Near Sestina for Hart Crane

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No one believes in your America, Hart Crane.
Not anymore, not even you. We have Cable.
Each morning, I take the World Trade Center train
to a place that only exists in people’s hearts.
Before we dip underwater, I can see the bridges,
their wires, their staid freedom, and I know

what you were thinking but did not know.
I see the empty sky, the missing cranes.
There is nothing that can bridge
the span from you to me. Send a cable
of what is left of your soggy heart;
the heaviest memories always train.

We jerk and tumble. Thoughts, passengers, train,
rails. Is that why you choose a ship? Did you know
what could be shaken loose from your heart?
Is that what you were drowning in, Crane,
when you refused to grab a cable
and your cries echoed off the bridge?

I’ve never been able to read The Bridge.
I don’t have the patience to train
myself to your vision of cables
and I-beams and building America. No,
I’ve seen the meadowlands and the Marsh Crane
and New Jersey’s wasted industrial heart.

I know what happens to the heart
when infrastructure fails and bridges
collapse. The homeless men who crane
their faces up from watching the trains
to ask for money. I know they know
I will go home and watch their plight on Cable.

You believed in system of pulleys and cables
that would lift America’s heart.
You must have known
that some wouldn’t cross that bridge,
that they would be thrown under the train.
Is that why you jumped from the crane?

In your vision of cables and cranes
did you know the failure to train
the heart to cross its longest bridges?