mouth of the cave and let me fire into this seascape: kraken, salt eye, brute alto murmuring. I’ll be in tweed and kitten heels.

So what if three of me come for dinner? Set a place and a place and a place.

Let the prophesy begin. I predict: Girl. It’ll flood in September. Planks will cross the square and we’ll cross over. But where does one find trees in a city that’s all water? Alternate ending: rape by swan. In special features you’ll see me in nettles thrown over my shoulder, clamshells at my feet, nine circles of hell more beautiful in cashmere and strings of pearl pulled from the ocean’s scupper, a best of themes that at large hunkers in an armchair slopping and crying, trident songbook gone and gone and gone: three-pronged. In cygnet I am risen, red carpet rolling its tongue from limo door to Kodak Theater. Aswim in kisses, the auditorium fills with eels poised for electricity, pop of cameras, pop of pseudo sea rising to a most musical swell. I’ll sing the recitatives then speak the aria.

It goes: Now into the sizzling olive oil descending! Three pairs of hands to tear the flesh and three to pour the wine into cracked glasses. I’ll find answers to the most Sargasso of questions: When will I die and how and why and.

82 Three Goes Starlet

“Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow

that shows up the bloody footprints.”

-Hitchcock

The director can’t help but see in my gesture, in my look, two girls divided on a playground by an orbiting third. That little disappointment,

he says, is the empathy an audience feels for me.

They know what it is to see some cloud as flying monkey, a pair of shoes as threat. They too light

candles in the church built to house personality and pray for heart, guts, the brains to possess this body. Dance when I say. Fly then fly over

myself dead in the snow. Or so. In my white skin the prism of decay, rainbow, sparrow, hot air balloon unnecessary. If I’m murdered

83 in this frame, lost forever in the Emerald City of my own legacy, remember that I harbored something dirty, felling me finally like a tree

till I shadowed in full sun. Click your heels three times, he says, and pretend you’re home.

But keep your face still. It’s a crime scene.

84 Three Embraces Her Darkness and, Conversely, Her Light

Unzip this long track of metal from neck to navel. Pull down till you see ribbon.

Undressed, I’ll drift,

an unhung painting floating to what wall it wants and when. Outside: naked sings the sparrow.

Outside: blossoms all the time. A fine plunder. A good shot. Then sweetness trumpets my coming under

a single flag. An army of one sails its flotilla down my body’s river.

Tender clavicle

is now a clavichord, hip-bone a drum.

I know how dangerous the honeycomb.

The bridge of our bed

85 is the bridge of our hands. Ape absolute.

Let me skyward march to that third star, and straight on till morning.

86 Three Are Living Proof

Listen to the garden. It’s living proof:

We’ve joined primordial, sang explosion till reality gave herself over

to her adoring, every autograph signed Truly. And truly, if truth died in the ugly glamour of her eyes,

who’d remember? Minds she once rocked go blank.

So let her now in coral gardens under- water pay homage to truth’s factory:

a submerged volcano, till now erupting anonymously. There flowers come up wild. There even we float unbidden

through aisles of fire and water.

There we’re able, in our very floating, to hold our own hands, to speak and be heard.

87 Three Go West

So few of us know what it means to be Indian or, better, aboriginal. No picture book, good china or even good-good china, no highboy

waxed back to life, could express the sacrifice you made so she might not make a baby, a tree.

What you did you did alone and silent except

for a grandfather clock’s ticking in the hall.

The sky thrummed prop plane propellers, dashing any hope the sky ever indulged in.

In a wingback you traveled without moving to a time when the country verily teemed with nearly-nude men and women, women,

you read, kind, treating captives as their own children, women collapsing in tall grass to see clouds, not as diamonds in platinum or rills

88 of fence, but as the mind, dark and pulsing, of each living thing. You plucked hydrangea planted after you married the doctor, hoping

to crush its wit till it smeared thick and green on your hands. Flowers, people who won’t speak as you’d have them speak, even these

have a kind of intelligence. You learned this when you said adieu to husband #1. He flew by 747 to California, land of the dying sun.

89 Three Reaches the Core and Is

held by the past, stylishly evaporating arms wrapped like fog around a runway till Three can’t see to take off again. When you love something you hurtle toward it,

no map, and starve to fit it, untying that blue ribbon from your hair, like sky-writing saying amazing what without ink or paper we can say. Lost Amelia wrote

her own epithet in pollution: We lied, begged, cheated, and killed. We’re not sorry to have crashed into the sun for she welcomed us with the burning we remember

from our past lives as stars when women were women and men by god were men. Each by each we fell into our flambé days, burning our drinks, desserts, fags.

We were greedy children, everything a show and still unsatisfied, we dreamt the very pavement lifted itself to be drunk, as if nectar, not a railroad, ran below, no

90 tunnels dug and we rode above in limos to parties lit with possibility, hung wax wings on virgins saying,

Give us the pleasure of your flying, and to our delight

they flew, up and above the maze. Reports came back suggesting walls of hedgerow didn’t stop them drifting.

Still the sun promised fame, said: Burn now or burn

later in the earth’s slow grinding the way you grind your teeth when sleeping, as if the jaw could hate its body and so during the night industriously make

war. Slowly. Surely. This is what it is to be young and human. So come to your mommy, and fly quick.

To me billions of years seem like just one morning.

91 Three Go Neutral Zone Orchard Fruit

What deserted me said as it was walking away, the sky, that hole to climb in, wired the spring so in spring’s orchard electrify your propriety.

Never stone the butterfly or baptize your skin in the start stop start of the river, spirit naked and embarrassed on the bank. When day ends

and heaven meets pitched roof meets evening, don’t be frightened. Yes, ghosts haunt our store of grain but with the chaff predict what hand

disembodied once belonged to whose living.

What left me in a cave drawing appeared again: Queen of phantasm, orgasm. Instinct

to shiver behind that cloud sliver saved it so saved me. Its ferocity is furred and below that even further below no liquid no, just

92 a hot and unforgiving core. What forgot me said, biting into that neutral zone orchard’s fruit, This is my body and I give up for you.

93 V.

“I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I have made.”

-Marilyn Monroe

94 Ophelia Stars as All the Women We’ve Loved Before

Your madness is ridiculous, your death all watery striptease.

A text-message from the grave reads: Dead and gone, Ldy.

Marilyn, what saved you from age? Could be that OD, last pill a steam ship chugging into the port of your throat. Could be

a silver-handled pistol, a limo hitting a wall at seventy, a plane crash, every member of the band onboard. Could be

the convertible that fell from a mountain in Monaco. Grace, is it true your hands were still on the wheel? There’s naught so

beautiful as bouquets at a dead girl’s gate. In LA the toilet you slumped against is strung with leis. You loved Hawaii,

its primordial volcano, sand so morbid it dressed for your funeral.

Hamlet said to say ‘hi.’ DiMaggio often toasts to you. Youth,

when you go what are we to do? We know. There, there.

You wonder about your dog, canary, undone laundry.

95 This is why you haunt late-nite cable, your dress fluttering, same frock that buoyed you up in NYC, but at Elsinore sank you.

96 Sunset Boulevard

Norma Desmond said it best when she said nothing except, maybe: I refuse to speak, written in the suicide

note that killed off her career. With a jerking hand she littered smeared sketches onto a cocktail napkin:

closed mouths, open eyes, the amputated head of John the Baptist and above him a purple halo of spilt wine mixed

with tears. So went Norma’s farewell to Hollywood.

Talkies, in time, will fall out of style. This she wrote

in the milky light of her own face, a celluloid version of herself dancing the dance of the seven veils, projected

onto a screen at the south end of her study. That version of Norma, the one half-clothed and vicious, carried a sword

for the severance of head from heart, muting the already mute. How sad, she must have thought, that we lose something

97 so precious. And just above the sound of twitching pen- strokes, the almost imperceptible pulse of her lungs: silence.

