By JOHN MATTHIAS.

—For Judge J. Manier

Fusty comes to mind around certain houses
In Ohio towns; but there might be a local bar
And a car or two rounding a pond where
Hart’s crane stands on one leg and stares.

Stares at Helen, whose name puns so easily
With Hell on – for example, hell on cities,
Hell on ships, hell on cranes even, but whose
Fine Nuptials must be celebrated by the

Law that made Marlow, Goethe, and Mann.
Auden’s Tom Rakewell was a pretty fusty
Faust, but we number him as well, as off he
Goes in the Auden libretto and Stravinsky’s music.

Gounod danced a Faust for me in Paris
When I was a summer sophomore on my
Way to – where it does not matter now, for
I slept through both the opera and ballet –

But not Hart’s crane. He didn’t sleep. Where’s
Helen? he honked (or squawked?) I knew
From my music class at school that Tom Rakewell
Married the ugliest woman in Europe in order

To prove that our choices are free. He didn’t
Marry Helen or even Ann Truelove; alas
Poor Tom went mad. But Hart’s father was
The man who invented Life Savers, the

Ubiquitous candy in everybody’s pocket.
Somehow this confounded the son, who
Wrote about him with smutty wings that flash
Equivocations – which was really Byronic

Euphorian, falling before his time, child
(Harold) of Faust and Helen, trying to fly.
The crane shook his head; he’d known
All along that Euphorian was no Daedalus.

But where’s Helen now? Gounod only gets as far
As Margherita’s tale, interrupted by dance. The crane’s
Not satisfied. And nor is Zeus, appearing as a swan,
Helen’s winged and feathered dad.

And yes, I did digress

And jumped ahead as well. I thought
that cranes quacked or squawked.
When I paused back there with Rakewell, for
Research, I found that Cranes, well, bugle.

Crane’s call is like a trumpet blast and can be heard
For miles. How I underestimated him. And this
Brass insult he splutters angrily at Swan,
Come to his daughter’s wedding. Why would

Swan’s daughter marry Faust, with
The ship of Menelaus almost in sight?
Where does Faust fit in? He too has a bugle
Call and a rattling good yarn to tell. He is

In fact, the very Hart of Crane. It was all
Understood from the beginning. Helen tricked
Her father, Leda, Menelaus, Paris, Agamemnon
And Odysseus. She was an Eidolon in Egypt

While the heroes on the beach fought about
An absence in the tower of Troy.
Faust bided his time. He knew it all. He’d have
To live through nonsense in a chapbook,

Oral tales, epics, plays and operas. He grew
Impatient, though, which led him to Mephisto.
What he’d been lacking was Hart’s crane.
Who bugled, trumpeted: The incunabula of

The Divine grotesque, corymbulous formations
Spouting malice, plangent over meadows and
Empty houses like old women with teeth
Unjubilant. Now then honk or bray; be jubilant.

But was she concubine or wife? Menelaus got there
In one version of the tale. In another, he
Fails to arrive. Either way, the crane presides: Like
A marriage counselor, like a priest, like the

Phrase I now pronounce you pain and strife. It’s
Possible. In our time, it’s possible to be married or
Divorced in a court of law, and as everyone hurries
Through the centuries to the courtroom of my

Friend Judge Manier, the crane finds himself barred
From entering. No cranes allowed in the courtroom,
Or other birds. Was that original wager more of a
Plea bargain before the act? On everybody’s part?

We’ll never know. The crane resumes his residence
In the heart of the poet . . .
Or the poet
In the heart of the crane.

♦

JOHN MATTHIAS, a contributing editor of The Fortnightly Review, is also editor emeritus of Notre Dame Review, emeritus professor of English at Notre Dame and the author of some thirty books of poetry, translation, criticism, and scholarship. Shearsman Books published his three volumes of Collected Poems, as well as the uncollected long poem, Trigons, two more volumes of poetry, Complayntes for Doctor Neuro and Acoustic Shadows and a novel, Different Kinds of Music. Tales Tall & Short— Fictional, Factual and In Between  was published by Dos Madres in 2020 and The New Yorker recently published his widely read memoir, “Living with a Visionary.” His Fortnightly archive is here.