Cock-Crow

I

Swear by what the Sages spoke
Round the Mareotic Lake
That the Witch of Atlas knew,
Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.

Swear by those horsemen, by those women,
Complexion and form prove superhuman,
That pale, long visaged company

The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894—1956 I
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

PART I
'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;
Tu—whit! Tu—whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.
Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She maketh answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say, she sees my lady's shroud.

An Episode AND the first grey of morning fill'd the east,
And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream.

First Psalm

Let there be a God as large as a sunlamp to laugh his heat at you.

Let there be an earth with a form like a jigsaw and let it fit for all of ye.

Let there be the darkness of a darkroom out of the deep. A worm room.

Let there be a God who sees light at the end of a long thin pipe and lets it in.

Let God divide them in half.

Let God share his Hoodsie.

Let the waters divide so that God may wash his face in first light.

the weather is hot on the back of my watch
which is down at Finkelstein’s
who is gifted with 3 balls
but no heart, but you’ve got to understand
when the bull goes down
on the whore, the heart is laid aside for something else,
and let’s not over-rate the obvious decency
for in a crap game you may be cutting down

For Marilyn who died in January april 1

[Introduction]
Lo now! four other acts upon the stage,
Childhood, and Youth, the Manly, and Old-age.
The first: son unto Phlegm, grand-child to water,
Unstable, supple, moist, and cold’s his Nature.
The second: frolic claims his pedigree;
From blood and air, for hot and moist is he.
The third of fire and choler is compos’d,
Vindicative, and quarrelsome dispos’d.
The last, of earth and heavy melancholy,
Solid, hating all lightness, and all folly.
Childhood was cloth’d in white, and given to show,
His spring was intermixed with some snow.
Upon his head a Garland Nature set:
Of Daisy, Primrose, and the Violet.

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:Σίβυλλα τίθέλεις; respondebat illa:άποθανεîνθέλω.’ For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro. I. The Burial of the Dead

Let the bird of loudest lay
On the sole Arabian tree
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.

But thou shrieking harbinger,
Foul precurrer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever's end,

Alan drives a cab at night,
Has cab driver’s elbow
In his left arm,
Sells real estate by day.

Alan dreams of a big deal,
Of opening a classy poolhall.
Has a four million dollar deal
Which will probably fall through,

I was born to a family wrapped
inside the wallpaper of two worlds,
drumming the other's disappearance.
My voice grew into an impulse of blood wars red and white.

Running between winter and spring
I awoke to a nightmare of spit and bile.
My grandfather said I must earn my tracks in the night.
The earth surged and oozed

How long have they laid buried
in the sludge and grime of industry
erasing the river's breath

and almost erasing the Duwamish people
who once paddled their canoes down
its current swift as the wing of kingfisher?

Walking beside the river in 2009 you can
still hear the dreams and laughter

1. ON ASPHALT: NO GREENS

Quarry out the stone
of land, cobble the beach,
wall surf, name it “street,”
allow no ground or green
cover for animal sins,
but let opacity of sand
be glass to keep the heat

There were still shards of an ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank
their pools of shadow from an older sky,
surviving from when the landscape copied such subjects as
“Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye.”
The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel
sprinkling like petals from the star-apple trees,
and all of the windmills and sugar mills moved by mules

Milij Balakirev
1837-1910, Russian Composer The black grand piano, the gleaming spider
stood trembling in the midst of its music-net.

With lovers, ’twas of old the fashion
By presents to convey their passion;
No matter what the gift they sent,
The Lady saw that love was meant.
Fair Atalanta, as a favour,
Took the boar’s head her Hero gave her;
Nor could the bristly thing affront her,
’Twas a fit present from a hunter.

II.iv

I am writing this poem
about the 1965 massacre
of Indonesians by Indonesians

which in an article ten years later
I could not publish
except in Nottingham England with

a friend Malcolm Caldwell who has since