She signed the letter, Forget ever seeing me again. With that she vanished, taking with her the benefaction of her eyes.

98 High Society

Grace regretted her goddess. Growing old is grace, is discipline, is human.

Though earth obeys its laws, love is still.

Grace had hair so pale

the Fifties died right there in its audacious.

With grace

day flicked its wrist, started the blonde marble spinning.

Can’t grace mean: Cling to a body and build against gravity?

Grace isn’t bronze. So she says. Bronze patinas.

Let grace rather be the wonder

of a very human arm perfectly lifting a flute of champagne

99 to the women who slept golden and woke up vanishing.

With grace I watch Grace— who despite money’s splendor,

the wonder of her figure, the usually terrifying ocean

lapping honeyed out her front door— would surrender diamond

and dream of a single zero wheel stopping at the wrong destination,

then wake to the sound of mystery in an adjoining room: eggs cracked

over skillets filling the morning with broken sizzling conversation.

100 The Absolute Ultimate

For Sandra Dee

Gidget, that get up, the gorse gathering dragged you down. Diving deep- sea style simply slipped your mind. But mindful of your midget moray eel, your eddied elbow, you entered the tussle a frightened girl. Forget him, that Darren, that Doggie that Moon, Darling. undo, undulate. Be urchin, be understood. so small but I soared over you, Sandra

Dee. Be diphthong, divide yourself in two.

There are bigger boards yet and you’ll ride, you’ll dive to save yourself into some sea or some sky.

There is gorge galore, there is Gallo-Romance.

It’s a watery Paris perfect in miniature.

Be a bee and busy your way back to the hive, Hurry, the here- after is amassing its armies of ace surfer Sallies and you’ll be shinning there.

Gidget, the golly gees, the god

101 of the 50’s, the fix, the fizz, the factoid, so sorry. So sick the sidecar did you in, double crossed you diluted the already thin. Thumb your nose and pitch the pearl, piece your potion nulling notion you need, you nettle, you rah-rah, you rise, have risen.

102 Poem Beginning with a Joke, Ending with a Seriousness

The next day she brought three calves on the set, one name Carole, one named Bob and one named Hitch. And that's how it started -- because he loved Carole Lombard's sense of humor."

Carole Lombard, comedienne, carried to Hitch’s soundstage in her arms proof actors aren’t mere animals. Her face

read so well he forgave her the steer shit on his set, bungled mystery he believed comes, not from a diseased dream, but

as day follows night follows the phrase she scrawled as the three piece began the Beguine: Je ne comprend pas, room

wearing its weirdly unlucky pall. A calf like a baby should not be sacrificed for any man, any joke no matter how cosmic.

103 It may grow disastrous, growing to kill, never aping the kill, heart of its heart a lie too insidious. She held in her arms,

tight against her breast, the very image of innocence. Actors act, act at acting: a gun cocked, aimed, not fired, a girl

pretending to faint into the future. What became of those calves? Did they escape the butcher or in death haunt every film

Hitch was to make, oddly significant, looking back, a mauling in theory or in practice deep in Daedalus’ labyrinth?

Hitch never forgot the figure she struck, entering with the light behind her, calf with his name mewling against her chest.

104 Bell, Book and Candle

Just for one Christmas I wish I could listen to carols, not bongos, says the non-human blonde. Set in witch- rich New York City, it breaks our millennial hearts to hear such innocence. Watching we grow heavy

with cat philosophy: One never knows what wings when will buzz at the window. At Club Zodiac the happy warlock sips his martini. Jazz plays. in her head to jazz the aunt called in circles witchy

chants: I want to live in a wholly cat city. Beyond the Hudson is an island sweet with piss, covered in fur. The very air seems to purr. I want to die there so I might return, more hair, no pills. Forget trains.

I’ll come through windows. I’ll negotiate the wind. the non-human blonde quietly sips her cabernet.

She’s hoping for Jesus and picnics, goes the story but cameras lie. There are thousands of cats hissing

105 through the mask of her face. So she blushes. We in the dark think she’s in love only till we retire to the streets of cities not the city where a witch fed on the back step finally creeps inside, tells her story.

106 Andy Warhol Wants to Be a Machine, and So Do I

Andy saw poor mourning Jackie in her pink suit and from her emanated the feverish spirituality of the sea anemone. No wonder he wanted to be

a machine. Me too. If the reflection I had hoped for is not mine then let me be another wife, she who hasn’t lost, she who rides forever

in God’s Cadillac, pink and equatorial, a barely there line down her throat that says she once loved the sun, once wore a cross, once

died then was reborn on a beach in Greece where the cliffs plunge, as aging starlets do, into the sea.

Each morning I wake to see poor mourning

Who and What-For crawling barelegged along the rocks of some beach, tossed by wind.

I say again, I want to be a machine then mechanically

107 build another me. Andy, think of the speed!

At the Jamaica Inn across the ocean pirates are again sailing in with gold but only

in ghastly sacks and in sick human repetition they pantomime their own assassination at night in the jeweled dark of the stateroom

and on the rocks where their ghostly ships land.

I don’t want, Andy, to end up like them. I can be a metal joint, I can be a plot twist, I can redo

and redo until even my bouffant, even my brain, fragile as floating medusae, is flame-retardant, is hijacked by the inanimate dream of all grieving women.

108 Refusing Sinatra

Let me tell you about regret. Regret is a piano played a flight below as you lift your demitasse with a finger

and linger upstairs, afraid to go down.

He was cocky but sweet. He was in-town for chili, ribs, French-style ice cream,

then turned up at your sorority, watched as you came in after tennis, and climbed the stair. Your mouth, he said, was like a mic.

he’d like to sing into it so hold still.

But if you’d said yes to every man who claimed he’d make it big, you could build

a bridge of their bodies, a bridge of salt all the way to the stars. In your sling-backs you’d cross and never look back but you must

109 look back. Years later you saw him sing on T.V., cursed yourself. Why, when you were young, did you cover your ears? He sang to you

about spring and Jupiter and Mars, stars you can’t see now, Nan, not from where you are, wintering in Ohio’s long, grey hair.

110 All Sculpture Is Butter

All sculpture is butter. All songs are about my mother.

All ice-skaters triple: rotation, rotation—Mother says, Get out of bed or sleep till you see the flower

on the table. Writing written today is by men who’ve not lived, only read. Writing is a valentine to the future. In the air with my finger I draw

my blonde head and wonder: Is my neck a reprieve when I twist up my sunny nature? Can I be a cloud and blot out my own debt? Can my boat of a heart

be music if all music is breath and breath a darkness, three times the poisonous time, three folds in a robe, three lines on a hand? Sun is good for thawing

the carefully wrought. In another time I might have laid my head against a heifer’s warm side and with my fingers taken milk from this century,

111 so coming of age in an age of Michelangelo calico, a palazzo built of bone, a butter gown. Mother dressed me in what she found rotting in the fridge. To be rue

means flour will stick as will sugar to you. All hands on my face say all’s blind and I’m the best unseen figurine. All sculpture is salt and to it I’m returning.

112 Isis Talkin Blues

A squanderer of champagne I was busted on the road to Memphis watering the median with my White Star but O Procurer of the Law, forgive me! Scared I fell from my horse as a star falls then uncorked the bottle and let it run till it was the Nile lapping its many tongues, its many hands, over that scattered body. This while his ka stood by. Some movie! The screen went black and I heard tinkling piano, the weird knocking of knees.

True. The puzzle wasn’t solved before I left for the city clad in the white of a player’s juju or the shock-white of spook after spook at a late-night disco party.

In me is the shadow. It could be a lost thigh. It could be a sunken arm. Or the hand that didn’t hold on, soon to rise. I wanted his body. Then I reeled it in, O Judge.

He was all to pieces. He was helpless on the tide so slipped my net. I rode away and that’s where I catch up with my story. But there’s a sequel. The C-List is in the process of rebuilding not along the horizon but tall so every century can see his sphinx whose secret is this.

