Tuesday Poem delves into At Melvilles Tomb by Hart Crane.

Usually a place for contemporary poetry, today Tuesday Poem delves into a poem from another time, courtesy of Tuesday Poet's editor this week, Australian-based American Zireaux. His commentary is a poem in itself written by a man with a passion for poetry and for Herman Melville. It begins:

"A risk, I know, to post this poem by Crane. I can already hear the twitter-twatter of distracted brains, like bird feet on a tin roof. The furrow of brows(ers). The clicks of the mice -- back-button, window closed. What a strain this cranial Crane! Too hard, too dense!

But stay, my reader. Let us creep across the stars. A little voyage for us to make. A little ship for us to sink in.

It's in our biology, programmed in our souls, to feel attraction to water. Crane, who found his dirty pleasure (dirty to him, that is) in sailors and their scepters, leapt off a steamship into the Gulf of Mexico. A suicide, apparently, after a male crew member responded violently to his physical advances.

"Harold Hart Crane 1899–1932 lost at sea," reads the inscription on his father's tombstone.

I'm no Cranophile, not by a longboat, and only recently -- budded by Bloom (Harold) and carried by a Griffin (John) -- has my interest come anywhere near the poet. But here's Crane now, floating beside us, his debris on the page, in water writ, forever inscribed in "Melville's Tomb.""

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