by Hughes, Ted
The Harvest Moon
The flame-red moon, the harvest moon,
Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,
A vast balloon,
Till it takes off, and sinks upward
To lie in the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon.
The harvest moon has come,
Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon.
And earth replies all night, like a deep drum.
So people can’t sleep,
So they go out where elms and oak trees keep
A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.
The harvest moon has come!
And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep
Stare up at her petrified, while she swells
Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer and closer like the end of the world.
Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry ‘We are ripe, reap us!’ and the rivers
Sweat from the melting hills.
Leaves
Who’s killed the leaves?
Me, says the apple, I’ve killed them all.
Fat as a bomb or a cannonball
I’ve killed the leaves.
Who sees them drop?
Me, says the pear, they will leave me all bare
So all the people can point and stare.
I see them drop.
Who’ll catch their blood?
Me, me, me, says the marrow, the marrow.
I’ll get so rotund that they’ll need a wheelbarrow.
I’ll catch their blood.
Who’ll make their shroud?
Me, says the swallow, there’s just time enough
Before I must pack all my spools and be off.
I’ll make their shroud.
Who’ll dig their grave?
Me, says the river, with the power of the clouds
A brown deep grave I’ll dig under my floods.
I’ll dig their grave.
Who’ll be their parson?
Me, says the Crow, for it is well known
I study the bible right down to the bone.
I’ll be their parson.
Who’ll be chief mourner?
Me, says the wind, I will cry through the grass
The people will pale and go cold when I pass.
I’ll be chief mourner.
Who’ll carry the coffin?
Me, says the sunset, the whole world will weep
To see me lower it into the deep.
I’ll carry the coffin.
Who’ll sing a psalm?
Me, says the tractor, with my gear-grinding glottle
I’ll plough up the stubble and sing through my throttle.
I’ll sing the psalm.
Who’ll toll the bell?
Me, says the robin, my song in October
Will tell the still gardens the leaves are over.
I’ll toll the bell.
from Autumn Notes
III
The chestnut splits its padded cell.
It opens an African eye.
A cabinet-maker, an old master
In the root of things, has done it again.
Its slippery gloss is a swoon,
A peek over the edge into – what?
Down the well-shaft of swirly grain,
Past the generous hands that lifted the May-lamps,
Into the Fairytale of a royal tree
That does not know about conkers
Or the war-games of boys.
Invisible though he is, this plump mare
Bears a tall armoured rider towards
The mirk-forest of rooty earth.
He rides to fight the North corner.
He must win a sunbeam princess
From the cloud castle of the rains.
If he fails, evil faces,
Jaws without eyes, will tear him to pieces.
If he succeeds, and has the luck
To snatch his crown from the dragon
Which resembles a slug
He will reign over our garden
For two hundred years.
IV
When the Elm was full
When it heaved and all its tautnesses drummed
Like a full-sail ship
It was just how I felt.
Waist-deep, I ploughed through the lands,
I leaned at horizons, I bore down on strange harbours.
As the sea is a sail-ship’s root
So the globe was mine.
When the swell lifted the crow from the Elm-top
Both Poles were my home, they rocked me and supplied me.
But now the Elm is still
All its frame bare
Its leaves are a carpet for the cabbages
And it stands engulfed in the peculiar golden light
With which Eternity’s flash
Photographed the sudden cock pheasant –
Engine whinneying, the fire-ball bird clatters up,
Shuddering full-throttle
Its three-tongued tail-tip writhing
And the Elm stands, astonished, wet with light,
And I stand, dazzled to my bones, blinded.
V
Through all the orchard’s boughs
A honey-colour stillness, a hurrying stealth,
A quiet migration of all that can escape now.
Under ripe apples, a snapshot album is smouldering.
With a bare twig,
Glow-dazed, I coax its stubborn feathers.
A gold furred flame. A blue tremor of the air.
The fleshless faces dissolve, one by one,
As they peel open. Blackenings shrivel
To grey flutter. The clump’s core hardens. Everything
Has to be gone through. Every corpuscle
And its gleam. Everything must go.
My heels squeeze wet mulch, and my crouch aches.
A wind-swell lifts through the oak.
Scorch-scathed, crisping, a fleeing bonfire
Hisses in invisible flames – and the flame-roar.
An alarmed blackbird, lean, alert, scolds
The everywhere slow exposure – flees, returns.
VI
Water-wobbling blue-sky-puddled October.
The distance microscopic, the ditches brilliant.
Flowers so low-powered and fractional
They are not in any book.
I walk on high fields feeling the bustle
Of the million earth-folk at their fair.
Fieldfares early, exciting foreigners.
A woodpigeon pressing over, important as a policeman.
A far Bang! Then Bang! and a litter of echoes –
Country pleasures. The farmer’s guest,
In U.S. combat green, will be trampling brambles,
Waving his gun like a paddle.
I thought I’d brushed with a neighbour –
Fox-reek, a warm web, rich as creosote,
Draping the last watery blackberries –
But it was the funeral service.
Two nights he has lain, patient in his position,
Puckered under the first dews of being earth,
Crumpled like dead bracken. His reek will cling
To his remains till spring.
