New and Selected Poems

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New and Selected Poems Page 16

by Hughes, Ted


  Where the lamb had been born, dreading

  She must have been deceived away from it

  By crafty wolvish humans, then coming again

  Defenceless to the bleat she’s attuned to

  And recognizing her own – a familiar

  Detail in the meaningless shape-mass

  Of human arms, legs, body-clothes – her lamb on the white earth

  Held by those hands. Then vanishing again

  Lifted. Then only the disembodied cry

  Going with the human, while she runs in a circle

  On the leash of the cry. While the wind

  Presses outer space into the grass

  And alarms wrens deep in brambles

  With hissing fragments of stars.

  16 February 1975

  Tractor

  The tractor stands frozen – an agony

  To think of. All night

  Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale,

  A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,

  Pours into its steel.

  At white heat of numbness it stands

  In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness.

  It defies flesh and won’t start.

  Hands are like wounds already

  Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable

  As if the toe-nails were all just torn off.

  I stare at it in hatred. Beyond it

  The copse hisses – capitulates miserably

  In the fleeing, failing light. Starlings,

  A dirtier sleetier snow, blow smokily, unendingly, over

  Towards plantations eastward.

  All the time the tractor is sinking

  Through the degrees, deepening

  Into its hell of ice.

  The starter lever

  Cracks its action, like a snapping knuckle.

  The battery is alive – but like a lamb

  Trying to nudge its solid-frozen mother –

  While the seat claims my buttock-bones, bites

  With the space-cold of earth, which it has joined

  In one solid lump.

  I squirt commercial sure-fire

  Down the black throat – it just coughs.

  It ridicules me – a trap of iron stupidity

  I’ve stepped into. I drive the battery

  As if I were hammering and hammering

  The frozen arrangement to pieces with a hammer

  And it jabbers laughing pain-crying mockingly

  Into happy life.

  And stands

  Shuddering itself full of heat, seeming to enlarge slowly

  Like a demon demonstrating

  A more-than-usually-complete materialization –

  Suddenly it jerks from its solidarity

  With the concrete, and lurches towards a stanchion

  Bursting with superhuman well-being and abandon

  Shouting Where Where?

  Worse iron is waiting. Power-lift kneels,

  Levers awake imprisoned deadweight,

  Shackle-pins bedded in cast-iron cow-shit.

  The blind and vibrating condemned obedience

  Of iron to the cruelty of iron,

  Wheels screeched out of their night-locks –

  Fingers

  Among the tormented

  Tonnage and burning of iron

  Eyes

  Weeping in the wind of chloroform

  And the tractor, streaming with sweat,

  Raging and trembling and rejoicing.

  31 January 1976

  Roe-Deer

  In the dawn-dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year

  Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.

  They had happened into my dimension

  The moment I was arriving just there.

  They planted their two or three years of secret deerhood

  Clear on my snow-screen vision of the abnormal

  And hesitated in the all-way disintegration

  And stared at me. And so for some lasting seconds

  I could think the deer were waiting for me

  To remember the password and sign

  That the curtain had blown aside for a moment

  And there where the trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road

  The deer had come for me.

  Then they ducked through the hedge, and upright they rode their legs

  Away downhill over a snow-lonely field

  Towards tree dark – finally

  Seeming to eddy and glide and fly away up

  Into the boil of big flakes.

  The snow took them and soon their nearby hoofprints as well

  Revising its dawn inspiration

  Back to the ordinary.

  13 February 1973

  Sketching a Thatcher

  Bird-bones is on the roof. Seventy-eight

  And still a ladder squirrel,

  Three or four nitches at a time, up forty rungs,

  Then crabbing out across the traverse,

  Cock-crows of insulting banter, liberated

  Into his old age, like a royal fool

  But still tortured with energy. Thatching

  Must be the sinless job. Weathered

  Like a weathercock, face bright as a ploughshare,

  Skinny forearms of steely cable, batting

  The reeds flush, crawling, cliff-hanging,

  Lizard-silk of his lizard-skinny hands,

  Hands never still, twist of body never still –

  Bounds in for a cup of tea, ‘Caught you all asleep!’

  Markets all the gossip – cynical old goblin

  Cackling with wicked joy. Bounds out –

  Trips and goes full length, bounces back upright,

  ‘Haven’t got the weight to get hurt with!’ Cheers

  Every departure – ‘Off for a drink?’ and ‘Off

  To see his fancy woman again!’ – leans from the sky,

  Sun-burned-out pale eyes, eyes bleached

  As old thatch, in the worn tool of his face,

  In his haggard pants and his tired-out shirt –

  They can’t keep up with him. He just can’t

  Stop working. ‘I don’t want the money!’ He’d

  Prefer a few years. ‘Have to sell the house to pay me!’

