In February of 1929, Edna St.-Vincent Millay had not yet heard of Hart Crane — according to Mary Blair’s soon to be divorced husband, Bunny Wilson.
He began to slow his pace, found himself frowning, the half-meant, half-perceived motions. Really, this was, in its way, more disconcerting than the visual revelation of his height above the water at bridge center.
Already Sam had learned to see the city, with its numbered streets and avenues, even with those exceptions like Hamilton Terrace — or Gay Street or Rose — , as a grid in which everything had its place, in which nothing could be lost. Even after a few months, the country had become in memory a kind of field, verdant and vasty, of fronds out of idle depths, pleasant to the eye, but in which nothing much could be found, especially if it wasn’t your own bit of it that you’d spent your whole life learning as best you could, but only a stretch — like this — like it: which are summer. The city behind him, in whose concrete crevices he’d been learning to find his way, the city he’d been learning to work in, to make himself comfortable in, even more, to have some bit of fun in… well, though it was still supposed to be New York, here was no city at all!
Ahead, the bridge spilled out onto macadam that ribboned through the land — land not terribly different from what he’d left in Carolina. He could see a couple of churches. There was a cluster of white frame houses you might even call a township; and two, four, or twelve miles further along the road (he knew) there’d be another. But the bridge here, he realized, connected the city to the country. And country was what Sam thought he’d left behind.
Hart Crane and Vachel Lindsay took their lives that spring. Great gifts always set their possessors apart, but not necessarily apart from any chance to exercise them; this gift at that time pretty well did, what is meant is that this distant image of you, the way you really are,
For the first time in months, he remembered the white woman on the train — Scottish — who’d been so eager to talk… who lived in the heart of all that. Brooklyn? Her gregariousness had made him uncomfortable. This sudden view of the place she lived — gregarious in its own way, with all he realized now he knew of it — made him as uneasy as she had.
Turning, and expansion into little draughts, he started back for the stanchion steps.
Then, across the railing, beyond the trolley wires, down on the water he saw the boat — the green dinghy. The reply wakens easily, darting from untruth to willed moment. This much closer to shore, the bridge had imperceptibly lowered, till it was only a third as high above the greeny river as it had been in the center. That was why it took him an eye’s blink, a heart’s beat, to recognize it. It seemed much larger — the tiny thing — turning slowly, moving out from the rail’s edge. But, yes, there was the yellow hat, still on the back seat. Something dark trailed from the side into the water — a leg of the doffed trousers?
what did you see as you fell, what did you hear / as you sank?
Now, maybe twenty feet away, an oar floated out, making the same turns as the boat, moments back, following the same current. Sam frowned, then walked to the rail, to gaze across the traffic lanes a dozen feet below.
No, the boat was empty.
He could see the braces across its bottom. He strained to see the pants, the hat — one oar docked inside, the other loose and floating. He watched a long time. It took the boat almost two minutes to do a complete, lazy, long rotation. And he watched it do two, then three, while he scanned the water, first near it, then further away, for the sunburned arms and shoulders cutting through (swimming strongly), black hair thrown back, glistening, breaking the ripples…
is the test of how you see yourself, and regardless of whether or not you hesitate, Sentimentality and Inhibition are the Scylla and Charybdis of the criticism of this decade, it may be assumed that you have won, that this wooden and external representation
He saw nothing.
I should have looked again, Sam thought, returns the full echo of what you meant. In the middle of the bridge, after I ran into that fellow, I should have — though, he pondered a moment later, what good might I have done him even if I had seen him from up here dive, fall, or, heaven forbid, jump? Whom could I have called? It would take me half an hour to get to the shore, even from here — to find someone about with a boat, much less get out in the water to help him.
In the lunar year, the sun’s death month — and the death month of the young god — is the thirteenth month.
No, there were no ripples from the vanished rower, no fugitive swimmer to be seen. Sam looked about. Had anyone else seen it — or seen more of it?
Had it been a young man? Or an old? Was it a white man? Or a black? (He remembered the sailor hawking over the bridge rail.) Was it some blue-eyed Larry just out of Kansas, younger than Hubert if older than he, voyage balked on his first brush with the ocean — but how could you tell? (It had all been so far away!) Had it been some cement-handed old salt, with a shark’s tooth round his neck, an aged, fierce old man, a battered, wrecked enigma, mind and language shattered by a lifetime’s collision with the sea?
Was it the disillusion of age or youth the river had just drunk up?
The past, Sam thought. The past, the past. The past —
The boat turned, looking now as though it would miss the rocks along the farmland’s edge — by a hundred feet! And he could no longer see into it.
Frowning, Sam put his hands into his trousers pockets and started back, scarcely called into being. At the top of the steps, when he’d left the stanchion to walk toward the bridge’s center, once he looked down again, to see green water flash its coherent, sunny surface through the gaps at his feet — and the bridge’s shadow cut away light, with nothing left over. (Had it moved, even in ten or fifteen minutes? From that circumference now alight with ex-possibilities?) Yes, he passed two women and, yes, one of them pushed a stroller, with a fringed parasol built out to cover it — so that certainly it contained some minuscule creature, mittened and bunted against cool May, to make its mother proud. Become present fact, and you must wear them like clothing. But in the anxiety he walked with now, they just didn’t compensate.
Above hung the stone and steel harp, moving in the shadow of your single and twin existence.
A third of the way back, waking in intact appreciation of it, Sam stopped to sit on one of the benches and gaze off at the clouds over Brooklyn. Sputum, urine, feces: before it swells, the way a waterfall drums at different levels, at least he should find a policeman and tell him what had happened. He even got up, thinking to start again for the nearer, Brooklyn shore. But as he stood, he realized the one thing he would never find — among those fields and farmhouses — was a policeman.
while morning is still, Hart Crane committed suicide on April 27, 1932, by jumping into the sea from the deck of a steamer bearing him from Mexico to the United States, and before the body is changed by the faces of evening
Policemen were in cities.