113 Little Women

We were only two but played four.

As Meg you wore pink: practicality.

As Amy I wrote on my palm-sized slate

I’m ashamed though I did nothing

but dream of slamming your hand in the door. Stop babying me.

As Beth I’d shimmy beneath the bed.

I was overcome with timerdity,

refused to admit you cut your hair mourning a fiancée dead suddenly in winter. Sister, I’m sorry.

You threw away your one beauty but in this movie that ending

is restorative, has purpose, learned us how to be family despite civil war, rationed coffee, men leaving, men returning. The length down your back hated to split

114 whole-heartedly, but one strand at a time. Lately it’s stopped growing.

Behind you on the stair I stare at the unsolvable sum of your neck.

Its nakedness, Jo, is what frightens me.

115 Musical to be Performed in a Cul-de-sac

There’s a Rogers and Hammerstein extravaganza on TNT and Mom’s got The Sound of Music on in her bedroom while she organizes her underwear drawer. “My Favorite

Things” creeps in through the crack between the door and its frame, whistles down the hall, and finds me crouching in my bathroom, hands resting on the windowsill,

looking out at the neighbor’s yard where they’ve started to put in a pool for the grandchildren. From this height, the construction looks apocalyptic; the hill that runs

down to the woods gutted, bored through by foxholes.

I start to sing, quietly, and rock back and forth on my heels.

“When the dog bites and the bees….” Back and forth.

From here I can almost see the collapsed bodies of earthworms, the annihilation of Mrs. Powers’ garden, bulbs blown out of the dirt by big, male hands shoveling down to the limestone,

116 the bedrock, to a buried city, abandoned after the bombing, the air-raids. All that’s left is this universe of backyards, some partitioned off at their borders by wooden fence, electric fence,

dandelions, hedge rows. I can already tell the workmen have cut my safest route to Kristen’s house. That’s where I used to go, in summer, kneeling down in the mulch under the DuBois’

new deck. I’d sing, “How do you solve a problem like….” digging fingernails into the skin of my thighs, eyes closed.

Maybe I was waiting for an explosion but none came: a 747

landing at the Northern Kentucky airport, that’s all. “Small and white, clean and bright…bless my homeland forever.”

I’d grab my own shoulders and shake, waiting

for the Gestapo, for round-toe boots, soles caked with guts, causing the deck planks up above to shake. He never came: just Mrs. DuBois in her flats, watering the hanging mums.

117 Ghost of Fashion

Oh skylark, won’t you lead me there?

Kid-glove on the dash, a hard right, then no fingers slide back to non-lap. Your dearth rides with me. It says:

To the dead there’s only fashion. To the dead every dress just fits. Mercer once called the moon out in Savannah,

now Losantiville is all synth, no ironed hem or cello on the radio filling my room with your ghost gospel, bandstand the pulpit from which you urged: Love can be a riot of fabric in a store window. Skylark,

guide my hand among the gowns and show me sweetheart necklines, A-lines—then bear my trousseau on your missing shoulder. I’ll wait naked at a mirror.

You taught me shoes, belt, clutch must match: pink

and pink and pink, an arpeggio of color culminating in the same phrase. Make me over, my chic but tender center. Warm my young hand holding the one photo of you galloping the field over, hair mussed, scarf undone

118 until November in its dark living room turns off the radio, lays down its own month’s Vogue, and rides for barrenness. Don’t be scared of fallow. You were born as a promise to be filled and so you’ll end and begin and

119 Gypsy

You gotta get a gimmick

The svelte length of a stride you unpeeled your glove till you were nearly naked, mostly clothed.

My fly unzips to silence.

The twenty-first century already blows, Rose.

I can’t get time and my third eye, bloodshot, is sorry to see in the mirror my dirty blonde. Exclusive unicorn, you wouldn’t allow this virgin to enter your wood.

I’ve nowhere to rest my head.

It’s ok.

Speak and in my book

120 I’ll copy down your thousand travesties, light the vacancy sign over your shoulder, cull my naked brain for a signal, confuse words and love, fashion and space till the more I wear the more empty

I’ll be. Let me entertain you, make you smile. In my blank belly of obsidian is an absolute zero dance floor where stars are born spinning.

121 “In an Age of Nomalcy: How Hart Crane’s The Bridge Spans a Decade”

O Sleepless as the river under thee,

Vaulting the sea, the prairie’s hidden sod,

Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

-Hart Crane, “To the Brooklyn Bridge”

Hart Crane composed a good deal of The Bridge in a New York apartment that featured a clear view of his muse: the Brooklyn Bridge. New York itself had become, for

Crane, an artist’s playground, at times joyous and at other times forbidding and terribly lonely. He couldn’t deny its growing force nationally and internationally in an economic, political, and artistic sense. In a letter to his painter friend William Sommer, Crane wrote:

“In almost every way, N.Y. is getting to be a really stupendous place. It is the center of the world today, as Alexandria became the nucleus of another older civilization…Life is possible here at greater intensity than probably any other place in the world today” (150-

151). Crane imagined New York City as comparable to Alexander’s glittering capital city

Alexandria, a city built in Greek-colonized Egypt. However, in a later letter to Alfred

Stieglitz, Crane revised his opinion of New York and said: “The city is a place of

‘broken-ness,’ of drama; but when a certain development in this intensity is reached a new stage is created, or must be, arbitrarily, or there is a foreshortening, a loss and a premature disintegration of experience” (155). It’s obvious that Crane anticipated that change, exponential growth and, often, incalculable loss. It’s also no coincidence that this letter was written during the early stages of The Bridge’s inception—and that Crane moved so rapidly between a vision of the city (and subsequently the entire country itself)

122 that was hopeful, ambitious, and joyful and a vision that was as dark as a New York subway tunnel and just as inscrutable.

The Bridge began as a long breath of praise for a country’s growing prowess in democratizing technological advancement. Lives would be made easier and folks from all walks of life would be, because of a booming economy, able to take part. It would be a new kind of “Song of Myself,” a poem that would look back over the country’s past with reverence and would attempt to incorporate the diversity of voices that had had a role in shaping the beautiful jumble that is the American idiom. In the end, however, The Bridge grapples with the United States’ fundamental conflict between democracy and capitalism and its fundamental desire to further its own economic interests around the world. 1

The Bridge is, ultimately, a disjointed poem that loses its original enthusiasm for the United States’ economic expansion. It epitomizes the country’s rapid economic rise and subsequent fall during the 1920s by dramatizing the kinds of ideological conflicts that were prevalent during that decade, specifically the change from progressive to conservative policy and an increasing interest in globalization. It calls for “synthesis” while simultaneously decrying the breakdown of traditional race and class hierarchies.

Formally, it’s a fusion of epic and lyrical modes (a new poetics for a new age) that inevitably becomes a jumble of conflicted ideas and poetic forms. Much in the same way that Modernism (despite its call to “Make it new!”) typically can be said to reify old structures, The Bridge, in its breaking apart and reconstitution of nineteenth-century epistemologies, remains a testament to a conflicted period. In process from 1923 to 1929

(with a publication date of 1930), The Bridge encompassed the decade’s optimistic

1 The Bridge’s dichotomous relationship between desire and refusal has often been cited in queer readings of the text, but here I mean to suggest that the poem reflects an antagonistic mix of desire for economic expansion and nostalgia for the past.

123 beginnings and its catastrophic end. I’ll be discussing Crane’s ideological and formal progression specifically in “The River,” “Ave Maria,” “To Brooklyn Bridge,” “Indiana,”

“The Dance,” “National Winter Garden,” “Quaker Hill,” The Tunnel,” and “Atlantis,” in order to demonstrate The Bridge’s significance as a text indicative of 1920s America.

