I've been reading Herrick and Spenser and thinking a lot about the relationship between poetry and music. Tom Clark showed us his copy of Herrick last fall, in which the previous owner had scored out a couple of bars of music for various poems that he'd decided to set tunes for, just like Henry Lawes did for real back when the poems were made. It's simple to do if you have a musical ear and the poem was written that way. Spenser's Faerie Queen has been a real revelation, and it occurred to me how much this poem must have influenced Ed Dorn in his writing the Gunslinger, although I haven't yet talked with anyone who would know for sure.

Crow Tyrannosaurus

Creation quaked voices--
It was a cortege
Of mourning and lament
Crow could hear and he looked around fearfully.

The cat's body writhed
Gagging
A tunnel
Of incoming death-struggles, sorrow on sorrow.

And the dog was a bulging filterbag
Of all the deaths it had gulped for the flesh and the bones.
It could not digest their screeching finales.
Its shapeless cry was a blort of all those voices.

Even man when he is walking
Abattoir
Of innocents--
His brain incinerating their outcry.

Crow thought 'Alas
Alas ought I
To stop eating
And try to become the light?'

But his eye saw a grub. And his head, trapsprung, stabbed.
And he listened
And he heard
Weeping

Grubs grubs He stabbed he stabbed
Weeping
Weeping

Weeping he walked and stabbed
Thus came the eye's