The Blue Buick

by B. H. Fairchild

  mouths of history, one arc synoptic of all tides

  below. O what lies deepest, meter of the sea,

  surge and buffet of what’s always underneath

  and untranslatable, crucial, crux of everything,

  unresurrected Christ, word, in the beginning

  now endeth

  Key to “Hart Crane in Havana”

  I, too, dislike notes—much less a “key”—to poems, but in the case of a realistic imagining of Hart Crane’s postcards, written the day before he leaped from the Orizaba to his death, such is unavoidable. In his letters it was natural for him, as for anyone writing to friends and relatives, to refer to shared knowledge, names, experiences that would be unknown to most outsiders. Therefore, for those who haven’t read Paul Mariani’s or Clive Fisher’s very fine biographies of Crane, his correspondents as well as some of his allusions need to be identified. All the quoted lines in my poem are from Crane’s poems, except for “borne back ceaselessly . . . ,” which is taken from the famous final sentence of The Great Gatsby.

  Wilbur: Wilbur Underwood, poet and government clerk in Washington, DC. He was an older, longtime friend and gay mentor to Crane.

  Orizaba: The ship on which Crane and Peggy Cowley were returning to the USA.

  Ramón Novarro, Hoover: Fisher reveals in his biography what while living in Pasadena, Crane received the sexual services of the film star, Ramón Novarro, as he had as an adolescent from the Hoover vacuum cleaner his mother, Grace, discovered him with.

  Sambo: Sam Loveman, poet and publisher whom Crane met in his early twenties. Loveman was Crane’s literary executor and published Brom Weber’s Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study.

  iodine, Mercurochrome, Siqueiros: During his last days in Mexico, Crane made at least two suicide attempts and slashed his portrait by David Siqueiros with a razor blade.

  Lawrence: D. H. Lawrence.

  Hartley’s tale, Albert Ryder: Crane’s friend, the artist and poet, Marsden Hartley, tells this story of the painter, Albert Pinkham Ryder. Ryder’s hostess asked him why he hadn’t come to her Christmas dinner as he had promised, and he explained that he had indeed been there but had been standing outside the window, observing it.

  Otto Kahn: Financier who generously underwrote Crane’s expenses during the composition of The Bridge.

  Bill: William Slater Brown. Novelist and translator, he and his wife were old friends of Crane, who had been a guest at their farmhouse in Dutchess County. New York, on several occasions.

  Minsky’s: The famous Manhattan burlesque theater that Crane and William Slater Brown frequented together and which was probably an influence on Crane’s “National Winter Garden.”

  Ouspensky: Colleague of Gurdjieff and author of Tertium Organum, much read and discussed by Crane and his circle.

  Lotte: Charlotte Rychtarik, a musician and painter, whom Crane had known since his early twenties in Cleveland.

  Allen: Allen Tate, American literary critic and poet and a central member of the Fugitive group of southern poets. He was an early admirer of Crane’s work.

  “Le Bateau ivre”: Rimbaud’s famous poem is sometimes interpreted as prophesying the later events of his life.

  Winters: Yvor Winters. Prominent literary critic who taught at Stanford University and like Allen Tate was an enthusiastic admirer and advocate of Crane’s poetry.

  Roebling: Both John Augustus Roebling, architect and builder of the Brooklyn Bridge, and his son, Washington Roebling, who continued his father’s work and lived in the same apartment where Crane later wrote The Bridge.

  Grace: Grace Hart Crane, the poet’s mother, divorced from his father in 1917.

  The Cottonwood Lounge

  It must follow that every infinity is, in a way we cannot express, made finite to God.

  —ST. AUGUSTINE, DE CIVITATE DEI

  Four boys drinking tomato juice and beer

  for God knows why, smoke from Pall Malls

  guttering in the floor’s red sawdust, the talk

  the kind of mindless yak that foams up

  when summer is wearing down, and Campbell

  is already deep into Cantor and won’t shut up,

  lining up Coronas to the table’s edge

  to indicate “infinite progression, just imagine

  they go on forever,” but Travis, the sad one,

  the maniac, who flunked out of A&M playing

  bass in pickup bands and chasing girls, just

  isn’t having it, and says, “But the edge, Campbell,

  is there and always will be,” and Ira says,

  “Please, asshole, just imagine,” and so it goes,

  integers, sets, transfinite sets, Coronas filling

  the table because “with infinitely small Coronas

  this table becomes, my friends, an infinite space

  within finite limits,” and Travis lip-synching

  the Doors’ “Break on Through” has carved

  IRA CAMPBELL IS A DICK into the soft

  lacquered tabletop, and time, illusion though it

  may be, argues Ira, is walking past the table

  in the form of Samantha Dobbins, all big hair

  and legs and brown eyes like storms coming on

  who I would date that summer and leave behind

  and regret it even now, for time in its linear

  progression, real or not, is, I fear, terribly finite,

  as it is for God, who, looking down or up

  or from some omnidirectional quantum point

  in this one universe among many suffers

  the idiocies of four beer-stunned boys stumbling

  in the long confusion of their lives toward

  what one might call the edge that is there

  and always will be, for three have already found it,

  and the one who has not ponders the mathematics

  of the spirit, and Ira Campbell, who found God there.

