Sinister: an ink polaroid for "3, 6, 9 Seconds of Light"

[Youn Jong Noh]

I would like to offer a poem for poetry Mondays, if this tradition
still exists.  The sleeve notes to "3, 6, 9 Seconds of Light" reads 
like a mandate to make your own poster.  I made mine at the local
copy shop where the copiers are not so fancy, but anyone who works
at a big company should have been able to make a really great one.

I will include the entire poem, but only I is the ink polaroid.  It is by
Hart Crane.  (I have the feeling that I am doing something slightly
naughty, but the poem is so remarkable I could not resist.)

Voyages

I

Above the fresh ruffles of surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached 
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.

II

-- And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers' hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides, --
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave, --
Hasten, while they are true, -- sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until 
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

III 

Infinite consanguinity it bears --
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also reliquary hands.

And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise, --
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!

		  and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change, --
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands . . .

I will stop now because I have the feeling that this might not go over too
well with everyone.  But I wanted to include enough of the rest of the
poem to show what a small part the first section actually is. 

I hope that Belle & Sebastian overcome what I think is the band's implicit
criticism of Nick Drake's music - that it's unidimensional, lacks irony,
is self-obsessed in a way that is natural for adolescents but not so
natural later on.  They might have already done this.  "Slow Graffiti"?  

Someone made me a tape and put "Pictures of Lily" on it.  I think that's
an example of a song about youth that's more.  Are there more songs by the
Who like that?




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