  Alertness built into the bird-stare,

  The hook of his nose, bill-hook of his face.

  Suns have worn him, like an old sun-tool

  Of the day-making, an old shoe-tongue

  Of the travelling weathers, the hand-palm, ageless,

  Of all winds on all roofs. He lams the roof

  And the house quakes. Was everybody

  Once like him? He’s squirmed through

  Some tight cranny of natural selection.

  The nut-stick yealm-twisťs got into his soul,

  He didn’t break. He’s proof

  As his crusty roofs. He ladder-dances

  His blood light as spirit. His muscles

  Must be clean as horn.

  And the whole house

  Is more pleased with itself, him on it,

  Cresting it, and grooming it, and slapping it

  Than if an eagle rested there. Sitting

  Drinking his tea, he looks like a tatty old eagle,

  And his yelping laugh of derision

  Is just like a tatty old eagle’s.

  Ravens

  As we came through the gate to look at the few new lambs

  On the skyline of lawn smoothness,

  A raven bundled itself into air from midfield

  And slid away under hard glistenings, low and guilty.

  Sheep nibbling, kneeling to nibble the reluctant nibbled grass.

  Sheep staring, their jaws pausing to think, then chewing again,

  Then pausing. Over there a new lamb

  Just getting up, bumping its mother’s nose

  As she nibbles the sugar coating off it

  While the tattered banners of her tri
umph swing and drip from her rear-end.

  She sneezes and a glim of water flashes from her rear-end.

  She sneezes again and again, till she’s emptied.

  She carries on investigating her new present and seeing how it works.

  Over here is something else. But you are still interested

  In that new one, and its new spark of voice,

  And its tininess.

  Now over here, where the raven was,

  Is what interests you next. Born dead,

  Twisted like a scarf, a lamb of an hour or two,

  Its insides, the various jellies and crimsons and transparencies

  And threads and tissues pulled out

  In straight lines, like tent ropes

  From its upward belly opened like a lamb-wool slipper,

  The fine anatomy of silvery ribs on display and the cavity,

  The head also emptied through the eye-sockets,

  The woolly limbs swathed in birth-yolk and impossible

  To tell now which in all this field of quietly nibbling sheep

  Was its mother. I explain

  That it died being born. We should have been here, to help it.

  So it died being born. ‘And did it cry?’ you cry.

  I pick up the dangling greasy weight by the hooves soft as dogs’ pads

  That had trodden only womb-water

  And its raven-drawn strings dangle and trail,

  Its loose head joggles, and ‘Did it cry?’ you cry again.

  Its two-fingered feet splay in their skin between the pressures

  Of my fingers and thumb. And there is another,

  Just born, all black, splaying its tripod, inching its new points

  Towards its mother, and testing the note

  It finds in its mouth. But you have eyes now

  Only for the tattered bundle of throwaway lamb.

  ‘Did it cry?’ you keep asking, in a three-year-old field-wide

  Piercing persistence. ‘Oh yes’ I say ‘it cried.’

  Though this one was lucky insofar

  As it made the attempt into a warm wind

  And its first day of death was blue and warm

  The magpies gone quiet with domestic happiness

  And skylarks not worrying about anything

  And the blackthorn budding confidently

  And the skyline of hills, after millions of hard years,

  Sitting soft.

  15 April 1974

  February 17th

  A lamb could not get born. Ice wind

  Out of a downpour dishclout sunrise. The mother

  Lay on the mudded slope. Harried, she got up

  And the blackish lump bobbed at her back-end

  Under her tail. After some hard galloping,

  Some manoeuvring, much flapping of the backward

  Lump head of the lamb looking out,

  I caught her with a rope. Laid her, head uphill

  And examined the lamb. A blood-ball swollen

  Tight in its black felt, its mouth gap

  Squashed crooked, tongue stuck out, black-purple,

  Strangled by its mother. I felt inside,

  Past the noose of mother-flesh, into the slippery

  Muscled tunnel, fingering for a hoof,

  Right back to the port-hole of the pelvis.

  But there was no hoof. He had stuck his head out too early

  And his feet could not follow. He should have

  Felt his way, tip-toe, his toes

  Tucked up under his nose

  For a safe landing. So I kneeled wrestling

  With her groans. No hand could squeeze past

  The lamb’s neck into her interior

  To hook a knee. I roped that baby head

  And hauled till she cried out and tried

  To get up and I saw it was useless. I went

  Two miles for the injection and a razor.

