“O CARIB ISLE!

The tarantula rattling at the lily’s foot
Across the feet of the dead, laid in white sand
Near the coral beach--nor zigzag fiddle crabs
Side-stilting from the path (that shift, subvert
And anagrammartize your name)--No, nothing here
Below the palsy that one eucalyptus lifts
In wrinkled shadows--mourns.

And yet suppose
I count these nacreous frames of tropic death,
Brutal necklaces of shells around each grave
Squared off so carefully. Then

To the white sand I may speak a name, fertile
Albeit in a stranger tongue. Tree names, flower names
Deliberate, gainsay death’s brittle crypt. Meanwhile
The wind that knots itself in one great death--
Coils and withdraws. So syllables want breath.

But where is the Captain of this doubloon isle
Without a turnstile? Who but catchword crabs
Patrols the dry groins of the underbrush?
What man, or What
Is Commissioner of mildew throughout the ambushed senses?
His Carib mathematics web the eyes’ baked lenses!

Under the ponciana, of a noon or afternoon
Let fiery blossoms clot the light, render my ghost
Sieved upward, white and black along the air
Until it meets the blue’s comedian host.
Let not the pilgrim see himself again
For slow evisceration bound like those huge terrapin
Each daybreak on the wharf, their brine-caked eyes;
--Spiked, overturned; such thunder in their strain!
And clenched beaks coughing for the surge again!

Slagged of the hurricane--I, cast within its flow,
Congeal by afternoons here, satin and vacant.
You have given me the shell, Satan,--carbonic amulet
Sere of the sun exploded in the sea.”

--Hart Crane, Key West: An Island Sheaf (1932)


K. S.