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Confirmed in their belief there's still a need
for worship prior to Lauds,
the street-dog choristers insist on how
any three of them form a quorum.
However great the din they're eventually forced to cede
their urine-soaked sod
to a single rooster, his beak the prow
of an imperial quinquereme
at the break of dawn. 2
Not that a rooster ever rues
the day of days
he first lowered the tone by kicking up a fuss.
He specializes in splutter and spout.
Sometimes the bearer becomes the bad news,
as when Augustus would parlay
the cult of Diana at Ephesus
into the out-and-out
worship of himself as Emperor.
3
A rooster will pay cash on the barrel
to join the Praetorian Guard
but the flanking eagles betoken our throwing off one yoke
even as we take on fresh burdens.
Left to his own devices, a rooster will don the kind of gaudy apparel
more often associated with the bard—
the three-quarter-length tuigen or "feather-cloak."
That he has a sense of his own importance
is hardly something he'll deny. 4
That wattle-ear was sliced
off a slave
by the self-same Simon Peter who'd cover it with a tissue
of lies… The blue gel,
the iodine, the ice-pack ice.
The pigs who've had a close shave
in the abattoir are in such a daze
they can't tell
Gethsemane from the Garden of Eden. 5
The rooster's claws are tempered by calcium
derived from the forearm
of a devotee of Saint Francis Xavier going for broke
as he sawed the heart from a yucca
or agave. The rooster himself would never deign to take a shortcut to Elysium
via fermented sap. Beating his breast on a farm
is learned behavior but the tendency to stroke
his own ego
is pretty much baked into his DNA. 6
From the top
of the rubbish tip on which he's parked
he rubbishes any duenna trying to pull rank.
His hens are rumpled. Raggedy-ass.
Most statements issued from his pilaster of slow-cured adobe
are followed by an exclamation mark!
A sheet of corrugated tin is his main plank.
"When oh when," he blubbers, "will this cup pass?"
All bully-pulpitry. All bluster. 7
For it's very rarely a cup of joy,
the cup
that runneth over. More a seed-bleed
from the agave's once-in-a-lifetime pod.
More a fairground tune from a wind-up toy
winding us up
for what seems forever. Till the street-dogs have once again treed
a god
somewhere on the outskirts of town.   Copyright © 2018 Paul Muldoon. Used with permission of the author. | 
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