The Air Plant

The Air Plant


by Hart Crane

Grand Cayman


This tuft that thrives on saline nothingness,
Inverted octopus with heavenward arms
Thrust parching from a palm-bole hard by the cove
A bird almost, of almost bird alarms,


Is pulmonary to the wind that jars
Its tentacles, horrific in their lurch.
The lizard’s throat, held bloated for a fly,
Balloons but warily from this throbbing perch.


The needles and hack-saws of cactus bleed
A milk of earth when stricken off the stalk;
But this, defenseless, thornless, sheds no blood,
Almost no shadow but the air’s thin talk.


Angelic Dynamo! Ventriloquist of the Blue!
While beachward creeps the shark-swept Spanish Main
By what conjunctions do the winds appoint
Its apotheosis, at last the hurricane!



Hart Crane, "The Air Plant" from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (New York: Liveright, 2000).