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 anagrammatize 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 poinciana, 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.
O Carib Isle!
Harold Hart Crane
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Poem topics: beach, breath, flower, light, sea, sun, tree, wind, blue, tongue, great, huge, stranger, ghost, speak, thunder, grave, suppose, black, slow, Print This Poem , Rhyme Scheme
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