Pigeons doze,
or rouse
their striped crescendos
of grey rainbow
a living frieze on the shallow
sill of a factory window.

Pigeons arise
alight
on vertical bases
of civic brick
whitened with avalanches
of their innocent excrements
as if an angel had been sick;

all that is shown to us
of bird-economies,
financeless,
inobvious as the disposal
of their corpses.

Pigeons make irritant, alluring
music;
quilled solfeggios
of shrill wings winnowing
their rejoicing, cooing
fanaticism for wooing.

Their dolce voices
dotage.

Too and fro, frowardly they live
burnishing each other’s
gorgeous halters
in the feathery drive
of preliminaries
to their marriages.

Pigeons disappear,
their claws, a coral landing-gear,
dive for the altar-stair
to their privacies

a slice of concrete
fallen on a cornice
leading into darkness;
the slit adjacence of houses

where the careesive dusts,
the residue of furnaces
upholster the gossamer
festoons of intestate spiers
for nuptial furniture

Pigeons through some conjurous procedure

appear to reappear
upon the altar-stair
at startling instants
in the immature
torsos of their giant infants;

timid and unflown
stark of plume
naive in nativity
to peer into a vast transparency.

They hail me as one living, 
But don't they know 
That I have died of late years, 
Untombed although? 

I am but a shape that stands here, 
A pulseless mould, 
A pale past picture, screening 
Ashes gone cold. 

Not at a minute's warning, 
Not in a loud hour, 
For me ceased Time's enchantments 
In hall and bower. 

There was no tragic transit, 
No catch of breath, 
When silent seasons inched me 
On to this death…. 

— A Troubadour-youth I rambled 
With Life for lyre, 
The beats of being raging 
In me like fire. 

But when I practised eyeing 
The goal of men, 
It iced me, and I perished 
A little then. 

When passed my friend, my kinsfolk, 
Through the Last Door, 
And left me standing bleakly, 
I died yet more; 

And when my Love's heart kindled 
In hate of me, 
Wherefore I knew not, died I 
One more degree. 

And if when I died fully 
I cannot say, 
And changed into the corpse-thing 
I am to-day; 

Yet is it that, though whiling 
The time somehow 
In walking, talking, smiling, 
I live not now.