A prose rose

It's not prose that I'm posting today, but a prose poem.  This was published in the January 1933 issue of Poetry magazine, i.e. the year after Hart Crane died:
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Havana Rose

By Harold Hart Crane

            Let us strip the desk for action, now we have a house in Mexico.  …  That night in Vera Cruz—verily for me “the True Cross”—let us remember the Doctor and my thoughts, my humble fond remembrances of the great bacteriologist.  …  The wind, that night, the clamor of incessant shutters, doors, and the watchman tiptoeing the successive patio balconies, trundling with a typical pistol, trying to muffle doors; and the pharos-shrine—the mid-wind midnight stroke of it, its milk-light regularity above my bath-partition through the lofty dusty glass.  Cortez—Cortez—his crumbled palace in the square; the typhus in a trap, the Doctor’s rat-trap.  Where?  Somewhere in Vera Cruz—to bring—to take—to mix—to ransom—to deduct—to cure.  …

            The rats played ring around the rosy (in their basement basinette).  The Doctor supposedly slept, supposedly in No. 35—thus in my wakeful watches at least—the lighthouse flashed … whirled … delayed, and struck—again, again.  Only the Mayans surely slept—whose references to typhus and whose records spurred the Doctor into something nigh those metaphysics that are typhoid plus, and had engaged him once before to death’s beyond and back again—antagonistic wills—into immunity.  Tact, horsemanship, courage, were germicides to him.  …

            Poets may not be doctors, but doctors are rare poets whose roses leap like rats—and too, when rats make rose nozzles of pink death around white teeth.  …

            And during the wait over dinner at La Diana, the Doctor had said—who was American also—“You cannot heed the negative, so might go on to  undeserved doom … must therefore loose yourself within a pattern’s mastery that you can conceive, that you can yield to—by which also you win and gain mastery and happiness which is your own from birth.”