An Unpublished Hart Crane Poem                    25

So they sleep in the shade of black palm-bark at noon,
Blind only in day, but remembering that soon
She will flush their hid wings in the evening to blaze
Countless rubies and tapers in the oasis' blue haze.

But over one moth's eyes were tissues at birth
Too multiplied even to center his gaze
On that circle of paradise cool in the night; —
Never came light through that honey-thick glaze.

And had not his pinions with signs mystical

And rings macrocosmic won envy as thrall.

They had scorned him, so humbly' [?] low, bound there and tied

At night like a grain of sand, futile and dried.

But once though, he learned of that span of his w-ings, —
The fluorescence, the power he felt bud at the time
When the others were blinded by all waking things;
And he ventured the desert, — his wings took the climb.

And lo, in that dawn he was pierroting over, —
Swinging in spirals round the fresh breasts of day.
The moat of the desert was melting from clover
To yellow, — to crystal, — a sea of white spray —

Til the sun, he still gyrating, shot out all white, —
Though a black god to him in a dizzying night; —
And without one cloud-car in that wide meshless blue
The sun saw a ruby brightening ever, that flew.

Seething and rounding in long streams of light

The heat led the moth up in octupus arms:

The honey-wax eyes could find no alarms.

But they burned thinly blind like an orange peeled white.

And the torrid hum of great wings was his song

When below him he saw what his whole race had shunned —

Great horizons and systems and shores all along

Which blue tides of cool moons were slow shaken and sunned.

1 Crane wrote '"himbly".