Crane wasn’t the only Modernist to attempt a long poem during the 1920s. Crane saw Eliot’s “negative” poetics (in The Wasteland) as a depressive world-view in which

“the fruits of civilization have all been harvested.” Crane didn’t agree with Eliot’s assertion—at least not at first. He did recognize, however, Eliot’s artistic prowess and growing influence among other writers of his generation and imagined “going through

[Eliot] toward a different goal… [that would lead us to, intelligently point to, other positions and pastures new” (89). As an American poet in pursuit of an American poetics, it was important for Crane to utilize Eliot’s structural innovations but to more “positive” ends. The Bridge typified a Modernist’s sense of fracture, but also included a Modernist’s belief in a chaotic universe reordered via “tradition.” Eliot’s and Pound’s inclusion of time-honored verse forms and classical literary and mythological reference points managed to suggest an eventual societal reconfiguration. Crane attempted a similar poetics in The Bridge, using also American reference points like Pocahontas, Walt

Whitman, the Mississippi River, and Christopher Columbus. After all, if a nation is to pass on democratic ideals to the rest of the globe, there must be a reinvestigation of what makes that nation unique; by tapping directly into the country’s self-hood and cultural history, Crane hoped to lend credence to its policies.

Crane’s Modernist confluence of Elizabethan rhetoric, Victorian sentiment and ethnography, and Modernism’s “obliquity, indirection, and estrangement” (17) (as well

124 as a healthy interest in “the machine”), serves as a “perfect storm,” in which America’s

“cultural exchange” and imperialist desire is played out in The Bridge’s (as Westover in

The Colonial Moment argues) “hybrid form” that “discloses the opposing forces at work in the poem—between the ideal of a unified nation and the historical reality of a fragmented one—and between he imperial gain of the free-market forces and the salutary insights of a humane imagination” (130). In other words, while Eliot was busy lamenting the end of civilization and Pound was busy recording history, Crane, instead, used the long form to explore the past, present, and potential future of his nation using, as a vehicle, the lyric “I,” and an odd assortment of poetic references that, according to Brian

Reed, “liberate and redeploy the raw libidinal energy bound up in the nation’s collective

drive to industrialize, to produce” (110).2

Crane’s sincere3 reliance on tradition seems to ultimately justify the poem’s hierarchical sympathies. This is not to say that Crane didn’t imagine himself (as Langdon

Hammer says) “newly released from the Puritan sexual and economic disciplines of nineteenth century America” (118),4 or that he believed his depiction of the American

Indian was not rendered with care and sensitivity. However, Crane’s unique poetics of excess, of decadent surfaces and hybridism, points toward a de-centered economic (and literary) future that still requires literary and historic authority to solidify its arguments.

Crane wanted to write his “American synthesis” using “an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words! Something clean, sparkling, elusive!” (86). The

2 From his essay “Hart Crane’s Victrola,” originally published in Modernism/Modernity and later in his collection of essays Hart Crane: After His Lights. 3 Louis Menand in Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context discusses the emotional “sincerity” and “honesty” of nineteenth century writers (and subsequently Modernist writers) as stemming from a presubscribed notion of what is “literary.” 4 From his book Hart Crane and Allen Tate

125 “negative” poetics Crane wished to avoid, however, ultimately comes to the fore in The

Bridge’s “The Tunnel,” “Cape Hatteras,” “The River, ” and others. These poems, written later, depict what Ellen Meiksins Wood describes as an imperialism without “direct command of vast subject territories,” that, for all intents and purposes, is “operating not imperially but neutrally, in the interests of an ‘international community’ (5).5 It’s an empire that is often hard to trace and difficult to implicate. Capitalist imperialism is

“distinctive among all social forms precisely in its capacity to extend domination by purely economic means. In fact, capital’s drive for relentless self-expansion depends on this unique capacity, which applies not only to class relations between capital and labor but also to relations between imperial and subordinate states” (Wood 12). The Manifest

Destiny Crane describes in The Bridge is a modern accumulation of progressive and/or moral justifications for economic expansion. By promising to spread democracy to

“uncivilized” communities, the imperialist power is able to defend its occupation both to its own citizens and to those occupied.

Allen Tate, an early champion of Crane’s work, later became uncertain about his friend’s project primarily because, as Paul Bowles says, “the modern world lacked the vital system of shared beliefs, the common cultural vocabulary that Milton and Dante had drawn on their major poems. There was nothing spiritually sustaining about American capitalism” (220).6 Crane’s American long poem itself finally lacks any kind of traditional narrative, only fragments of recognizable historical instances stitched together with the ephemeral thread of metaphor as organizing principle. In defense of his poetic system (that in a letter to Harriet Monroe he calls the “logic of metaphor”), Crane argued

5 In her Empire of Capital 6 In his introduction to Crane’s Selected Letters

126 “[I’m] more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and perceptions involved in the poem" (278). A breakdown of traditional meaning is Crane’s primary task. Coupled with erratic syntax and spelling, Crane’s transformative and chaotic metaphoric “logic” represents a new

America of decadent surfaces and hazy rationalization.

“The River,” for example, opens with a jumble of slogans and brand names

(indicative of a popular culture entrenched with racially divisive references) that Crane attempts to thread together with a relatively regular pentameter line and the invitation to:

“Stick your patent name on a signboard/brother—all over—going west—young man”

(57). The addressee could very well be the poet in the case; Pocahontas, guiding principle for this particular section of The Bridge (“Powhatan’s Daughter”) and the poem as a whole, has become the river itself. The archaic method of steamship travel is juxtaposed with a fast-paced “EXPRESS” train that manages to both embody progress and potential abandonment. In stanza three the speaker notices “three men, still hungry on the tracks”

(57)—an image that both prefigures an impending economic depression and suggests that not everyone is benefiting from the current economic boom.

These “hoboes” are used as “psychological mules” on whose backs the reader is carried through Crane’s America. The highly emblematic nature of these “mules” doesn’t manage to adequately depict the depth of their despair but does manage, on the other hand, to suggest Crane’s own identity as a self-subscribed wanderer, unable to partake of

America’s promise because of his status as outsider artist, gay man, and general

127 nonconformist. The real irony of The Bridge is, of course, Crane’s inability to join the world order he describes. Of course, Crane comes to understand that in reality democracy and capitalism can be, and often are, mutually exclusive. The Bridge is, to an extent, a coming of age story that—in most cases—involves a loss of innocence. Both the poem and its creator come to better understand the complexities and difficulties inherent in their respective “visions.” For Crane, the story doesn’t end well. The Bridge comes to its conclusions, in a sense, backwards.

Crane describes “The River” as an “intentional burlesque on the cultural confusion of the present—a great conglomeration of noises analogous to the strident impression of a fast express rushing by. The rhythm is jazz” (346). The first thirty lines of

“The River” are an attempt to express the dissident music of a country that hopes to synthesize moral authority with technological advancement and one that inevitably has no qualms about selling spirituality:

…a Ediford—and whistling down the tracks

a headlight rushing with the sound—can you

imagine—while an EXPRESS makes time like

SCIENCE—COMMERCE and the HOLYGHOST

RADIO ROARS IN EVERY HOME WE HAVE THE NORTHPOLE

WALLSTREET AND VIRGINBIRTH WITHOUT STONES or

WIRES or EVEN running brooks connecting ears

and no more sermons windows flashing roar

breathtaking—as you like it…eh? (57)

128 In this new America, Crane understands that time and space—previously religion’s jurisdiction—have been irrevocably altered by new advancements in science.

Menand argues that the “decade before the First World War [was] suspicious of the pretensions of science” and in need of “spiritual comfort” (34). WWI may very well have contributed to this need.