  Les Passages

  the arcades . . . are residues of a dream world.

  —WALTER BENJAMIN

  The piano player at Nordstrom’s was crying,

  and no one knew what to do. His hands were thin

  and pale as the starched cuffs that seemed to hold

  his wrists above the keyboard until they collapsed

  and lay there among the ache of his sobs and awful

  silences and the tapping of cash registers, the ocean

  of small voices, the hum and click of commerce.

  We all stood there, looking at him, then away,

  fine linen trousers hanging from our arms,

  or scent of cologne we could not afford thickening

  the air, or right foot half-slipped into the new blue shoe

  we would not buy, not now, not ever, and those stiff

  little cries kept coming, kept tumbling across

  that immense, gleaming floor into the change rooms

  where men and women were gazing into mirrors

  far from this strange sadness that fell clumsily

  into a day rushing like all days on earth to fulfill itself,

  to complete like the good postman its mission, and so

  we paused in the crumbling silence until the fragile,

  cautious tones of “Autumn Leaves” began to drift

  through the aisles and around the glittering display cases

  as if a dream, a great dream, were being dreamed again,

  and the cries of an infant rose now from the other end

  of the mall, cries bursting into screams and then one long

  scream that spread its wings and lifted, soaring,

  and we grew thoughtful and began to move about again,

  searching our pockets, wallets, purses, tooled leather

  handbags for something that would stop that scream.

  Wittgenstein, Dying

  Someone who, dreaming, says, “I am dreaming,” even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he s
aid in his dream, “it is raining,” while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain.

  —ON CERTAINTY, NO. 676, WRITTEN ON HIS DEATHBED

  The way a sentence is a story. It is raining.

  Something happens, as the case may be, to something

  of a certain kind and in a certain way.

  Im Aufang war die Tat. In the beginning was

  the act. So I tell a story: it is raining.

  Grammar as a mirror of the world. Poor Trakl,

  without a world except the world of words beyond

  mere speech, drenched with dreams I never understood.

  War, the nightmare of the earth, while in my backpack

  Tolstoy’s Gospel preached belief’s old dream. I said,

  once, The sense of the world must lie outside the world.

  If that sense is “God,” we might stand in His rain,

  in “belief” of Him, but cannot quite get wet from it.

  It is raining. In this room, the fire is blackening

  the hearth’s old stones, the now of my observing it

  the only heaven of the mind. I said in my dream,

  it is raining, but I dreamed the words themselves

  and even that the words have meaning. Nonsense, then,

  though now the rain is spattering the sixteen panes,

  four by four, of my window. Keats, dying, looked out

  a window at the Spanish Steps, Rome dimming in

  the rain to gauzy nothing that must have seemed a dream,

  like Madeline in his poem on St. Agnes’ Eve.

  Porphyro lying next to her spoke himself into

  her dream, the voice she heard as known as the hand

  of Moore showing the other one exists: “Here is one hand.”

  Because all certainty at least begins with the body’s

  certainty. My brother, Paul, playing Brahms,

  feels his amputated arm, his hand, still moving.

  Can the body know? Can, therefore, the mind?

  Thought is the mind minding, poetry the mind

  embodied, what cannot be spoken, that is, explained:

  these curtains—Burano lace, I think—that sift

  the April light, walls papered with lurid rose designs,

  a bird in the window’s lower panes resting on

  a branch. In Ireland, chaffinches feeding

  from my hand. With what certainty! “Here is one

  hand.” It is raining. And if I say, I am dying,

  within this finite life enclosed at either end

  by the unknowable, what are my words—

  not a knowing, surely, but a kind of wonder

  bodied forth here where the Cambridge rain comes down

  on Storeys Way in a house called Storeys End.

  The Barber

  The barber shaves all and only men who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber?

  —BERTRAND RUSSELL’S PARADOX

  I have been waiting so long . . . little pocks

  of rust freckle the shanks of my best blades.

  Who, after all, would be shaved by a barber

  boasting foliage of such grotesque proportions,

  dragging its damp, heavy life along sidewalks

  and alleyways, doomed to this eternal algebra

  of existence, these parallel universes

  of paradox where bearded and beardless

  coexist simultaneously and separately

  and my twin in his timeless moment stands

  mirrored in the lather of despair, blade

  scraping flesh forever barren. Between us:

  nothing, a space infinite and infinitesimal,

  the sunless, silent arctic zone of contradiction.

