by Hughes, Ted
But climb
Climb
Sing
Obedient as to death a dead thing.
III
I suppose you just gape and let your gaspings
Rip in and out through your voicebox
O lark
And sing inwards as well as outwards
Like a breaker of ocean milling the shingle
O lark
O song, incomprehensibly both ways –
Joy! Help! Joy! Help!
O lark
IV
You stop to rest, far up, you teeter
Over the drop
But not stopping singing
Resting only for a second
Dropping just a little
Then up and up and up
Like a mouse with drowning fur
Bobbing and bobbing at the well-wall
Lamenting, mounting a little –
But the sun will not take notice
And the earth’s centre smiles.
V
My idleness curdles
Seeing the lark labour near its cloud
Scrambling
In a nightmare difficulty
Up through the nothing
Its feathers thrash, its heart must be drumming like a motor,
As if it were too late, too late
Dithering in ether
Its song whirls faster and faster
And the sun whirls
The lark is evaporating
Till my eye’s gossamer snaps
and my hearing floats back widely to earth
After which the sky lies blank open
Without wings, and the earth is a folded clod.
Only the sun goes silently and endlessly on with the lark’s song.
VI
All the dreary Sunday morning
Heaven is a madhouse
With the voices and frenzies of the larks,
Squealing and gibbering and cursing
Heads flung back, as I see them,
Wings almost torn off backwards – far up
Like sacrifices set floating
The cruel earth’s offerings
The mad earth’s missionaries.
VII
Like those flailing flames
The lift from the fling of a bonfire
Claws dangling full of what they feed on
The larks carry their tongues to the last atom
Battering and battering their last sparks out at the limit –
So it’s a relief, a cool breeze
When they’ve had enough, when they’re burned out
And the sun’s sucked them empty
And the earth gives them the O.K.
And they relax, drifting with changed notes
Dip and float, not quite sure if they may
Then they are sure and they stoop
And maybe the whole agony was for this
The plummeting dead drop
With long cutting screams buckling like razors
But just before they plunge into the earth
They flare and glide off low over grass, then up
To land on a wall-top, crest up,
Weightless,
Paid-up,
Alert,
Conscience perfect.
VIII
Manacled with blood,
Cuchulain listened bowed,
Strapped to his pillar (not to die prone)
Hearing the far crow
Guiding the near lark nearer
With its blind song
‘That some sorry little wight more feeble and misguided than thyself
Take thy head
Thine ear
And thy life’s career from thee.’
Pibroch
The sea cries with its meaningless voice
Treating alike its dead and its living,
Probably bored with the appearance of heaven
After so many millions of nights without sleep,
Without purpose, without self-deception.
Stone likewise. A pebble is imprisoned
Like nothing in the Universe.
Created for black sleep. Or growing
Conscious of the sun’s red spot occasionally,
Then dreaming it is the foetus of God.
Over the stone rushes the wind
Able to mingle with nothing,
Like the hearing of the blind stone itself.
Or turns, as if the stone’s mind came feeling
A fantasy of directions.
Drinking the sea and eating the rock
A tree struggles to make leaves –
An old woman fallen from space
Unprepared for these conditions.
She hangs on, because her mind’s gone completely.
Minute after minute, aeon after aeon,
Nothing lets up or develops.
And this is neither a bad variant nor a tryout.
This is where the staring angels go through.
This is where all the stars bow down.
The Howling of Wolves
Is without world.
What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound
That dissolve in the mid-air silence?
Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,
Brings the wolves running.
Tuning of a viola, in this forest delicate as an owl’s ear,
Brings the wolves running – brings the steel traps clashing and slavering,
The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,
The eyes that never learn how it has come about
That they must live like this,
That they must live
Innocence crept into minerals.
The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.
It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.
The earth is under its tongue,
A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.
The wolf is living for the earth.
But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.
It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly.
It must feed its fur.
The night snows stars and the earth creaks.