“The River” also grapples with capitalism’s necessary subjection of the land itself. American literature has arguably enacted with this fundamental struggle since its beginnings, and The Bridge is no exception: “The last bear, shot drinking in the Dakotas/

Loped under wires that span the mountain stream./ Keen instruments, strung to a vast precision/ Blind town to town and dream to ticking dream” (57). The frontier, in its original form, is ostensibly “closed.” Crane’s is a romantic longing for what once was; the “last bear shot drinking in the Dakotas” references Wild Bill Hickock’s infamous end and his status as one of the last “true” symbols of the “Old West.” Crane looks back to the United States’ struggle for domination in the West with a fond nostalgia, its eighteenth and nineteenth-century animalistic and audacious methods of conquest now, in the 1920s, outmoded.

During the “Age of Normalcy,” there were conflicting calls for isolationism and economic advancement. Harding’s and Coolidge’s conservative administrations contrasted with forward-looking societal changes, many of which were brought about by technological advancements that afforded Americans more leisure time, greater mobility, and new choices as consumers best exemplified in the country’s fast urbanization. The

New York City that Crane returned to again and again throughout his short life had seen progressive policies enacted during the last years of the previous century and so typified a

129 modern infrastructure that promised less class stratification and a greater sense of a collective community. After the continent was closed to further expansion, America’s lust for novel methods of development focused its energies on the country’s growing urban centers. The city became a “frontier” of sorts, and Crane’s The Bridge, by virtue of its central metaphor, epitomizes that change.

After having explored “The River’s” nostalgia for an earlier, simpler, and more

“innocent” relationship with “the body” of America (Pocahontas), let’s move backward in The Bridge’s compositional timeline and backward in its progression of ideas, to what

Crane believed signified the land’s initial conquest (as representative of America’s

“frontier spirit”). The “Ave Maria” poem romanticizes America’s fundamental act of imperialist enterprise: Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World.

Who grandest oar, and arguing the mast

Subscribest holocaust of ships, O Thou

Within whose primal scan consummately

The glistening seignories of Ganges swim;--

Who sendest greeting by the corposant,

And Teneriffe’s garnet—flamed it in a cloud,

Urging through night our passage to the Chan;--

Te Deum laudamus, for thy teeming span! (49)

The Ganges evokes Columbus’ original imperialist purpose, and, perhaps also eludes to England’s “classical” empire. Reference to the Ganges also attempts to incorporate spiritual significance to the bridge’s democratizing endeavor; it’s an early twentieth century, Orientalist fascination with the “other,” ultimately incorporating

130 bygone cultures to serve capitalist urges. Again, Crane must justify the “sincerity” of his project by injecting loaded references to “Chan” and “Ganges.” As Louis Menand argues, a change in focus from “object” to “subject”7 in modern scientific and philosophical thought justified an interest in (what William James referred to as) “pure experience.” In

The Bridge Crane seems nostalgic for a world-view in which the “objects” of the poet’s observations maintain static roles (i.e. the Native American as “dying animal” meant to give up its body, the body of America, as a kind of fertilizer for a modern society). The only real “pure experience” we receive is the poet’s.

The Bridge’s proem or introduction, “To Brooklyn Bridge,” praises what Crane came to see as the ultimate symbol of America’s technological progress. It’s the culmination of Columbus’ (and by extension Crane’s) vision. “To Brooklyn Bridge” was one of the earliest poems to be written and it certainly reflects Crane’s initial optimism and stylistic eccentricities. His praise of the bridge’s technological prowess borders on the sublime:

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest

The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,

Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

Over the chained bay waters Liberty— (43)

The passage above is a far cry from “The River’s” “jazz” rhythm that attempts, in the concurrence of deafening, fast-moving popular culture and wistful longing for an earlier America, to depict a country at a crossroads. “To Brooklyn Bridge” employs stylized rhetoric to praise what later in the poem becomes a deficit: technology. For

7 I’m referring here to Louis Menand’s Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context and his argument that modernists’ attempt to move away from empirical thinking merely resulted in a more palatable change of wording.

131 Crane, the bridge is an actualized symbol of democracy in its unimaginable “flight” across the East River, literally linking disparages in time and space as well as between citizens (as a means to “bridge” an ever-widening gulf between what previous generations considered “American” and what constitutes a “modern American”). Crane extols the bridge’s feat of engineering as Whitman’s romantic verse might praise the river the bridge will eventually cross. The Bridge, in fact, seems to surpass nature’s prowess by restraining its chaotic tendencies:

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced

As though the sun took step of thee, yet left

Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--

Implicitly thy freedom staying thee! (43)

In the passage above, Crane suggests that it’s “freedom” itself that keeps the bridge from collapse while the structure itself simultaneously implies movement. Again

Crane attempts to strike an ideological balance between desire and refusal, movement and stillness, democratic ideals and economic development. What’s telling about “To

Brooklyn Bridge,” however, is Crane’s strange invocation of a “bedlamite” who “out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft/…speeds to thy parapets,/ Tilting there momentarily, shrill shirt ballooning” (43), as if to hint at the poem’s future dissatisfaction with its own proposed utopia; it appears also to foreshadow the Great Depression’s psychological impact and Crane’s own death. In a sense, Crane hopes to add the United States to the global literary tradition and, by doing so, modify that tradition to accommodate the

United States’ growing world dominance. In “To Brooklyn Bridge,” Crane describes a

132 United States that’s not only threatening global market dominance, but dominance over nature as well.

Nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny hasn’t disappeared completely; it has merely reconstituted itself, arguing for the democratizing spirit of technology and for advancing the United States’ economic, moral, and governmental inclinations in other nations and territories in order to pave the way for the a lasting economic security. In Literary

Culture and U.S. Imperialism, John C. Rowe describes The United States’ use of “hope” and “social justice” (5) as a kind of rhetorical hijacking and certainly talk of America’s

“individualism” and “frontier spirit” in the 1920s similarly helped to justify some less than savory foreign and domestic policies, such as Teapot Dome, the Snoot-Hawley

Tariff, and U.S.-Nicaraguan relations during the Coolidge administration. At the onset of

The Bridge’s composition, Crane audaciously championed himself as Walt Whitman’s heir and Whitman’s poetics of Manifest Destiny initially influenced Crane’s work a great deal. However, the section of The Bridge Crane eventually dedicated to Whitman, “Cape

Hatteras,” suggests an underlying dissatisfaction with Whitman’s democratizing ideology in the face of twentieth-century horrors.

“Cape Hatteras” begins in prehistory with “Imponderable the dinosaur/sinks slow,/the mammoth saurian/ghoul, the eastern/Cape…” (77) both to imply the nobility of the land itself and its value as “Graveyard of the Atlantic;” ships that once served as a main source of trade and transportation have now given way to the airplane and, subsequently, new sources of energy that, in fact, rely on the sediment of the past (in the form of fossil fuels, and, more metaphorically, a cultural history):

Slowly the hushed land—

133 Combustion at the astral core—the dorsal change

Of energy—convulsive shift of sand…

But we, who round the capes, the promontories

Where strange tongues vary messages of surf

Below grey citadels, repeating to the stars

The ancient names—return home to our own

Hearths, there to eat an apple and recall

The songs that gypsies dealt us at Marseille

Or how the priests walked—slowly through Bombay— (77)

Beyond the obvious imperial connotations, one also gets a sense of Crane’s insistence on the United States’ global significance as well as the growing evidence of a now-global world in which systems of power don’t radiate from a single location but, rather, from states now linked by shared economic interests—what the “you” (Whitman) confronts later in the poem, and what Crane calls “the Exchange” (78).

The American “frontier spirit” also suggests advancements in aviation, culminating in Lindbergh’s 1927 flight across the Atlantic. “Cape Hatteras,” which was begun in ’27, reflects a nation caught up in the nationalistic implications of Lindbergh’s accomplishment. “Cape Hatteras’” convergence of Whitmanesque poetics of Manifest

Destiny and Wright Brothers references should include all the ingredients of Crane’s earlier utopian optimism. The end result, however, is not so simple. The sixth stanza describes an encounter with mechanized power:

The nasal whine of power whips a new universe…

Where spouting pillars spoor the evening sky,

134 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 stopped to the slap of belts on booming spools, spurred

Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the stars (78-79).

