Mina Loy

Mina Loy [HiLobrow]

from Mina Loy's The Lost Lunar Baedecker: Poems:

Property of Pigeons

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.

Two 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
falled on a cornice
leading into darkness;
the slit adjacence of houses

where the caressive dusts,
the residue of furnaces
upholster the gossamer
festoons of intestate spiders
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.