and laughed like one half daft
Titivating her painted hair—

King Jehu he drove to her,
She tipped him a fancy beck;
But he from his knacky side-car spoke,
"Who'll break that dewlapped neck?"
And so she was thrown from the window;
Like Lucifer she fell
Beneath the feet of the horses and they beat
The light out of Jezebel.

That corpse wasn't planted in clover;
Ah, nothing of her was found
Save those grey bones that Hare-foot Mike
Gave me for their lovely sound;
And as once her dancing body
Made star-lit princes sweat,
So I'll just clack: though her ghost lacks a back
There's music in the old bones yet.


2. Foehn (Lullaby)
(Lyrics adapted from the text by Georg Trakl)

Blind lament in the wind, moony winter days,
Childhood, quietly the steps fade near black hedge,
Long evening bells,
Quietly the white night approaches

Transforms pain and worriment into purple dreams
Of stony living,
So that the thorny sting will never leave the rotting body.

Deep in slumber, the anxious soul heaves a sigh,

Deep the wind in broken trees,
And the lamenting figure
Of the mother staggers through the lonely forest

Of this speechless grief; nights
Filled with tears, fiery angels.
Silvery a childlike skeleton smashes on bleak wall.


3. Animals
(Lyrics adapted from the text by Walt Whitman)

I think I could turn and live with animals,
they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.


4. Birth-Dues
(Lyrics adapted from the text by Robinson Jeffers)

Joy is a trick in the air, pleasure is merely contemptible,
But limitary pain- the rock under the tower
and the hewn coping
That takes thunder at the head of the turret-
Terrible and real. Therefore a mindless dervish
carving himself
With knives will seem to have conguered the world.

The world's God is treacherous and full of unreason,
A torturer.
Who fights him eats his own flesh and perishes
of hunger; who hides in the grave
To escape him is dead; who enter the Indian
Recession to escape him is dead; who falls in
love with the God is washed clean
Of death desired, and of death dreaded.

(However I suppose few in the world have
energy to hear effectively-
Have paid my birth-dues; am quits with the people.)


5. Revelation and Decline

instrumental


6. Birth
(Lyrics adapted from the text by Georg Trakl)

These mountains; blackness, silence and snow.
The red hunter climbs down from the forest;
Oh the mossy gaze of the wild thing.
The peace of the mother: under black firs
The sleeping hands open by themselves
When the cold moon seems ready to fall.
The birth of man. Each night
Blue water washes over the rockbase of the cliff;
The fallen angel stares at his reflection with sighs,
Something pale wakes up in a suffocating room.
The eyes
Of the stony old woman shine, two moons.
The cry of the woman in labor. The night troubles
The boy's sleep with black wings,
With snow, which falls with ease out of the purple clouds.