I seem to have been slammed with a head cold, just in time for tonight's reading. Ah well. Nothing could be as bad as helplessly coughing through an entire half-hour phone interview, can it? And at last night's band practice I did manage to sing, which is harder than reading, especially since my singing range tends to drop down an entire register when I'm sick. From being an alto with a usable soprano falsetto I become a contralto with a career-smoker rasp. So perhaps tonight I should only read poems about the seedy back rooms of speakeasies, or bleak Gatsby-esque roadscapes, or the desk chairs of washed-up private investigators. Unfortunately I haven't written any of those poems yet.

But, as a bright spot, we're having a sleetstorm, and school has been canceled for the first time this year. The boys are celebrating by being unconscious, and I am celebrating by not engaging in any of my early morning pitchfork-the-boys-out-of-the-house chores. Instead I am sitting at my desk in the snowy half-light, thinking vaguely about Shelley and Middle English lyrics and shoveling out barnyard gates.

All these thoughts seem to be culminating in my sudden need to copy out this fifteenth-century double-entendre chicken poem:

I Have a Gentil Cok
Anonymous 

I have a gentil cok
Croweth me day;
He me risen erly
My matines for to say. 

I have a gentil cok;
Comen he is of grete;
His comb is of red corel,
His tail is of get. 

I have a gentil cok;
Comen he is of kinde;
His comb is of red corel,
His tail of inde. 

His legges ben of asour,
So gentil and so smale;
His spores arn of silver white
Into the wortewale. 

His eyen are of cristal,
Loken all in aumber;
And every night he percheth him
In mine ladyes chaumber.

[Translation key: get = jet; inde = indigo; spores = spurs; wortewale = skin of the claws. Not that you need to understand every word to love a poem. Sometimes sound in the mouth or shape on the page is as good as meaning in the head.]