  On my side Cretans always lie; on his,

  the lies are always true. On my side, particles;

  on his, waves. A life unimaginable, but a life.

  My wife—anguished, disgusted—long since done

  with making love to Sherwood Forest, amused

  herself with knitting it into increasingly

  bizarre shapes, single rope ladders at first,

  then interconnected hair suits for a trio

  of monkeys. She lives in Alexandria now

  with a Greek financier, a balding man of pink,

  pampered countenance who offered me thousands

  to shave. He sympathized. He saw in me the fate

  of the common world lugging its debts and losses

  through the streets like a black beard of shame,

  the clean face of prosperity ever disappearing

  until the man disappears, a walking shadow,

  a beard bearing a man, a man engulfed

  in the chaos of his own flesh, his own hair.

  The razor strops of fate hang uselessly

  beside their cruel mirrors. Among the dazzle

  of chrome embellishments, bottles of Wildroot

  and cans of Rose Pomade cry Traitor!

  to my lank tresses, and old customers,

  victims themselves of cut-rate solitudes

  in downtown hotels, wander by with lowered eyes

  and trembling hands. Shaggy children gawk

  and scatter when they spy in the shop’s

  deep shadows a chair of hair, a breathing mound

  multiplied infinitely in mirrors facing mirrors.

  My only solace is a dream, a tonsorial fantasy

  that more and more possesses me, of a world

  in which the calculus of being demands that

  barbers shave only men who shave themselves.

  In it my twin and I stand handsomely behind

  our chairs, he sporting a small goatee,

  my nude visage chaste as an egg, immaculately

  conceived, saintly in its pure nakedness,

  and an entire cosmos of the newly shaven,

  redolent with lotions but somehow needing

  our final caresses and fleshly blessings,

  lines the boulevard. The sun is shining.

  The brick streets glow richly. And beside me

  my wife prepares the secret oils of anointment

  and reaches up to stroke my silken chin.

  Hume

  for Peter Caws

  . . . experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable.

  —DAVID HUME, AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING

  Philosophia: declining Kansas light

  lifting dust motes from the shadows, scars

  along the prewar plaster walls of Fraser Hall.

  Professor Caws, left hand raised against the sun,

  right hand mapping on the board each turn

  and pivot in Hume’s argument against

  causality. Hume’s game, like mine,

  is pool: one ball strikes another, and between

  the two, says Caws, nada, nothing but

  coincidence. And forget the thousand times

  it happens, that little sad inductive leap.

  I’m stunned. A, then B. And between them, what,

  some vast, flat plain of pure event where things

  just happen—a bird falling from the sky,

  a distant shout, a cow wandering along

  the highway’s shoulder, the sun here, then there,

  the moon full or empty, a white boat floating

  on a sea of wheat.

  That’s it: a sea between

  two countries: the land of Cause, like Iceland,

  clean, uncluttered, a kind of purple mist

  hanging in the air, a few cold souls caught

  in midstride on a frozen lake, the awful silence,

  trees that fall without a sound, and across the bay,

  Effect, marching bands in every street,

  unruly crowds, that balmy island climate,

  and the thick, melo
dic accents of its citizens

  that make you think of Istanbul, or wine,

  or tile floors in geometrical designs—

  and in between, the sea, soundless but for

  the crash of waves, since nothing happens there

  except the constant passage, back and forth,

  of the little boat called the Logic of Induction

  that never reaches shore. And there it is

  in the distance—listing, it seems to me—

  its pilot, nameless and alone, slumped

  across the wheel.

  Walking out of class,

  breathing in the cold, salt air of Hume,

  I turn to Anderson, our point guard:

  “You no-talent hack, you’re just a servant

  of coincidence. Take that to the NBA.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” he says, and so we head

  for Duck’s, a game of pool, and look across

  that flat green field, listening to the click

  and thump of billiard balls, studying

  the angles, as our ignorant young lives

  pass slowly like the evening sun, unmoved,

  unmoving, that sinks below the Kansas plain.

  Gödel

  So here is Campbell, murky, shadow-blotched

  beneath the backroom table lamp at Duck’s,

  first one of us to dig past proposition 4.2

  in the Tractactus, Dante’s true disciple,

  unfurling long verbal tapestries by heart

  from Purgatorio (the dullest parts,

  perversely), Cutty Sark in hand, always,

  it seemed to me, in darkened rooms—scarred,

  name-carved booths in downtown college bars,

  jazz joints in Kansas City where after Reed

  and the Sorbonne he played lounge piano

  at the Muehlbach, claimed to know the mob

  (“ ‘double-entry bookkeeping,’ Lansky said,

  ‘was Western culture’s breakthrough’ ”), argued

  Plotinus held the key to quantum mystery,

  Gödel’s madness proved the end of thought.

  The end of thought! And then the cosmic sweep