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1.
Roisterers drunk, cursing in the cheap
London alehouses as the dead cart with its load
trundles by them, following it to the edge
of the bone pit as the bodies are tumbled in
on top of one another, half-clothed, naked, the flash
now and then of an earring the collectors
missed in their despoiling urgency, cursing the
idea of a God who could so depopulate
what he had constructed, no light but torches,
the night sky moonless and starless, sitting down
like a pot lid on its boiling.
2.
My sparrow, my dusky
instructed lover, it is the hour before Christmas,
when wanderers look for a place to give birth and are refused.
The doll with its china eyes is wrapped and gilded,
kneaded by Muzak to a malleable consistency;
popped into ovens and comes out with a glistening crust
for a great mouth under the East--this is our design.
3.
The girl left her father, priest
of a little country town, when the line of dancers
came down the road out of the wood, having given up
homes, children, food,...