Early Edit 0.01 Ellz, river

[RiverNotch]

Well, I just grew to love this poem a good deal more. New thoughts (or old ones restated), and without criticizing the prosody (as much):

Beetle-black with glinty, guilty eye, the carrion  crow
comes craving, raucous, raiding.She cleaves the dawn Can't help but feel that a semi-colon would be better here; the two images are closely related.
still wrapped in dreams of sleeping souls. Rasping words
escape through sashes open-cracked, up to the misted sky. I missed "sashes" in my earlier read. I'm not asking for any changes or anything, since it sounds perfect, but I can't quite visualize what those "sashes" are. May you explain?

She flinches, as if pricked by flea, when sight or sound I don't think the gentle rhythm here would be broken if you added a grammatically clean "a" before that "flea" -- "she FLINches, as if PRICKED by a FLEA..."
disrupts her flight. A twitch, a  twist in mock distress, she calls
to warn but draws the early gun. Flash! Dashed she tumble-turns, Maybe a comma before "but"? I think it's grammatically correct, and I'm sure it develops a soft pause before that crucial thought, which would perhaps add to the tension.
a single quill flat-spins to ground... morning has passed to man. Something's still off with the unusual plainness of "flat-spins"...it just sounds so, well, flat, and a bit awkward, since the image, I think, deserves a full line to really, properly describe. Plain "falls to the ground" should be enough here -- whether the spinning is imagined by the reader or not is, I think, irrelevant.

Still things of blood - furred, feathered or spined -
lie spread and flat on tar grit roads; all gone before the fox awakes. It's not that after a semicolon it should be a full sentence, it's just that a semicolon should divide more independent thoughts in its general usage. Here, however, it's being used as a clearer version of a comma, what with the kinda awkward syntax presented by the arrangement of the clauses, though it's still quite the double take before the point is taken, at least for me. Not that a change is that necessary, anyway -- I can't think of any way to preserve the arrangement of thoughts while changing the clause positions so.
Wings whiffle down to empty lanes and hide in hawthorn spiked
in white; then swoop to swallow shreds of red from dead of night. I reiterate: the semicolon could be replaced with a comma: the ideas here aren't so independent as to be so separated (it is, after all, just a passage of time). And now that the play on words with "dead of night" here is clear to me, I appreciate this line much more.

Far afield lie dappled drays, full stretched on grass as damp
as river  beds; the mares from night plume golden mists to lift The syntax here is much, much, much better, and I'm reading the drays as "dray horses", now, though I still think that in general usage, it shouldn't work that way. Anyway, "the mares of night" isn't as clear as I'd like it to be on them mares being (or not being) the same drays as earlier (maybe because, as noted, being "full-stretched" also implies a lack of movement), and I still can't stop seeing the farts -- I have never seen breath-plumes colored gold, though gold-colored sharts....
themselves into the sun. They steam like engines coaled and fired;
shimmered and shivered in to the working day. Now, I think, the semicolons here are fully unnecessary. Even if the modifiers here directly relate to the mares, with the full stop of the last sentence, such a conflation is immediately rejected regardless of the semicolon; and besides, there is nothing wrong with elaborating on the nature of the engines here, instead, since the reader, I guess, would see the equivalent image on the mares too.

See now how God awakes and breaks the wraiths that swirl
and scurry through dove-cooed oaks. Look where the steeple I take my earlier, more subjective note back: with the clarifications on the syntax of the earlier stanza, the images of these two lines are sublime.
sheds the shroud, where  naked branches starkly sway;
a gentle shifting in the air. April morn has brought an early spring. I still think the sudden shift from post-vespertine to pre-vernal here is off....again, the winter isn't even hinted on the earlier lines, so why suddenly introduce this idea into the poem? Unless you mean to change our points of view, in which case it somehow works, but it doesn't work as well as with either using a more generalized conclusion, or at least just summing up the whole of the plain dawn.

Overall, still amazing sound, and with the crucial clarifications on the fourth stanza, much, much better. Thanks again for the good read!