by Hughes, Ted
He sang
How the swan blanched forever
How the wolf threw away its telltale heart
And the stars dropped their pretence
The air gave up appearances
Water went deliberately numb
The rock surrendered its last hope
And cold died beyond knowledge
He sang
How everything had nothing more to lose
Then sat still with fear
Seeing the clawtrack of star
Hearing the wingbeat of rock
And his own singing
Crow’s Elephant Totem Song
Once upon a time
God made this Elephant.
Then it was delicate and small
It was not freakish at all
Or melancholy
The Hyenas sang in the scrub: You are beautiful –
They showed their scorched heads and grinning expressions
Like the half-rotted stumps of amputations –
We envy your grace
Waltzing through the thorny growth
O take us with you to the Land of Peaceful
O ageless eyes of innocence and kindliness
Lift us from the furnaces
And furies of our blackened faces
Within these hells we writhe
Shut in behind the bars of our teeth
In hourly battle with a death
The size of the earth
Having the strength of the earth.
So the Hyenas ran under the Elephant’s tail
As like a lithe and rubber oval
He strolled gladly around inside his ease
But he was not God no it was not his
To correct the damned
In rage in madness then they lit their mouths
They tore out his entrails
They divided him among their several hells
To cry all his separate pieces
Swallowed and inflamed
Amidst paradings of infernal laughter.
At the Resurrection
The Elephant got himself together with correction
Deadfall feet and toothproof body and bulldozing bones
And completely altered brains
Behind aged eyes, that were wicked and wise.
So through the orange blaze and blue shadow
Of the afterlife, effortless and immense,
The Elephant goes his own way, a walking sixth sense,
And opposite and parallel
The sleepless Hyenas go
Along a leafless skyline trembling like an oven roof
With a whipped run
Their shame-flags tucked hard down
Over the gutsacks
Crammed with putrefying laughter
Blotched black with the leakage and seepings
And they sing: ‘Ours is the land
Of loveliness and beautiful
Is the putrid mouth of the leopard
And the graves of fever
Because it is all we have –’
And they vomit their laughter.
And the Elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
About a star of deathless and painless peace
But no astronomer can find where it is.
Dawn’s Rose
Is melting an old frost moon.
Agony under agony, the quiet of dust,
And a crow talking to stony skylines.
Desolate is the crow’s puckered cry
As an old woman’s mouth
When the eyelids have finished
And the hills continue.
A cry
Wordless
As the newborn baby’s grieving
On the steely scales.
As the dull gunshot and its after-râle
Among conifers, in rainy twilight.
Or the suddenly dropped, heavily dropped
Star of blood on the fat leaf.
The Smile
Began under the groan of the oldest forest
It ran through the clouds, a third light
And it ran through the skin of the earth
It came circling the earth
Like the lifted bow
Of a wave’s submarine running
Tossing the willows, and swelling the elm-tops
Looking for its occasion
But people were prepared
They met it
With visor smiles, mirrors of ricochet
With smiles that stole a bone
And smiles that went off with a mouthful of blood
And smiles that left poison in a numb place
Or doubled up
Covering a getaway
But the smile was too vast, it outflanked all
It was too tiny it slipped between the atoms
So that the steel screeched open
Like a gutted rabbit, the skin was nothing
Then the pavement and the air and the light
Confined all the jumping blood
No better than a paper bag
People were running with bandages
But the world was a draughty gap
The whole creation
Was just a broken gutter pipe
And there was the unlucky person’s eye
Pinned under its brow
Widening for the darkness behind it
Which kept right on getting wider, darker
As if the soul were not working
And at that very moment the smile arrived
And the crowd, shoving to get a glimpse of a man’s soul
Stripped to its last shame,
Met this smile
That rose through his torn roots
Touching his lips, altering his eyes
And for a moment
Mending everything
Before it swept out and away across the earth.
Crow’s Battle Fury
When the patient, shining with pain,
Suddenly pales,
Crow makes a noise suspiciously like laughter.
Seeing the night-city, on the earth’s blue bulge,
Trembling its tambourine,
He bellows laughter till the tears come.
Remembering the painted masks and the looming of the balloons
Of the pinpricked dead
He rolls on the ground helpless.
And he sees his remote feet and he chokes he
Holds his aching sides –
He can hardly bear it.
One of his eyes sinks into his skull, tiny as a pin,
One opens, a gaping dish of pupils,
His temple-veins gnarl, each like the pulsing head of a month-old baby,
His heels double to the front,
His lips lift off his cheekbone, his heart and his liver fly in his throat,
Blood blasts from the crown of his head in a column –
Such as cannot be in this world.
