Reading Hart Crane with the Husky

A hundred degrees.

I sit in the shade

of the ginkgo tree

and drink a glass of red wine

while reading Hart Crane’s poetry

for the first time.

I picked up a copy for $1.57

at the Portland Goodwill Bins,

a bizarre, teeming place where people purchase items by the pound,

of all the unsold in Goodwill stores across the Western United States.

This is their last stop.

If unsold here, they will find their way into the fire

to cushion the fall on the playgrounds

because bark chips doesn’t cut it anymore.

Some of the shoppers at the Bins look like super models,

others look homeless.

High school kids on dates.

An old Mexican men with a shopping cart full of cleats.

The Vietnamese woman with a basket full of purses.

Inmates doing community service.

Bibliophiles searching for a first edition

of US Grant’s memoir,

the one he wrote on cocaine.

I can’t understand a single line of Hart Crane’s poetry,

even the one about Melville’s grave,

and I’ve been there.

Wait! Here’s a line I understand!

Preferring laxatives to wine

all america is saying

“how are my bowels today?

What interests me more in poetry

would be a poem about the Goodwill Bins,

but the poet would have to

get the smell right,

the frenzy,

the Walt Whitman democracy,

and no living poet in the nation can do that.

What also interests me in poetry at the moment

is the husky,

he’s chasing bees in the

clover

oregano

lavender

he’s throwing up a green apple that just fell to the ground,

he’s mangling the wading pool filled with water,

he’s carrying a football in his teeth like Barry Sanders

used to run between the tackles.

Yes, the Bins and the husky are way more interesting as poetry than Hart Crane’s poetry.

What really interests me about Hart Crane

is that he got bad reviews for a book of poetry,

and on a spring day in 1932,

took off his coat at noon,

and jumped off a ship bound to New York from Havana.

Body never found.

If only he could have written a poem about that.