by Hughes, Ted
Seeming to bring them the waters that make drunk
Caesar, Pompey, Antony I drank.
Now let the snake reign.
A half-deity out of Capricorn,
This rigid Augustus mounts
With his sword virginal indeed; and has shorn
Summarily the moon-horned river
From my bed. May the moon
Ruin him with virginity! Drink me, now, whole
With coiled Egypt’s past; then from my delta
Swim like a fish toward Rome.
UNCOLLECTED
Recklings
Stealing Trout on a May Morning
I park the car half in the ditch and switch off and sit.
The hot astonishment of my engine’s arrival
Sinks through 5 a.m. silence and frost.
At the end of a long gash
An atrocity through the lace of first light
I sit with the reeking instrument.
I am on delicate business.
I want the steel to be cold instantly
And myself secreted three fields away
And the farms, back under their blankets, supposing a plane passed.
Because this is no wilderness you can just rip into.
Every leaf is plump and well-married,
Every grain of soil of known lineage, well-connected.
And the gardens are like brides fallen asleep
Before their weddings have properly begun.
The orchards are the hushed maids, fresh from convent …
It is too hushed, something improper is going to happen.
It is too ghostly proper, all sorts of liveried listenings
Tiptoe along the lanes and peer over hedges.
I listen for the eyes jerked open on pillows,
Their dreams washed with sudden ugly petroleum.
They need only look out at a sheep.
Every sheep within two miles
Is nailing me accurately down
With its hellishly-shaven starved-priest expression.
I emerge. The air, after all, has forgotten everything.
The sugared spindles and wings of grass
Are etched on great goblets. A pigeon falls into space.
The earth is coming quietly and darkly up from a great depth,
Still under the surface. I am unknown,
But nothing is surprised. The tarmac of the road
Is velvet with sleep, the hills are out cold.
A new earth still in its wrappers
Of gauze and cellophane,
The frost from the storage still on its edges,
My privilege to poke and sniff.
The sheep are not much more than the primroses.
And the river there, amazed with itself,
Flexing and trying its lights
And unused fish, that are rising And sinking for the sheer novelty
As the sun melts the hill’s spine and the spilled light
Flows through their gills …
My mind sinks, rising and sinking.
And the opening arms of the sky forget me
Into the buried tunnel of hazels. There
My boot dangles down, till a thing black and sudden
Savages it, and the river is heaping under,
Alive and malevolent,
A coiling glider of shock, the space-black
Draining off the night-moor, under the hazels …
But I drop and stand square in it, against it,
Then it is river again, washing its soul,
Its stones, its weeds, its fish, its gravels
And the rooty mouths of the hazels clear
Of the discolourings bled in
Off ploughlands and lanes …
At first, I can hardly look at it –
The riding tables, the corrugated
Shanty roofs tightening
To braids, boilings where boulders throw up
Gestures of explosion, black splitting everywhere
To drowning skirts of whiteness, a slither of mirrors
Under the wading hazels. Here it is shallow,
Ropes my knees, lobbing fake boomerangs,
A drowned woman loving each ankle,
But I’m heavier and I wade with them upstream,
Flashing my blue minnow
Up the open throats of water
And across through the side of the rush
Of alligator escaping along there
Under the beards of the hazels, and I slice
The wild nape-hair off the bald bulges,
Till the tightrope of my first footholds
Tangles away downstream
And my bootsoles move as to magnets.
Soon I deepen. And now I meet the piling mob
Of voices and hurriers coming towards me
And tumbling past me. I press through a panic …
This headlong river is a rout
Of tumbrils and gun-carriages, rags and metal,
All the funeral woe-drag of some overnight disaster
Mixed with planets, electrical storms and darkness
On a mapless moorland of granite,
Trailing past me with all its frights, its eyes
With what they have seen and still see,
They drag the flag off my head, a dark insistence
Tearing the spirits from my mind’s edge and from under …
To yank me clear takes the sudden, strong spine
Of one of the river’s real members –
Thoroughly made of dew, lightning and granite
Very slowly over four years. A trout, a foot long,
Lifting its head in a shawl of water,
Fins banked stiff like a trireme
It forces the final curve wide, getting
A long look at me. So much for the horror
It has changed places.
Now I am a man in a painting
(Under the mangy, stuffed head of a fox)
Painted about 1905
Where the river steams and the frost relaxes
On the pear-blossoms. The brassy wood-pigeons
Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun
Rises upon a world well-tried and old.
Water
On moors where people get lost and die of air
On heights where the goat’s stomach fails
In gorges where the toad lives on starlight
In deserts where the bone comes through the camel’s nostril
On seas where the white bear gives up and dies of water
In depths where only the shark’s tooth resists
At altitudes where the eagle would explode
Through falls of air where men become bombs
At the poles where zero is the sole hearth
Water is not lost, is snug, is at home –
Sometimes with its wife, stone –
An open-armed host, of poor cheer.
Memory
The morass is bulging and aborting –
Mother, mother, mother, what am I?
Hands of light, hands of light
Wash the writhing darkness.
Mother, the eel in the well is eating the moon!
If I stop my heart and hold my breath
The needle will thread itself.
Daring the no-man quiet of my no-being
A mouse buds at the washboarding. A nose
Of ginger spider weaves its hairs toward me.
Claws trickle onto my palm.
An ounce pins itself there,
Nose wavering to investigate me.
Am I a mouse’s remembrance?
I start, and it bounces past its shadow
Into my mother’s shoe
Which twists out.
I fly up flustered
Into the winter of a near elm.
Tutorial
Like a propped skull,
His humour is mediaeval.
What are all those tomes? Tomb-boards
&nb
sp; Pressing the drying remains of men.
He brings some out, we stew them up to a dark amber and sit sipping.