A hair’s breadth out of the world
He comes forward a step,
and a step,
and a step –
Crow Blacker than Ever
When God, disgusted with man,
Turned towards Heaven,
And man, disgusted with God,
Turned towards Eve,
Things looked like falling apart.
But Crow Crow
Crow nailed them together,
Nailing Heaven and earth together –
So man cried, but with God’s voice.
And God bled, but with man’s blood.
Then Heaven and earth creaked at the joint
Which became gangrenous and stank –
A horror beyond redemption.
The agony did not diminish.
Man could not be man nor God God.
The agony
Grew.
Crow
Grinned
Crying: ‘This is my Creation,’
Flying the black flag of himself.
Revenge Fable
Could not get rid of his mother
As if he were her topmost twig.
So he pounded and hacked at her
With numbers and equations and laws
Which he invented and called truth.
He investigated, incriminated
And penalized her, like Tolstoy,
Forbidding, screaming and condemning,
Going for her with a knife,
Obliterating her with disgusts
Bulldozers and detergents
Requisitions and central heating
Rifles and whisky and bored sleep.
With all her babes in her arms, in ghostly weepings, She died.
His head fell off like a leaf.
Bedtime Anecdote
There was a man
Who got up from a bed that was no bed
Who pulled on his clothes that were no clothes
(A million years whistling in his ear)
And he pulled on shoes that were no shoes
Carefully jerking the laces tight – and tighter
To walk over floors that were no floor
Down stairs that were no stairs
Past pictures that were no pictures
To pause
To remember and forget the night’s dreams that were no dreams
And there was the cloud, primeval, the prophet;
There was the rain, its secret writing, the water-kernel
Of the tables of the sun;
And there was the light with its loose rant;
There were the birch trees, insisting and urging.
And the wind, reproach upon reproach.
At the table he cupped his eyes in his hands
As if to say grace
Avoiding his reflection in the mirror
Huddled to read news that was no news
(A million years revolving on his stomach)
He entered the circulation of his life
But stopped reading feeling the weight of his hand
In the hand that was no hand
And he did not know what to do or where to begin
To live the day that was no day
And Brighton was a picture
The British Museum was a picture
The battleship off Flamborough was a picture
And the drum-music the ice in the glass the mouths
Stretched open in laughter
That was no laughter
Were what was left of a picture
In a book
Under a monsoon downpour
In a ruinous mountain hut
From which years ago his body was lifted by a leopard.
Apple Tragedy
So on the seventh day
The serpent rested.
God came up to him.
‘I’ve invented a new game,’ he said.
The serpent stared in surprise
At this interloper.
But God said: ‘You see this apple?
I squeeze it and look – Cider.’
The serpent had a good drink
And curled up into a questionmark.
Adam drank and said: ‘Be my god.’
Eve drank and opened her legs
And called to the cockeyed serpent
And gave him a wild time.
God ran and told Adam
Who in drunken rage tried to hang himself in the orchard.
The serpent tried to explain, crying ‘Stop’
But drink was splitting his syllable
And Eve started screeching: ‘Rape! Rape!’
And stamping on his head.
Now whenever the snake appears she screeches
‘Here it comes again! Help! O help!’
Then Adam smashes a chair on its head,
And God says: ‘I am well pleased’
And everything goes to hell.
Crow’s Last Stand
Burning
burning
burning
there was finally something
The sun could not burn, that it had rendered
Everything down to – a final obstacle
Against which it raged and charred
And rages and chars
Limpid among the glaring furnace clinkers
The pulsing blue tongues and the red and the yellow
The green lickings of the conflagration
Limpid and black –
Crow’s eye-pupil, in the tower of its scorched fort.
Fragment of an Ancient Tablet
Above – the well-known lips, delicately downed.
Below – beard between thighs.
Above – her brow, the notable casket of gems.
Below – the belly with its blood-knot.
Above – many a painful frown.
Below – the ticking bomb of the future.
Above – her perfect teeth, with the hint of a fang at the corner.
Below – the millstones of two worlds.
Above – a word and a sigh.
Below – gouts of blood and babies.
Above – the face, shaped like a perfect heart.
Below – the heart’s torn face.
Lovesong
He loved her and she loved him
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains
Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment’s brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin’s attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
Her glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon’s gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop
In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage
In the morning they wore each other’s face
Notes for a Little Play
First – the sun coming closer, growing by the minute.
Next – clothes torn off.
Without a goodbye
Faces and eyes evaporate.
Brains evaporate.
Hands arms legs feet head and neck
Chest and belly vanish
With all the rubbish of the earth.
And the flame fills all space.
The demolition is total
Except
for two strange items remaining in the flames –
Two survivors, moving in the flames blindly.
Mutations – at home in the nuclear glare.
Horrors – hairy and slobbery, glossy and raw.
They sniff towards each other in the emptiness.