Is this the Atlantis Crane had imagined when he began his depiction of a utopian

America? Certainly the poet’s fascination with modernized industry and its subsequent

“harnessing” of time and space is evident, but it’s hard to ignore the poem’s darker implications. Language like “marauding,” “screaming,” “threshed,” “dashed,” and “slit” suggests a violent “entrance” into modernity. The planes as “hurtling javelin[s]” (after

Crane has inordinately praised the Brooklyn Bridge for its technological success and visual beauty) suggest that in Crane’s “Atlantis,” there is a hierarchy. Feats of engineering that are practical and aesthetically pleasing are valued more. The bridge links previously separated sectors of society and so serves a democratic function. According to

Crane, however, the plane conquers space by subjugation. He wonders if nature and technology can coexist peacefully, as they seem to in “To Brooklyn Bridge.” A collective memory of WWI (Crane was rejected from the army because of his age, and worked in a munitions plant during the war) pervades the passage below as well, transforming a potentially positive flight into a hellish image of war:

O bright circumferences, heights employed to fly

War’s fiery kennel masked in downy offings,—

135 This tournament of space, the threshold and chiseled 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! (79-80)

There’s a sense of modernity’s hubris throughout “Cape Hatteras,” though the poem finally ends with a direction invocation of Walt Whitman and Manifest Destiny’s new function: “thy vision is reclaimed!” (83)

During the 1920s, the kind of “creolized” language Whitman used during the mid- nineteenth century was emblematic of a diverse nation that, despite progressivism’s democratizing intentions, maintained a racial hierarchy as a means of social control and economic development. Jazz-Age American cities were home to idiomatic expressions comprised of a confluence of slogans, advertisements, journalistic language and scientific language; it represented disparate groups of people forced to live together and it often lacked narrative congruence. A desire to revel in this new, urban, jazz-tinged rhythm later led Crane to desire a “wholeness” of purpose and a “national” language while the country became increasingly fascinated by what constituted an “American” in a nation of immigrants and facing globalization.

The Bridge’s “Indiana,” for example, is indicative of the Twenties’ xenophobia and the rampant racism that helped justify the United States’ immigration and foreign policies, especially in regard to Central and South America. By extending what many progressives saw as the United States’ moral and democratic “authority” to other peoples, they inadvertently perpetuated racial hierarchy in an attempt to “civilize” and

“democratize” other nations. The “well-worn ideological construct” Crane employs in

136 “Indiana” suggests that redemption, both for the conquered and the conqueror, can happen because of the “mystical synthesis” the poem’s structure and the bridge itself symbolize. In “Indiana,” the Pocahontas figure has gained some of the colonizer’s physical attributes:

The long trail back! I huddled in the shade

Of wagon-tenting looked out once and saw

Bent westward, passing on a stumbling jade

A homeless sqaw—

Perhaps a halfbreed. On her slender back

She cradled a babe’s body, riding without rein.

Her eyes, strange for an Indian’s, were not black

But sharp with pain 67)

The “halfbreed” has managed to encompass, in her person, a convincing combination of the aboriginal American and the European American and she bestows upon the speaker her favor because he recognizes her physical synthesis.

The Bridge as a whole exudes nostalgia for the country as it once was and though the “dream called Eldorado” (66) may have negative associations with the land’s original conquest, the poet in “Indiana” ultimately laments the destruction of the American family and the closing of the West:

And bison thunder rends my dreams no more

As once my womb was torn, my boy, when you

Yielded your first cry at the prairie’s door…

Your father knew

137 Then, though we’d buried him behind us, far

Back on the gold trail—then his lost bones stirred…

But you who drop the scythe to grasp the oar

Knew not, nor heard (66).

“Indiana” teaches us that the myth of American individualism can have damaging effects.

The family that had originally traveled West to make a better life for themselves is ultimately betrayed—by the myth of gold, of God, and by their own son who chooses to forgo the family’s work to strike out on his own. “Indiana” may very well be the most autobiographical poem in The Bridge because of its lamenting depiction of a mother’s loss and a son’s contradictory refusal to acknowledge the sanctity of family tradition and structure.

The “half breed” and the poem’s speaker are both aspects of the overarching

Pocahontas character who at once loses her son, husband, home and cultural heritage in light of a new United States in which integration causes cultural annihilation. How Crane really felt about the mixing of the races is debatable. On the one hand, Crane fumblingly attempts to honor the Native American throughout The Bridge, but he finally

“experiences” their vanishing cultures as ethnographical oddities. His fascination with

Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (a book he often cites as his optimism’s “final solution”) suggests he was influenced by its orientalism. However, his interest in the book also suggests that he was aware that the United States’ rapid economic growth was leading to gross materialism. Twentieth-century United States that had no use for Crane’s

138 “half-breed” any more than it had for Crane himself; neither seemed to fit its narrow view of what constitutes an “American.”

For Crane, the utter destruction (or the attempt at utter destruction) of native peoples becomes a reason to record and manipulate their influence for the sake of the poem; in other words, before all is completely lost (perhaps because it is such an obviously silenced contingency) it becomes Crane’s job to “synthesize” their legacy with that of the larger culture. The tragic result, however, is the Native American’s cultural annihilation. Rowe tells us: “Manifest Destiny proved to be our own ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘problem’ of native peoples, which is also relatively unique in modern imperialisms: that the purpose of territorial expansion is not to subjugate native peoples for the purposes of exploiting their labor but simply to remove them from useful colonial territory with the ultimate purpose of eliminating them and their lifeways altogether”

(10). In essence, the spiritual justification for this “elimination” occurs within the confines of a supposedly “democratic” and “revolutionary” medium: modern poetry.

Aldon Lynn Nielson argues that, “High Modernism’s hopes to arrive at the thing itself, freed from the encrustations of the language of romance, did not always succeed even in arriving at new ways of writing about the thing, especially if the “object” under consideration was a…race” (49).8 In effect, the attempt to encapsulate a people within even a “revolutionary” new form was a failure. They sometimes reverted instead to a scientific, empirical language, and often, as in Crane’s case, a highly metaphoric language. In “The Dance,” for example, Crane attempts to reach, as he calls it, “the very core of the nature-world of the Indian” (345):

8 In his Reading Race

139 The swift red flesh, a winter king—

Who squired the glacier woman down the sky?

She ran the neighing canyons all the spring;

She sprouted arms; she rose with maize—to die (62).

The ease with which Pocahontas and Maquokeeta are subsumed by nature is in sharp contrast to “Cape Hatteras’” ferocious challenge to natural laws. Surely the culture that can’t overcome these “laws” will fall by the wayside. But the poet’s take is more complicated. He finds aesthetic worth in the Native American and ultimately begs

Maquokeeta to “lie to us,—dance us back the tribal morn!” (64) The poet knows there’s no turning back but his romantic longing for a more “primitive” way of life suggests that

amid the nation’s progress, something important was and is lost. 9

The primitivist sentiment in his discussions and explications of “The Dance,” suggests, in his view, America’s future is to be found in its past—a fundamental dichotomy that permeates The Bridge. Crane’s fascination with the “primitive” nature of his Native American characters has a timely correlation with the United States’ agenda in

South and Central America—nations comprised of people badly in need of “civilizing,” if democracy, in fact, equals civilization. After Crane had completed The Bridge, he was anxious to use his Guggenheim Fellowship to write an epic detailing the rise and fall ancient Mexico.

In order for Crane to arrive at “the very core of the nature-world,” he had to attempt to slough off what he saw at the restrictions of traditional “sense,” and embrace fully his own idiosyncratic, metaphoric intelligence. The “Indian’s world,” to Crane, was

9 Of course, Crane had little to no real understanding of Native American languages and culture. He took the name from a taxi driver, figuring Maquokeeta “sound[ed] Indian enough…” (323).

