The gull turns into a sail turns into a piece of paper to be filed away by a paper pusher. The elevator (not necessarily one of those white reincarnations/transformations of the gull, but it carries folks in white shirts) drops. Then movie screens, on which the same flashing images will be shown over and over, seen by other eyes. There’s a story here about the daily grind. It gets more complicated after that, but the downward motion of the gull, the filed paper, the elevators, and the flickering images on the screen all seem to pave the way for the suicide. There’s an alternate set of things happening here, though — a shedding of constraints — also related to the Bridge, which is granted godlike associations (the power to reward, even as it’s harp and altar too), but this time the images related to its shadows. We see Manhattan skyscrapers like parcels coming undone. (What’s inside them?) We hear a lover’s cry. There seems to be the implication that he’s trolling for sex under the Bridge. I suppose the rest of the story is left for us to imagine.

There does not seem to be much of a story here — the first two stanzas had me anticipating one — but it’s just looking like random images. Some of the images are lovely, like the “bedlamite…Tilting there momently, small shirt ballooning” and “the traffic lights that skim thy swift Unfractioned idiom”. I think the poem stands or falls on the beauty of the language, which is sort of haphazard; some of it just sounds awkward, like “Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!” — that line and others like it keep me from really getting into the poem & hearing it spoken by my own voice.

My friend Janis said, “Oh at the end he’s talking about death because he’s depressed.”

My wife (who I was surprised to learn, took a class in Hart Crane’s poetry taught by John Barth when she was in SUNY Buffalo) said it’s more complex than I’m giving it credit for, but did not go into much detail beyond that.

I will cop to being slow on the uptake; it took me until about the end of the first time through it to realize that “Thee” is the Bridge, he’s talking to the Bridge. Duh.