(A narrative evocation of the last days of Harold Hart Crane, April 1932)

The port of Veracruz seemed suspended between fever and silence. April breathed with a heavy heat, and the sea, a sheet of silver reflected the ships and the shirtless, sweating men working on the docks. Hart Crane had been there for days, restless, with a damp notebook of verses and a waiting he dared not name. The Poet had arrived with Peggy Cowley, his companion, who watched him with the distant understanding of someone who knows that love, at times, is only a harbor between two shipwrecks.

He was waiting for the Orizaba, or for William Cramp Jr., the ship’s officer from Philadelphia with whom he had shared a desire the world would not forgive. William did not know he was being awaited in that tropical port, among the shouts of the dockworkers and the smell of salt and fermented mango. He did not know or did not want to know that his silence was also a kind of promise.

The ship appeared one afternoon as the sun was about to set. From the deck, William recognized a figure in the crowd: white hat, wrinkled linen shirt, and the expression of a child waiting for forgiveness. The encounter was brief, almost awkward. But one look was enough, that look that holds the memory of the impossible.

That night, as the Orizaba slowly moved away from Mexico, leaving a trail of white smoke in the starry night, the cabin became heaven. The hum of the engines covered their words, and the air, heavy with desire, wrapped around them as if the sea itself wanted to erase their names. They spoke little; what was left to say their bodies already knew. In the ship’s shadows, he felt everything stop: fear, poetry, or the end of the world. For a few hours, life made sense again.

By dawn, the ship was already nearing the coast of Cuba. In Havana awaited an open, luminous city where there was no Prohibition, and where love between men was not shame but the murmur of harbors and the complicity of corners. They walked through bars and under lamplight, drinking rum from thick glasses, laughing with that joy that always announces the end.

At night, Havana embraced them without judgment. On the balconies, fans turned slowly, and the streets smelled of tobacco and sea. It was one night, one sufficient night to believe in the possibility of a shared destiny. An eternal night.

William, however, knew that desire and passion would have to end once they returned to the strict laws of the North. In New York, love like this was silence; in Philadelphia, shame. And there, between the heat of the Caribbean and the breeze of dawn, he said what the poet did not want to hear:
You cannot come back with me.

He understood everything. And in that understanding, he began to say goodbye to the world.

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty…

The poem echoed in his mind like a voice returning from the depths.
The sea, love, the abyss all had become the same.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry…

The Orizaba set sail again. Havana was left behind as always, and as only Havana can be left behind. William avoided his gaze; the ship was now a floating prison. He drank without measure, speaking to the ghost of his father, to the verses, to the echo of the names he could never say aloud.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year…

Just before noon on April 27, 1932, the sea was calm, almost indifferent.
Some passengers saw him at the back of the ship, his eyes lost in the distant Havana.
“Goodbye, everybody,” he murmured no one knows whether with irony or gratitude and stepped into the void.

William did not cry out his name, said nothing. He remained motionless, staring at the point where the body vanished among the waves, where the white hat drifted away, like a silver moon lost at sea.