140 an elemental world devoid of modernity’s ironic double-speak and ripe with totemic imagery, but one that must inevitably fall away:

We danced, O Brave, we danced beyond their farms,

In cobalt desert closures made our vows…

Now is the strong prayer folded in thine arms,

The serpent with the eagle in the boughs (65).

Crane is obviously interested in the Native American and the ways in which the Native

American’s “spirituality” can be utilized in nationalist and nativist sentiments. If The

Bridge means to illustrate a dynamic new century ripe with economic and technological possibility, one must first be grounded in the country’s earthy reality; after-all, the

Brooklyn Bridge must have a base.

Michael Castro 10 discusses Crane’s initial intention to include the Native

American in his poem: “Crane employed the Indian as a symbol associated with the land and with a new American identity, and expanded consciousness based on a mystical participation in the land’s spirit” (55). But what is this new identity? I’ve suggested earlier that a position of power requires some kind of spiritual or ideological justification.

In conjunction with Crane’s literary and “high” cultural references, he was also hoping to find justification or approval of his project in the land itself and in order to do so he had to personify or deify it. As a result he created, for America, a new saint in the figure of a virginal/sexualized Pocahontas.

Pocahontas looms large in Crane’s imagination and for good reason. Despite an insistence on a racial hierarchy, Pocahontas maintains a special place in the American

10 In his Interpreting the Indian

141 imagination. Her omnipresence in the poem and in popular culture itself suggests that the

United States did, in fact, enjoy a traditionally “imperial” past and many have claimed her as an ancestor in order to maintain a connection to that past. To Crane, Pocahontas is the land itself. Her description in “The Dance” as “the torrent and the singing tree,” and

“virgin to the last of men,” (65) changes to, in “Indiana,” a “half breed” mother whose culture has been slowly and surely subsumed by westward expansion, and finally to the

Pocahontas of “National Winter Garden” whose “Outspoken buttocks in pink beads/

Invite the necessary cloudy clinch/ Of bandy eyes…” (89). In this last poem, Crane’s obvious ideological change manifests itself in a grotesque vaudeville in which a whorish

Pocahontas clowns for a clamoring audience:

Her eyes exist in swivellings of her teats,

Pearls whip her hips, a drench of whirling strands

Her silly snake rings begin to mount, surmount

Each other—turquoise fakes on tinseled hands (89).

Pocahontas (America) engages in an over-the-top dance a la Josephine Baker in which

Pocahontas—perhaps because of cultural and economical pressures—is forced to perform her gender and race to please a voracious, lustful, and voyeuristic audience hungry for a

“primitive” experience:

We wait that writhing pool, her pearls collapsed,

--All but her belly buried in the floor;

And the lewd trounce of a final muted beat!

We flee her spasm through a fleshless door…

142 Yet, to the empty trapeze of your flesh,

O Magdalene, each comes back to die alone.

Then you, the burlesque of our lust—and faith,

Lug us back lifeward—bone by infant bone (89).

The religious implications of Pocahontas’ change from “virgin” to “mother” to

“Magdalene” also gives us an insight into the country’s dichotomous relationship between the idea of moral authority and the reality of the prohibitionist era. Certainly the

“dries” liked to imagine their “Great Experiment” as representative of the United States’ sincere and sober interest in reform, but the increase in crime and violence that resulted from a decade of conservative rule proved otherwise. Of course, Crane’s one-dimensional and systematic repudiation of America’s modern excesses (embodied by Pocahontas as

“Magdalene”) runs counter to his earlier desire for the “jazz” of technological progress

(embodied by the Brooklyn Bridge.) You can take the poet (and, by extension,

Pocahontas) out of the nineteenth century, but you can’t take the nineteenth century out of the poet. We also get a clearer sense of Crane’s vision of Pocahontas as the physical body of the nation, meant to merge with her European bridegroom. In his study The

Machine that Sings, Gordon A. Tapper argues that this merger serves as “Crane’s uncritical replication of the well-worn ideological construct in which the “disappearance” of Native Americans is deemed the tragic but inevitable destiny that paves the way for the national cultural identity of the US” (102).

My last argument is a succinct way to describe Modernism as an aesthetic movement, and the 1920s as a decade. Both seemed to thrust forward while simultaneously looking back. Eliot, Pound, and Crane, as Modernists, struggled against

143 nineteenth-century literary paradigms while also attempting to use those paradigms to make a new literature. The conflict is obvious. On a socio-political level, a 1920s United

States hoped to regain a sense of “normalcy” after years of progressive reforms and world war, but fear of immigrants, minorities, and moral corruption led to a regression of sorts.

The Klu Klux Klan was back with a vengeance. Immigration quotas were lowered, especially for certain countries like Japan.11 People began wondering, with seriousness, who and what a real American looked and acted like.

The Bridge, as an historical text, epitomizes many of these aesthetic and ideological contradictions, most obviously in Crane’s treatment of the Native American.

On the one hand, Crane hopes to dignify a lost culture by elevating it to the status of a kind of deposed royalty. However, for Crane (at least at the beginning of his project), the less civilized peoples must make way for progress. Of “The Dance,” Crane writes to his benefactor Otto Kahn: “I become identified with the Indian and his world before it is over, which is the only method possible of ever really possessing the Indian and his world as a cultural factor. I think I really succeed in getting under the skin of this glorious and dying animal” (347). The verb “possess” is striking. Crane is looking for an assimilation or synthesis he, on the one hand understands to be destructive to the Native American, and on the other, finds necessary to create his “myth of America.”

Crane’s ultimate inability to actualize the Native American is telling in its dynamic “tensions” (the desire and the refusal that we see played out again and again in the poem). It’s almost as if Crane’s hope for a new engagement with the earth itself is also, in a way, ultimately impossible. Castro argues: “Modern man’s ability to

11 from Maureen A. Flanagan’s American Reformed

144 subordinate himself in quasi-religious eroticism, as well as his ability to perceive, let alone contact, the spirit of the American earth, is inhibited by historical, spiritual, and psychological forces beyond his control (56).12 Of course history’s perimeters can be and are restrictive on the artist’s possibility for change. He/she is limited by his/her time—and it can be argued that Crane ultimately does have real interest in a “spiritual wholeness” for his deeply divided country. The division, as Crane sees it, stems from a lack of appropriate respect for a collective cultural past now subsumed by capitalism’s hodge-podge of “high” and “low” cultural effects, what he describes as “mostly slop, priggishness and sentimentality” (344).

The nineteenth century’s tendency to hold art in high esteem spills over into the

Modernists’ agenda. Crane places greater value on what he views as “authentic,”13 what’s aesthetically pleasing, and what’s been created under a Platonic sense of the divine. In other words, Crane’s original egalitarian ideals break down finally in favor of a cultural hierarchy. In “Quaker Hill,” for example, Crane writes

This was the Promised Land, and still it is

To the persuasive suburban land agent

In bootleg roadhouses where the gin fizz

Bubbles in time to Hollywood’s new love-nest pageant.

Fresh from the radio in the old Meeting House

(Now the New Avalon Hotel) volcanoes roar

A welcome to highsteppers that no mouse

Who saw the Friends there ever heard before (93),

12 from Interpreting the Indian: Twentieth-Century Poets and the Native American 13 I mean to evoke Benjamin here

145 suggesting what was, in a sense, “holy” has become fair game for capitalist enterprise—a hollow religion compared to the Quakers’ earlier brand of spirituality.

A stanza later, the poet laments the passing of an older social order to accommodate the country’s newcomers’ voracious drive for landownership—even if it means an increase in usury, which was, in fact, a growing problem in the 1920s. The last names, too, indicate an increasingly heterogeneous population unafraid to ‘auction off” pieces of the United States’ Anglo past (as represented by ‘Adams’):

What cunning neighbors history has in fine!

