by Hughes, Ted
Knives, forks, spoons divide his brains.
The supporting earth, and the night around him,
Smoulder like the slow, curing fire
Of a Javanese head-shrinker.
Nothing remains of the tête d’armée but the skin –
A dangling parchment lantern
Slowly revolving to right, revolving to left,
Trembling a little with the incessant pounding,
Over the map, empty in the ring of light.
III WIT’S END
The General commits his emptiness to God.
And in place of his eyes
Crystal balls
Roll with visions.
And his voice rises
From the dead fragments of men
A Frankenstein
A tank
A ghost
Roaming the impossible
Raising the hair on men’s heads.
His hand
Has swept the battlefield flat as a sheet of foolscap.
He writes:
I AM A LANTERN
IN THE HAND
OF A BLIND PEOPLE
IV TWO MINUTES’ SILENCE
The soldier’s boots, beautifully bulled,
Are graves
On the assembly line
Rolls Royces
Opera boxes
Double beds
Safes
With big smiles and laced-up eyes
His stockings
Are his own intestines
Cut into lengths –
They wear better and are
Nobody else’s loss,
So he needn’t charge diffidently
His battledress
Is Swanwhite’s undies
Punch and Judy curtains
The Queen’s pajamas
The Conjuror’s hankie
The flapping sheet
Of the shithouse phantom
His helmet
Is a Ministry pisspot
His rifle
Is a Thames turd
And away downwind he runs, over no man’s land,
In a shouting flight
From his own stink
Into the mushroom forest
Watched from the crowded walls.
V THE RED CARPET
So the leaves trembled.
He leaned for a moment
Into the head-on leaden blast of ghost
From death’s doorway
Then fell forward, under his equipment.
But though the jungle morass has gripped him to the knees
His outflung left hand clawed and got a hold
On Notting Hill
His brow banged hard down once then settled gently
Onto Hampstead Heath
The thumb of his twisted, smashed right hand
Settled in numb snugness
Across the great doorway of St Paul’s
His lips oozed soft words and blood bubbles
Into the Chalk Farm railway cutting
Westminster knuckled his riddled chest
His belt-buckle broke Clapham
His knees his knees were dissolving in the ebb of the Channel
And there he lay alive
His body full of lights, the restaurants seethed,
He groaned in the pushing of traffic that would not end
The girls strolled and their perfumes gargled in his throat
And in the holes in his chest
And though he could not lift his eyes to the streetlights
And though he could not stir either hand
He knew in that last stride, that last
Ten thousand league effort, and even off balance,
He had made it home. And he called –
Into mud.
Again the leaves trembled.
Splinters flew off Big Ben.
Theology
No, the serpent did not
Seduce Eve to the apple.
All that’s simply
Corruption of the facts.
Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam.
The serpent ate Eve.
This is the dark intestine.
The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise –
Smiling to hear
God’s querulous calling.
Gog
I woke to a shout: ‘I am Alpha and Omega.
Rocks and a few trees trembled
Deep in their own country.
I ran and an absence bounded beside me.
The dog’s god is a scrap dropped from the table.
The mouse’s saviour is a ripe wheat grain.
Hearing the Messiah cry
My mouth widens in adoration.
How fat are the lichens!
They cushion themselves on the silence.
The air wants for nothing.
The dust, too, is replete.
What was my error? My skull has sealed it out.
My great bones are massed in me.
They pound on the earth, my song excites them.
I do not look at the rocks and trees, I am frightened of what they see.
I listen to the song jarring my mouth
Where the skull-rooted teeth are in possession.
I am massive on earth. My feetbones beat on the earth
Over the sounds of motherly weeping …
Afterwards I drink at a pool quietly.
The horizon bears the rocks and trees away into twilight.
I lie down. I become darkness.
Darkness that all night sings and circles stamping.
Kreutzer Sonata
Now you have stabbed her good
A flower of unknown colour appallingly
Blackened by your surplus of bile
Blooms wetly on her dress.
‘Your mystery! Your mystery! …’
All facts, with all absence of facts,
Exhale as the wound there
Drinks its roots and breathes them to nothing.
Vile copulation! Vile! – etcetera.
But now your dagger has outdone everybody’s.
Say goodbye, for your wife’s sweet flesh goes off,
Booty of the envious spirit’s assault.
A sacrifice, not a murder.
One hundred and forty pounds
Of excellent devil, for God.
She tormented Ah demented you
With that fat lizard Trukachevsky,
That fiddling, leering penis.
Yet why should you castrate yourself
To be rid of them both?
Now you have stabbed her good
Trukachevsky is cut off
From any further operation on you.
And she can find nobody else.
Rest in peace, Tolstoy!
It must have taken supernatural greed
To need to corner all the meat in the world,
Even from your own hunger.
Out
I THE DREAM TIME
My father sat in his chair recovering
From the four-year mastication by gunfire and mud,
Body buffeted wordless, estranged by long soaking
In the colours of mutilation.
His outer perforations
Were valiantly healed, but he and the hearth-fire, its blood-flicker
On biscuit-bowl and piano and table leg,
Moved into strong and stronger possession
Of minute after minute, as the clock’s tiny cog
Laboured and on the thread of his listening
Dragged him bodily from under
The mortised four-year strata of dead Englishmen
He belonged with. He felt his limbs clearing
With every slight, gingerish movement. While I, small and four,
Lay on the carpet as his luckless double,
His memory’s buried, immovable anchor,
Among jawbones and blown-off boots, tree-stumps, shellcases and craters,
Under rain that goes on drumming its rods and thickening
Its kingdom, which the sun has abandoned, and where nobody
Can ever again move from shelter.
