[Lunch with Hart Crane]

Jason Jones

Infinite dynamo of translucent flavor, sublime agony
of our collective will—borne over the hills and windswept
canyon floors of our mythic continent—no longer butchered
and dressed and packaged by pallid and homestruck hands,
whose carnal reflected in birthday soirees or
backyard barbeques, whose infant song recalls
the myriad pastures grazing—white fields of
America's breast.

Whose iceberg crown embellished the broiled
circle of unremembered hooves. What synthesis of life
and death, those that rise from the slumber of sleeping earth—
those machines that chafe and claw the April sky--those
fattened beasts that circle aimlessly the dawn.
You and I.

What satisfaction! The writhing gut! Glistening onion
dew of eternity, vinegar tasteless paste of meandering
endlessness—those iron rivers that scar ourselves for want
of a yard to call our own. O glorious fermentation and
sanguine purity, golden orb of nourishing bliss, can you
count the seasons of growth and harvest that inspire
thee? Have you witnessed the changing of the years?
Tasted the wind that brought thy pollen to our eastern shore?

Ours is a song of immediate delight.

Raked and sowed no longer, not angry in the shining
and stubborn soil, nor fearful of raining hail, nor drunken
happy around aged barrels—laughing well into night,
but Now. Seduction around every corner waits, ionized,
like heated gas—the charge moving swiftly through the arc
of the tube—what luminosity of desire,
of most ancient bodily thirst,
of hunger.