He is fat, this burst bearskin, but his mind is an electric mantis
Plucking the heads and legs off words, the homunculi.
I am thin but I can hardly move my bulk, I go round and
round numbly under the ice of the North Pole.
This scholar dribbling tea
Onto his tie, straining pipe-gargle
Through the wharf-weed that ennobles
The mask of enquiry, advancing into the depths like a harbour,
Like a sphinx cliff,
Like the papery skull of a fish
Lodged in dune sand, with a few straws,
Rifled by dry cold.
His words
Twitch and rustle, twitch
And rustle.
The scarred world looks through their gaps.
I listen
With bleak eyeholes.
Trees
I whispered to the holly …
There was a rustle of answer – dark,
Dark, dark, a gleamer recoiling tensely backward
Into a closing nest of shattered weapons,
Like a squid into clouds of protection.
I plucked a spiny leaf. Nothing protested.
Glints twitched, watched me.
I whispered to the birch …
My breath crept up into a world of shudderings.
Was she veiled?
Herself her own fountain
She pretended to be absent from it, or to be becoming air
Filtering herself from her fingertips,
Till her bole paled, like a reflection on water,
And I felt the touch of my own ghostliness –
I moved on, looking neither way,
Trying to hear
The outcry that must go with all
Those upflung maidenly gestures, that arrested
humpback rout
Stumbling in blackberries and bracken –
Silence.
Trees, it is your own strangeness, in the dank wood,
Makes me so horrifying
I dare not hear my own footfall.
The Lake
Better disguised than the leaf-insect,
A sort of subtler armadillo,
The lake turns with me as I walk.
Snuffles at my feet for what I might drop or kick up,
Sucks and slobbers the stones, snorts through its lips
Into broken glass, smacks its chops.
It has eaten several my size
Without developing a preference –
Prompt, with a splash, to whatever I offer.
It ruffles in its wallow, or lies sunning,
Digesting old senseless bicycles
And a few shoes. The fish down there
Do not know they have been swallowed
Any more than the girl out there, who over the stern of a rowboat
Tests its depth with her reflection.
Yet how the outlet fears it!
– dragging it out,
Black and yellow, a maniac eel,
Battering it to death with sticks and stones.
A Match
Spluttering near out, before it touches the moors,
You start, threatened by your own tears.
But not your skin, not doors, not borders
Will be proof against your foraging
Through everything unhuman or human
To savour and own the dimensions of woman
As water does those of water.
But the river
Is a prayer to its own waters
Where the circulation of our world is pouring
In stillness –
Everyone’s peace, no less your own peace.
No movement but rooted willows.
Out of bedrock your blood’s operation
Carves your eyes clear not so quickly
As your mouth dips deeper
Into the massed darkness.
Small Events
The old man’s blood had spoken the word: ‘Enough.’
Now nobody had the heart to see him go on.
His photographs were a cold mercy, there on the mantel.
So his mouth became a buttonhole and his limbs became wrapped iron.
Towards dying his eyes looked just above the things he looked at.
They were the poor rearguard on the beach
And turned, watering, with all his hope, from the smoke
To the sea for the Saviour
Who is useful only in life.
So, under a tree a tree-creeper, on dead grass sleeping –
It was blind, its eyes matt as blood-lice
Feeding on a raw face of disease.
I set it on dry grass, and its head fell forward, it died
Into what must have cupped it kindly.
And a grey, aged mouse, humped shivering
On the bare path, under November drizzle –
A frail parcel, delivered in damaging mail and still unclaimed,
Its contents no longer of use to anybody.
I picked it up. It was looking neither outward nor inward.
The tremendous music of its atoms
Trembled it on my fingers. As I watched it, it died.
A grey, mangy mouse, and seamed with ancient scars,
Whose blood had said: ‘Sleep.’
So this year a swift’s embryo, cracked too early from its fallen egg –
There, among mineral fragments,
The blind blood stirred,
Freed,
And, mystified, sank into hopeful sleep.
Crow Wakes
I had exploded, a bombcloud, lob-headed, my huge fingers
Came feeling over the fields, like shadows.
I became smaller than water, I stained into the soil-crumble.
I became smaller.
My eyes fell out of my head and into an atom.
My right leg stood in the room raving at me like a dog.
I tried to stifle its bloody mouth with a towel
But it ran on ahead. I stumbled after it
A long way and came to a contraption like a trap
Baited with human intestines.
A stone drummed and an eye watched me out of a cat’s anus.
I swam upstream, cleansed, in the snow-water, upstream.
Till I grew tired and turned over. I slept.
When I woke I could hear voices, many voices.
It was my bones all chattering together
At the high-tide mark, bedded in rubble, littered among shells
And gull feathers.
And the breastbone was crying:
‘I begat a million and murdered a million:
I was a leopard.’ And ‘No, no, no, no,
We were a fine woman,’ a rib cried.
‘No, we were swine, we had devils, and the axe halved us,’
The pelvis was shouting. And the bones of the feet
And the bones of the hands fought: ‘We were alligators,
We dragged some beauties under, we did not let go.’
And, ‘We were suffering oxen,’ and ‘I was a surgeon,’
And ‘We were a stinking clot of ectoplasm that suffocated a nun
Then lay for years in a cobbler’s cellar.’
The teeth sang and the vertebrae were screeching
Something incomprehensible.
I tried to creep away –
I got up and ran. I tried to get up and run
But they saw me. ‘It’s him, it’s him again. Get him.’
They came howling after me and I ran.
A freezing hand caught hold of me by the hair
And lifted me off my feet and set me high
Over the whole earth on a blazing star
Called
from WODWO
Thistles
Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
Or crackle open under a blue-black pressure.
Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up
From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.
Then they grow grey, like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,