One night I climbed from chilly sleep
        to shut off the sorcerers' airs
        and let in the winds of the world.
        As I leaned upon my lowered sills
        I heard the birds with their night voices
        calling to each other with no sense of sin.

        These are the same songs, I thought,
        heard by Jezebel and Cleopatra,
        by Alenander and by Caesar
        and by Mandarin princesses
        who drew some comfort from them
        as they tottered on mutilated feet.
        And they sang for Calpurnia
        who stood, above suspicion,
        on the highest of the Roman hills
        and gazed eternal loneliness
        into all the rest of them.

        These choristers formed indifferent choirs
        for Jezebel while the famished dogs
        growled over her still bleeding bones
        and her laughing lovers
        turned from their pitiless parapets
        to look for other queenly paramours.
        They lulled Cleopatra to sleep
        after her last lover, the angry adder,
        had kissed her bosoms to their dying.

        They sang Hadrian from his sorrow
        as he paced the banks
        of the life giving and taking Nile
        planning temples and monuments
        long since reduced to dust for Antinous.
        Perhaps they were even heard
        by the death dreaming Lion Hearted
        who lost his lutist in some useless battle.

        No doubt they were ignored by Alexander
        as he thundered through Asiatic nights
        astride his monstrous horse
        on his way to topple kingdoms
        and string the kings upon his Empire bracelet.

        But when Bucephalus of the legend
        wounded to death drew Alexander
        from the battle and set him safely down
        amid singing woods and chanting streams,
        then, then did the greedy Macedonian
        seize his sanity for a furtive spell
        to attend nocturnal choruses
        and be moved to bewail his guardian demon.

        Perhaps he even longed for Pegasus
        to bear him nearer to the birds
        till suddenly he recalled that Pegasus
        was the spawn of serpents' blood from Medusa's head,
        hence a monster too.
        Then did Alexander despair to know
        that ugliness and beauty are both
        the lairs of monsters that we worship.

        And his madness repossessed him
        as he rushed back into the battle
        bellowing for another horse
        with which to complete the rape of Asia,
        while I leaned drowsing on my lowered sills,
        my face silvered by the invaded moon.

        Fall, 1970