Gargoyles
—Gregory Corso (in The Happy Birthday of Death, 1960)

                    The gargoyles trumpet Paris to me
when it rains out of their mouths
                        For centuries the same tremulous
petrified sepulchre cries
all into the Seine’s narrow ear
                        It’s the way they’re placed
                        Outstretched gargy necks
screammouthed    haunched pensivity
blasting golden era echoes from cathedral nests
as though avenging   I imagine   speechless Quasimodos
                        My ear is unlike the ear of the Seine
                        In my ear more resounded unsepulchre birds
loom the sphere     the pinioned dome that is mine
this dream frontier    the brief flight    the zoomed utterance
that is mine to hear
                        O I don’t know what to think when they sit
like spies with no clothes     with no real
watching me in the rain        gushing storms like defiance
                        They too would like raincoats
or something    I don’t know   yet enough to know
their image false      their purpose contagious     counterfeit
I cannot feel that demondrains benefit the houses of God
on a rainy day     forbidding or decreeing nourishment for
                                                                        the river’s diet