Then I shall steal his fangs, and wear them, and honour them.
A Cranefly in September
She is struggling through grass-mesh – not flying,
Her wide-winged, stiff, weightless basket-work of limbs
Rocking, like an antique wain, a top-heavy ceremonial cart
Across mountain summits
(Not planing over water, dipping her tail)
But blundering with long strides, long reachings, reelings
And ginger-glistening wings
From collision to collision.
Aimless in no particular direction,
Just exerting her last to escape out of the overwhelming
Of whatever it is
, legs, grass,
The garden, the county, the country, the world –
Sometimes she rests long minutes in the grass forest
Like a fairytale hero, only a marvel can help her.
She cannot fathom the mystery of this forest
In which, for instance, this giant watches –
The giant who knows she cannot be helped in any way.
Her jointed bamboo fuselage,
Her lobster shoulders, and her face
Like a pinhead dragon, with its tender moustache,
And the simple colourless church windows of her wings
Will come to an end, in mid-search, quite soon.
Everything about her, every perfected vestment
Is already superfluous.
The monstrous excess of her legs and curly feet
Are a problem beyond her.
The calculus of glucose and chitin inadequate
To plot her through the infinities of the stems.
The frayed apple leaves, the grunting raven, the defunct tractor
Sunk in nettles, wait with their multiplications
Like other galaxies.
The sky’s Northward September procession, the vast soft armistice,
Like an Empire on the move,
Abandons her, tinily embattled
With her cumbering limbs and cumbered brain.
from GAUDETE
Collision with the earth has finally come –
Collision with the earth has finally come –
How far can I fall?
A kelp, adrift
In my feeding substance
A mountain
Rooted in stone of heaven
A sea
Full of moon-ghost, with mangling waters
Dust on my head
Helpless to fit the pieces of water
A needle of many Norths
Ark of blood
Which is the magic baggage old men open
And find useless, at the great moment of need
Error on error
Perfumed
With a ribbon of fury
*
Once I said lightly
Once I said lightly
Even if the worst happens
We can’t fall off the earth.
And again I said
No matter what fire cooks us
We shall be still in the pan together.
And words twice as stupid.
Truly hell heard me.
She fell into the earth
And I was devoured.
*
This is the maneater’s skull.
This is the maneater’s skull.
These brows were the Arc de Triomphe
To the gullet.
The deaf adder of appetite
Coiled under. It spied through these nacelles
Ignorant of death.
And the whole assemblage flowed hungering through the long ways.
Its cry
Quieted the valleys.
It was looking for me.
I was looking for you.
You were looking for me.
*
I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp.
I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp.
Nuptials among prehistoric insects
The tremulous convulsion
The inching hydra strength
Among frilled lizards
Dropping twigs, and acorns, and leaves.
The oak is in bliss
Its roots
Lift arms that are a supplication
Crippled with stigmata
Like the sea-carved cliffs earth lifts
Loaded with dumb, uttering effigies
The oak seems to die and to be dead
In its love-act.
As I lie under it
In a brown leaf nostalgia
An acorn stupor.
*
A primrose petal’s edge
A primrose petal’s edge
Cuts the vision like laser.
And the eye of a hare
Strips the interrogator naked
Of all but some skin of terror –
A starry frost.
Who is this?
She reveals herself, and is veiled.
Somebody
Something grips by the nape
And bangs the brow, as against a wall
Against the untouchable veils
Of the hole which is bottomless
Till blood drips from the mouth.
*
Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed,
Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed,
Waving, weeping, smiling, flushed
It happened
You knocked the world off, like a flower-vase.
It was the third time. And it smashed.
I turned
I bowed
In the morgue I kissed
Your temple’s refrigerated glazed
As rained-on graveyard marble, my
Lips queasy, heart non-existent
And straightened
Into sun-darkness
Like a pillar over Athens
Defunct
In the blinding metropolis of cameras.
*
The swallow – rebuilding –
The swallow – rebuilding –
Collects the lot
From the sow’s wallow.
But what I did only shifted the dust about.
And what crossed my mind
Crossed into outer space.
And for all rumours of me read obituary
What there truly remains of me
Is that very thing – my absence.
So how will you gather me?
I saw my keeper
Sitting in the sun –
If you can catch that, you are the falcon of falcons.
*
The grass-blade is not without
The grass-blade is not without
The loyalty that never was beheld.
And the blackbird
Sleeking from common anything and worm-dirt
Balances a precarious banner
Gold on black, terror and exultation.
The grim badger with armorial mask
Biting spade-steel, teeth and jaw-strake shattered,
Draws that final shuddering battle cry
Out of its backbone.
Me too,
Let me be one of your warriors.
Let your home
Be my home. Your people
My people.
*
I know well
I know well
You are not infallible
I know how your huge your unmanageable
Mass of bronze hair shrank to a twist
As thin as a silk scarf, on your skull,
And how your pony’s eye darkened larger
Holding too lucidly the deep glimpse
After the humane killer
And I had to lift your hand for you
While your chin sank to your chest
With the sheer weariness
Of taking away from everybody