The woodlouse mortgages the ancient deal

Table that Powitzky buys for only nine-

Ty-five at Adams’ auction,—eats the seal,

The spinster polish of antiquity…

Who holds the lease on time and on disgrace?

Who eats the pattern with ubiquity?

Where are my kinsmen and the patriarch race? (93)

Whether or not Crane meant “Quaker Hill” as ironic commentary on nativist sentiment is unclear. It was, however, the last poem in The Bridge to be written and it’s the poem that ultimately leads to Crane’s apocalyptic “The Tunnel,”—his best impression of Eliot’s

“negative” poetics and a final assessment of the United States’ future.

By the time “Quaker Hill” was written, Crane had almost nearly divorced himself from his original project and was ready to move on from it. It was now 1929. He had written segments of his opus in Cleveland, New York, California and Cuba. He had gone from ecstatic devotee of America’s economic and technological progress to a poet

146 haunted by his inability to maintain any kind of traditional ethic with the lack of a sense of “home,” the polarizing effect of his divorced parents, and his unconventional sexuality. The Bridge reflects his profound ideological shifts while simultaneously reifying certain social hierarchies.

The nightmarish poem “The Tunnel” underscores the changes both the poem itself and Crane’s worldview underwent during The Bridge’s composition. While

“Quaker Hill” invokes the memory of Emily Dickinson as a kind of quasi-spiritual model in a time Crane perceives to be spiritually vapid, he similarly invokes Edgar Allen Poe’s spirit in order to appeal to America’s darker angels. Crane regards Poe as “valuable” as a literary artifact and as a cultural icon. It’s no wonder that the poem’s commuters are unable to recognize him; they have (as we’ve seen) abandoned their collective cultural heritage. Only the poet sees Poe’s “eyes like agate lanterns—on and on/ Below the toothpaste and dandruff adds” (99), because Poe has been subscribed to life in a “hell” in which he’s unacknowledged and undermined by capitalism’s ubiquity. But it’s finally the poet’s task to recognize and record a nation’s history. The romantic, ultra-sensitive

Crane must pass through hell in order to reach his ultimate utopian vision. 14

Stylistically, “The Tunnel” makes use of Eliot’s collage of multifarious voices as a kind of Greek chorus in a poem already laden with metatextual references to theatrics (a technique Crane employs earlier in “Cutty Sark”). The poem begins:

Performances, assortments, resumes—

Up Times Square to Columbus Circle lights

14 It’s hard not to, in light of Crane’s “The Tunnel,” think of Pound’s imagistic “In a Station of the Metro.” That particular poem has an easier time “synthesizing” modern technology with Chinese poetic tradition. Crane’s poem encounters difficulty because of its confusion and conflation of ideas: a problem that plagues The Bridge as a whole.

147 Channel the congresses, nightly sessions,

Refractions of the thousand theatres, faces—

Mysterious kitchens…You shall search them all.

Someday by heart you’ll learn each famous sight

And watch the curtain lift in hell’s despite;

You’ll find the garden in the third act dead,

Finger your knees—and wish you were in bed

With tabloid crime-sheets perched in easy sight (97).

In a hell of inauthenticity, the tunnel’s jumble of sights and sounds also suggests a new and potentially unsavory cast of characters. The “wop washerwoman” the poet notices causes him to wonder if she indeed is “American” in her values: “And does the Daemon take you home, also,/ Wop washerwoman, with the bandaged hair? (100). The infamous

Sacco and Vanzetti trial of the 1920s permeates Crane’s fumbling attempt at empathy—ultimately resulting in a voyeuristic view of the “wop washerman” as a questionable “other.”

The “utopia” the poet enters into after his sojourn in the subway is “Atlantis,”

One of the first poems to be written and markedly different from its several preceding poems, but quite a bit like—in form and sentiment—“Ave Maria” and “To Brooklyn

Bridge.” “Atlantis” heralds a new America that, like the lost Atlantis, has (or had) the possibility of economic as well as democratic greatness:

Sweet peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth

Whose fell unshadow is death’s utter wound,—

O River-throated—iridescently upbourne

148 Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins;

With white escarpments swinging into light,

Sustained in tears the cities are endowed

And justified conclamant with ripe fields

Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment (107).

Here again is the showy rhetoric, gnarled syntax and anachronistic vocabulary

Crane often employs in his moments of pure song. Notice, too, the repeated dialectic between desire and refusal, positive and negative: “whose fell unshadow is death’s utter wound,—“ and “sustained in tears.” These negations seem to suggest “The Tunnel,” however, maintains a decidedly more contemporary diction, straightforward syntax, while also employing a convergence of public and private discourse.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that the mythological Atlantis was, in effect, an imperial enterprise. Similarly, Crane’s America takes in “the labyrinthine mouths of history/

Pouring reply as though all ships at sea/ Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry,—/

”Make thy love sure—to weave whose song we ply!” (105) meaning Atlantis’ (and subsequently America’s) greatness stems from its capacity to digest all time and space in its whirling vortex. It’s obvious too, that in “Atlantis,” Crane was still convinced by the power of mythological reference. His attempt to associate the United States with great ancient civilizations suggests tradition was, in effect, waiting for America’s arrival as the full blooming of democracy’s promise:

Thy pardon for this history, whitest Flower,

O Answerer of all,—Anemone,—

Now while thy petals spend the suns about us, hold—

149 (O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me)

Atlantis,— hold thy floating singer late! (107)

The “white” of “whitest Flower,” is noteworthy. The image may suggest a subliminal desire for a return to “normalcy” (in terms of traditional racial and social hierarchy). The Bridge calls for a kind of cultural synthesis but, on the other, calls for the eradication of immigrants’ cultural histories in order to make way for the new America

Crane has envisioned. The darker aspect of Crane’s American vision suggests that the

“mystical synthesis” of the Amerindian and European colonist in “Indiana,” has given way to the immigrant “other” whose purpose does not appear to be national fusion, but, rather, an. unraveling of traditional American racial and class hierarchy—a real fear during the 1920s. Westover argues, “At the same time that the U.S. was consolidating its powers abroad, members of its own nation shared in a disenfranchisement similar to the kind that was visited upon the citizen of foreign countries brought beneath its imperial sway” (153). The Bridge’s complicated relationship to the Amerindians, homeless, and immigrants it depicts suggests that Crane himself had a conflicted view of a modern

America and where it was headed.

Crane’s The Bridge is certainly indicative of Modernism’s uncomfortable relationship with nineteenth-century literary values and epistemological trends. It’s also, however, representative of a period in American history rife with progress and a simultaneous fear of progress. It was a period of small government and big business—a period of hardship for Crane. He ultimately could not subscribe to his own vision’s perimeters and, despite his initial enthusiasm, understood as much from the beginning

150 when he wrote the first few stanzas of “To Brooklyn Bridge” and included, on the building’s “parapets,” the bedlamite “tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning” (43).

That bedlamite is, of course, representative of Crane himself and his poetic vision, a vision that may have shown him both the country’s impending economic fall and his own fall in 1932 from a ship on its way back to New York from Mexico. He had intended to return to Cleveland to help his father’s ailing business stricken by the Depression.

151 Works Cited

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Bowles, Paul. Introduction. O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane. Edited by Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997.

Castro, Michael. Interpreting the Indian: Twentieth-Century Poets and the Native American. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983.

Crane, Hart. The Complete Poems of Hart Crane. New York: Liveright, 1986.

Flanagan, Maureen A. America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms 1890s- 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Hammer, Langdon. Hart Crane & Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber, eds. O My Land, My Friend: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997.

Menand, Louis. Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, ed. Reading Race in American Poetry: “An Area of Act.” Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Reed, Brian. Hart Crane: After His Lights. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.

Rowe, John C. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Westover, Jeffrey W. The Colonial Moment: Discoveries and Settlements in Modern American Poetry. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. Empire of Capital. London: Verso, 2003.

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