II ‘The dead man in his cave beginning to sweat’,
The dead man in his cave beginning to sweat;
The melting bronze visor of flesh
Of the mother in the baby-furnace –
Nobody believes, it
Could be nothing, all
Undergo smiling at
The lulling of blood in
Their ears, their ears, their ears, their eyes
Are only drops of water and even the dead man suddenly
Sits up and sneezes – Atishoo!
Then the nurse wraps him up, smiling,
And, though faintly, the mother is smiling,
And it’s just another baby.
As after being blasted to bits
The reassembled infantryman
Tentatively totters out, gazing around with the eyes
Of an exhausted clerk.
III REMEMBRANCE DAY
The poppy is a wound, the poppy is the mouth
Of the grave, maybe of the womb searching –
A canvas-beauty puppet on a wire
Today whoring everywhere. It is years since I wore one.
It is more years
The shrapnel that shattered my father’s paybook
Gripped me, and all his dead
Gripped him to a time
He no more than they could outgrow, but, cast into one, like iron,
Hung deeper than refreshing of ploughs
In the woe-dark under my mother’s eye –
One anchor
Holding my juvenile neck bowed to the dunkings of the Atlantic.
So goodbye to that bloody-minded flower.
You dead bury your dead.
Goodbye to the cenotaphs on my mother’s breasts.
Goodbye to all the remaindered charms of my father’s survival.
Let England close. Let the green sea-anemone close.
New Moon in January
A splinter, flicked
Into the wide eyeball,
Severs its warning.
The head, severed while staring,
Felt nothing, only
Tilted slightly.
O lone
Eyelash on the darkening
Stripe of blood, O sail of death!
Frozen
In ether
Unearthly
Shelley’s faint-shriek
Trying to thaw while zero
Itself loses consciousness.
The Warriors of the North
Bringing their frozen swords, their salt-bleached eyes, their salt-bleached hair,
The snow’s stupefied anvils in rows,
Bringing their envy,
The slow ships feelered Southward, snails over the steep sheen of the water-globe.
Thawed at the red and black disgorging of abbeys,
The bountiful, cleft casks,
The fluttered bowels of the women of dead burghers,
And the elaborate, patient gold of the Gaels.
To no end
But this timely expenditure of themselves,
A cash-down, beforehand revenge, with extra,
For the gruelling relapse and prolongueur of their blood
Into the iron arteries of Calvin.
Song of a Rat
I THE RAT’S DANCE
The rat is in the trap, it is in the trap,
And attacking heaven and earth with a mouthful of screeches like torn tin,
An effective gag.
When it stops screeching, it pants
And cannot think
‘This has no face, it must be God’ or
‘No answer is also an answer.’
Iron jaws, strong as the whole earth
Are stealing its backbone
For a crumpling of the Universe with screechings,
For supplanting every human brain inside its skull with a rat-body that knots and unknots,
A rat that goes on screeching,
Trying to uproot itself into each escaping screech,
But its long fangs bar that exit –
The incisors bared to the night spaces, threatening the constellations,
The glitterers in the black, to keep off,
Keep their distance,
While it works this out.
The rat understands suddenly. It bows and is still,
With a little beseeching of blood on its nose-end.
II THE RAT’S VISION
The rat hears the wind saying something in the straw
And the night-fields that have come up to the fence, leaning their silence,
The widowed land
With its trees that know how to cry
The rat sees the farm bulk of beam and stone
Wobbling like reflection on water.
The wind is pushing from the gulf
Through the old barbed wire, in through the trenched gateway, past the gates of the ear, deep into the worked design of days,
Breathes onto the solitary snow crystal
The rat screeches
And ‘Do not go’ cry the dandelions, from their heads of folly
And ‘Do not go’ cry the yard cinders, who have no future, only their infernal aftermath
And ‘Do not go’ cries the cracked trough by the gate, fatalist of starlight and zero
‘Stay’ says the arrangement of stars
Forcing the rat’s head down into godhead.
III THE RAT’S FLIGHT
The heaven shudders, a flame unrolled like a whip,
And the stars jolt in their sockets.
And the sleep-souls of eggs
Wince under the shot of shadow –
That was the Shadow of the Rat
Crossing into power
Never to be buried
The horned Shadow of the Rat
Casting here by the door
A bloody gift for the dogs
While it supplants Hell.
Heptonstall
Black village of gravestones.
Skull of an idiot
Whose dreams die back
Where they were born.
Skull of a sheep
Whose meat melts
Under its own rafters.
Only the flies leave it.
Skull of a bird,
The great geographies
Drained to sutures
Of cracked windowsills.
Life tries.
Death tries.
The stone tries.
Only the rain never tires.
Skylarks
I
The lark begins to go up
Like a warning
As if the globe were uneasy –
Barrel-chested for heights,
Like an Indian of the high Andes,
A whippet head, barbed like a hunting arrow,
But leaden
With muscle
For the struggle
Against
Earth’s centre.
And leaden
For ballast
In the rocketing storms of the breath.
Leaden
Like a bullet
To supplant
Life from its centre.
II
Crueller than owl or eagle
A towered bird, shot through the crested head
With the command, Not die