Most elegies call the dead back out of love. Harry Fainlight's address to Hart Crane does the opposite: it begs the dead man to stay away. The speaker sits in a public lavatory, and the small sound of toilet paper rustling is enough to haul Crane's ghost into the room. The poem's central idea is that remembering someone can hurt them. Each act of invoking Crane, however affectionate, drags him back to the worst moment of his life. That moment is one the poem knows well. Crane, the American poet, died in 1932 by drowning in the sea, and the poem's final word for the ghost's fate is "drowning."
What makes the poem startling is how it turns that tragedy into plumbing. The ghost arrives "pacing & fidgeting / down the long cell-blocks of cubicles." The prison image makes the toilets a place of confinement, and Crane is a restless inmate "trying the doors." His excuse, "pretending to be looking for a nickel," suggests someone with a cover story for loitering. Judging by the imagery, the poem may be hinting at furtive encounters in public toilets, so that the ghost is anxious and watched even in death. That is an inference, but the word "pretending" makes the loitering feel guilty and performed.
The key moment is the flush. "Your few seconds up" turns the visit into a timed sentence, like a prison visit or an execution clock. Then the language swells: the system "unleashes, / discharging you back into your drowning." "Unleashes" suggests a flood, but also an animal let off a lead. "Discharging" has several meanings at once: a soldier discharged from service, a patient discharged from hospital, a bodily discharge. The word is clinical and slightly disgusting, and it is exactly right for a machine that processes a poet as waste. The phrase "your drowning" also matters. It does not say "your death." It sounds like something that goes on happening, a condition he lives in rather than an event that ended.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The poem is free verse with the loose, speaking rhythm of someone thinking aloud, and the ampersands ("pacing & fidgeting," "stay back there & forget me") give it a hurried, notebook feel. The first stanza is a single long sentence that runs seven lines, mimicking the build-up to the flush and the sudden drop at "drowning." Then the poem changes gear. "Hart," sits alone on its own line, a first-name plea that is almost a gasp. The intimacy is striking after the cold, institutional vocabulary of "cell-blocks" and "automatic flushing system."
The second stanza reveals the speaker's guilt. The ghost has been "summoned," and the speaker knows who did the summoning. His request, "forget me-- forget," is oddly self-punishing. He asks Crane to forget him, as though his own attention were the hook that catches the dead. That hook is made literal in the last image, where the "stillness" is "already being baited with fresh rustlings." "Baited" belongs to fishing and trapping, so the quiet between flushes is not peace but a lure. The tank refills ("this system their pumping refills") and the cycle is ready to start again. The pronoun "their" points at nobody in particular, which makes the machinery feel faceless and unbeatable. The plural "rustlings" suggests that more visitors will keep coming, and each will unknowingly call the ghost back.
The poem is significant because it risks bathos, even a joke, and turns it into real feeling. A ghost summoned by a toilet roll could be comic, but the poem's tenderness and its tight, ugly diction make it painful. It also reverses the usual promise of elegy, that poetry keeps the dead alive. Here, keeping someone alive in memory means keeping him in torment, and the kindest thing the poet can do is let go. The poem ends without letting go, though, because the speaker is still writing to Crane as he tells him to leave.