And have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the of walking in across the most bridge of the world, the enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as have never walked and never can walk another. --Hart Crane In his rapturous description of crossing Brooklyn Emil Opffer, the sailor whom he shared the most intense affair of his short life, the lovestruck Hart Crane imagines New York's monument to modernity as a kind of rocking cradle. Crane's beautiful bridge encloses and lifts Hart and Emil, offering refuge and support while they experience their ecstasy (Letters 181). Just as a cradle replicates the environment of the mother's body, Crane's experience of the bridge--whose cables breathe as its arms lift in the address To Brooklyn Bridge that begins his 1930 epic The Bridge--also recalls the earliest scene of intersubjective intimacy (Poems 46). For the object relations psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, is both the first stage of satisfactory parental care and a form of loving. Winnicott stresses that the term holding denotes not only the actual physical of the infant which starts of course in inter-uterine life, but also the total environmental provision prior to the concept of living with (Maturational 43). (1) Yet beside the image of being safely held, up, and, implicitly (in their ec-stasy) together by the other, the passage depicts the intimate hand-holding of the two lovers. The symmetrical touching of hand in hand, performed syntactically in the phrase's chiasmus, contrasts the clear asymmetry of the bridge's maternal holding. In what we might be tempted to dismiss as an embarrassingly sentimental letter, Crane hints at the possible complexities of intimacy, suggesting two distinct models of object relations; two distinct somatic and affective partnerships. This article explores intimate contact in Crane's two published volumes of poetry--White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge--and in several of his uncollected poems. am interested in the ways Crane's work explores the conceptual and spatial bounds of intimacy--especially how it relies on confusion between sexual and non-sexual registers and affects, and is predicated on a dynamic between containment and space. Evoking Winnicott's concept of unintegration--a state in which one can safely experience the feeling of falling apart because another holds the environment--I explore an alternative to the Lacanian emphasis on jouissance that has dominated queer readings of Crane's poetry. Finally argue that Crane's poetry articulates (and enacts) an intense desire for a hard-won reciprocal intimacy based on recognition, a form of intersubjective exchange that may be illuminated by the psychoanalysis of Jessica Benjamin. Following Benjamin, we might characterize the two distinct models of intimate partnership in Crane's Brooklyn letter by the terms and complementarity. Classical psychoanalysis, Benjamin argues, has stressed complementarity in interaction over mutuality. The other is represented as an answer, and the self as the need; the other is the breast, and the self is the hunger; the other actively holding, the self is actively being held (47-48). Significantly, Benjamin claims that such complementary dual unity forms the basic structure of domination, while mutuality forms the path to recognition and equality. want to suggest that the distinction between these relationships is key to Crane's exploration of intimacy. While Crane's lyric I sometimes wants or even needs to be held, he also aspires towards a form of recognition characterized by such tropes as mutual looking and handholding. As Langdon Hammer notes, Hands and eyes are the parts of the body that fashion bonds in Crane's poetry, and the marks that they frequently bear testify to the extreme difficulty of this task: 'blamed bleeding hands' in 'For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,' the swimmers' 'lost morning eyes' in 'Voyages II' (130). âŠ