At four o’clock
In the gun-metal blue dark
We hear the first crow of the first cock

Just below
The gun-metal blue window
And immediately there is an echo

Off in the distance
Then one from the backyard fence
Then one, with horrible insistence

Grates like a wet match
From the broccoli patch
Flares, and all over town begins to catch

Cries galore
Come from the water-closet door
From the dropping-plastered henhouse floor

Where in the blue blur
Their rustling wives admire
The roosters brace their cruel feet and glare

With stupid eyes
While from their beaks there rise
The uncontrolled, traditional cries
Deep from protruding chests
In green-gold medals dressed
Planned to command and terrorize the rest

The many wives
Who lead hens’ lives
Of being courted and despised;

Deep from raw throats
A senseless order floats
All over town. A rooster gloats

Over our beds
From rusty iron sheds
And fences made from old bedsteads

Over our churches
Where the tin rooster perches
Over our little wooden northern houses

Making sallies
From all the muddy alleys
Marking out maps like Rand McNally’s:

Glass-headed pins
Oil-golds and copper greens
Anthracite blues, alizarins
Each one an active
Displacement in perspective;
Each screaming, “This is where I live!”

Each screaming
“Get up! Stop dreaming!”
Roosters, what are you projecting?

You, whom the Greeks elected
To shoot at on a post, who struggled
When sacrificed, you whom they labeled

“Very combative ...”
What right have you to give
Commands and tell us how to live

Cry “Here!” and “Here!”
And wake us here where are
Unwanted love, conceit and war?

The crown of red
Set on your little head
Is charged with all your fighting blood

Yes, that excrescence
Makes a most virile presence
Plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence
Now in mid-air
By twos they fight each other
Down comes a first flame-feather

And one is flying
With raging heroism defying
Even the sensation of dying

And one has fallen
But still above the town
His torn-out, bloodied feathers drift down;

And what he sung
No matter. He is flung
On the gray ash-heap, lies in dung

With his dead wives
With open, bloody eyes
While those metallic feathers oxidize

St. Peter’s sin
Was worse than that of Magdalen
Whose sin was of the flesh alone;

Of spirit, Peter’s
Falling, beneath the flares
Among the “servants and officers.”

Old holy sculpture
Could set it all together
In one small scene, past and future:

Christ stands amazed
Peter, two fingers raised
To surprised lips, both as if dazed

But in between
A little cock is seen
Carved on a dim column in the travertine

Explained by gallus canit;
Flet Petrus underneath it
There is inescapable hope, the pivot;

Yes, and there Peter’s tears
Run down our chanticleer’s
Sides and gem his spurs

Tear-encrusted thick
As a medieval relic
He waits. Poor Peter, heart-sick

Still cannot guess
Those cock-a-doodles yet might bless
His dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness

A new weathervane
On basilica and barn
And that outside the Lateran

There would always be
A bronze cock on a porphyry
Pillar so the people and the Pope might see

That even the Prince
Of the Apostles long since
Had been forgiven, and to convince

All the assembly
That “Deny deny deny”
Is not all the roosters cry

In the morning
A low light is floating
In the backyard, and gilding

From underneath
The broccoli, leaf by leaf;
How could the night have come to grief?

Gilding the tiny
Floating swallow’s belly
And lines of pink cloud in the sky

The day’s preamble
Like wandering lines in marble
The cocks are now almost inaudible

The sun climbs in
Following “to see the end,”
Faithful as enemy, or friend