Gnat-Psalm
When the gnats dance at evening
Scribbling on the air, sparring sparely,
Scrambling their crazy lexicon,
Shuffling their dumb Cabala,
Under leaf shadow
Leaves only leaves
Between them and the broad swipes of the sun
Leaves muffling the dusty stabs of the late sun
From their frail eyes and crepuscular temperaments
Dancing
Dancing
Writing on the air, rubbing out everything they write
Jerking their letters into knots, into tangles
Everybody everybody else’s yoyo
Immense magnets fighting around a centre
Not writing and not fighting but singing
That the cycles of this Universe are no matter
That they are not afraid of the sun
That the one sun is too near
It blasts their song, which is of all the suns
That they are their own sun
Their own brimming over
At large in the nothing
Their wings blurring the blaze
Singing
That they are the nails
In the dancing hands and feet of the gnat-god
That they hear the wind suffering
Through the grass
And the evening tree suffering
The wind bowing with long cat-gut cries
And the long roads of dust
Dancing in the wind
The wind’s dance, the death-dance, entering the mountain
And the cow dung villages huddling to dust
But not the gnats, their agility
Has outleaped that threshol
d
And hangs them a little above the claws of the grass
Dancing
Dancing
In the glove shadows of the sycamore
A dance never to be altered
A dance giving their bodies to be burned
And their mummy faces will never be used
Their little bearded faces
Weaving and bobbing on the nothing
Shaken in the air, shaken, shaken
And their feet dangling like the feet of victims
O little Hasids
Ridden to death by your own bodies
Riding your bodies to death
You are the angels of the only heaven!
And God is an Almighty Gnat!
You are the greatest of all the galaxies!
My hands fly in the air, they are follies
My tongue hangs up in the leaves
My thoughts have crept into crannies
Your dancing
Your dancing
Rolls my staring skull slowly away into outer space.
Full Moon and Little Frieda
A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket –
And you listening.
A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming – mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.
Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath –
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.
‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’
The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.
Wodwo
What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over
Following a faint stain on the air to the river’s edge
I enter water. What am I to split
The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed
Of the river above me upside down very clear
What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find
this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret
interior and make it my own? Do these weeds
know me and name me to each other have they
seen me before, do I fit in their world? I seem
separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped
out of nothing casually I’ve no threads
fastening me to anything I can go anywhere
I seem to have been given the freedom
of this place what am I then? And picking
bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me
no pleasure and it’s no use so why do I do it
me and doing that have coincided very queerly
But what shall I be called am I the first
have I an owner what shape am I what
shape am I am I huge if I go
to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees
till I get tired that’s touching one wall of me
for the moment if I sit still how everything
stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre
but there’s all this what is it roots
roots roots roots and here’s the water
again very queer but I’ll go on looking
from CROW
Two Legends
I
Black was the without eye
Black the within tongue
Black was the heart
Black the liver, black the lungs
Unable to suck in light
Black the blood in its loud tunnel
Black the bowels packed in furnace
Black too the muscles
Striving to pull out into the light
Black the nerves, black the brain
With its tombed visions
Black also the soul, the huge stammer
Of the cry that, swelling, could not
Pronounce its sun.
II
Black is the wet otter’s head, lifted.
Black is the rock, plunging in foam.
Black is the gall lying on the bed of the blood.
Black is the earth-globe, one inch under,
An egg of blackness
Where sun and moon alternate their weathers
To hatch a crow, a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
over emptiness
But flying
Lineage
In the beginning was Scream
Who begat Blood
Who begat Eye
Who begat Fear
Who begat Wing
Who begat Bone
Who begat Granite
Who begat Violet
Who begat Guitar
Who begat Sweat
Who begat Adam
Who begat Mary
Who begat God
Who begat Nothing
Who begat Never
Never Never Never
Who begat Crow
Screaming for Blood
Grubs, crusts
Anything
Trembling featherless elbows in the nest’s filth
Examination at the Womb-Door
Who owns these scrawny little feet? Death.
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death.
Who owns these still-working lungs? Death.
Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death.
Who owns these unspeakable guts? Death.
Who owns these questionable brains? Death.
All this messy blood? Death.
These minimum-efficiency eyes? Death.
This wicked little tongue? Death.
This occasional wakefulness? Death.
Given, stolen, or held pending trial?
Held.
Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death.
Who owns all of space? Death.
Who is stronger than hope? Death.
Who is stronger than the will? Death.
Stronger than love? Death.
Stronger than life? Death.
But who is stronger than death?
Me, evidently.
Pass, Crow.
A Childish Prank
Man’s and woman’s bodies lay without souls,
Dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert
On the flowers of Eden.
God pondered.
The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep.
Crow laughed.
He bit the Worm, God’s only son,
Into two writhing halves.
He stuffed into man the tail half
With the wounded end hanging out.
He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman
And it crept in deeper and up
To peer out through her eyes
Calling its tail-half to join up quickly, quickly
Because O it was painful.
Man awoke being dragged across the grass.
Woman awoke to see him coming.
Neither knew what had happened.
God went on sleeping.
Crow went on laughing.
Crow’s First Lesson
God tried to teach Crow how to talk.
‘Love,’ said God. ‘Say, Love.’
Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea
And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.
‘No, no,’ said God. ‘Say Love. Now try it. LOVE.’