  Sliced the lamb’s throat-strings, levered with a knife

  Between the vertebrae and brought the head off

  To stare at its mother, its pipes sitting in the mud

  With all earth for a body. Then pushed

  The neck-stump right back in, and as I pushed

  She pushed. She pushed crying and I pushed gasping.

  And the strength

  Of the birth push and the push of my thumb

  Against that wobbly vertebra were deadlock,

  A to-fro futility. Till I forced

  A hand past and got a knee. Then like

  Pulling myself to the ceiling with one finger

  Hooked in a loop, timing my effort

  To her birth push groans, I pulled against

  The corpse that would not come. Till it came.

  And after it the long, sudden, yolk-yellow

  Parcel of life

  In a smoking slither of oils and soups and syrups –

  And the body lay born, beside the hacked-off head.

  17 February 1974

  Birth of Rainbow

  This morning blue vast clarity of March sky

  But a blustery violence of air, and a soaked overnight

  Newpainted look to the world. The wind coming

  Off the snowed moor in the South, razorish

  Heavy-bladed and head-cutting, off snow-powdered ridges.

  Flooded ruts shook. Hoof-puddles flashed. A daisy

  Mud-plastered unmixed its head from the mud.

  The black and white cow, on the highest crest of the round ridge,

  Stood under the end of a rainbow.

  Head down licking something, full in the painful wind

  That the pouring haze of the rainbow ignored.

  She was licking her gawky black calf

  Collapsed wet-fresh from the womb, blinking his eyes

  In the low morning dazzling washed sun.

  Black, wet as a collie from a river, as she licked him,

  Finding his smells, learning his particularity.

  A flag of bloody tissue hung from her back-end

  Spreading and shining, pink-fleshed and raw, it flapped and coiled

  In the unsparing wind. She positioned herself, uneasy

  As we approached, nervous small footwork

  On the hoof-ploughed drowned sod of the ruined field.

  She made uneasy low noises, and her calf too

  With his staring whites, mooed the full clear calf-note

  Pure as woodwind, and tried to get up,

  Tried to get his cantilever front legs

  In operation, lifted his shoulders, hoisted to his knees,

  Then hoisted his back-end and lurched forward

  On his knees and crumpling ankles, sliding in the mud

  And collapsing plastered. She went on licking him.

  She started eating the banner of thin raw flesh that

  Spinnakered from her rear. We left her to it.

  Blobbed antiseptic on to the sodden blood-dangle

  Of his muddy birth-cord, and left her

  Inspecting the new smell. The whole South West

  Was black as nightfall.

  Trailing squall-smokes hung over the moor leaning

  And whitening towards us, then the world blurred

  And disappeared in forty-five degree hail

  And a gate-jerking blast. We got to cover.

  Left to God the calf and his mother.

  19 March 1974

  Coming Down Through Somerset

  I flash-glimpsed in the headlights – the high moment

  Of driving through England – a killed badger

  Sprawled with helpless legs. Yet again

  Manoeuvred lane-ends, retracked, waited

  Out of decency for headlights to die,

  Lifted by one warm hindleg in the world-night

  A slain badger. August dust-heat. Beautiful,

  Beautiful, warm, secret beast. Bedded him

  Passenger, bleeding from the nose. Brought him close

  Into my life. Now he lies
on the beam

  Torn from a great building. Beam waiting two years

  To be built into new building. Summer coat

  Not worth skinning off him. His skeleton – for the future.

  Fangs, handsome concealed. Flies, drumming,

  Bejewel his transit. Heatwave ushers him hourly

  Towards his underworlds. A grim day of flies

  And sunbathing. Get rid of that badger.

  A night of shrunk rivers, glowing pastures,

  Sea-trout shouldering up through trickles. Then the sun again

  Waking like a torn-out eye. How strangely

  He stays on into the dawn – how quiet

  The dark bear-claws, the long frost-tipped guard hairs!

  Get rid of that badger today.

  And already the flies.

  More passionate, bringing their friends. I don’t want

  To bury and waste him. Or skin him (it is too late).

  Or hack off his head and boil it

  To liberate his masterpiece skull. I want him

  To stay as he is. Sooty gloss-throated,

  With his perfect face. Paws so tired,

  Power-body relegated. I want him

  To stop time. His strength staying, bulky,

  Blocking time. His rankness, his bristling wildness,

  His thrillingly painted face.

  A badger on my moment of life.

  Not years ago, like the others, but now.

  I stand

  Watching his stillness, like an iron nail

  Driven, flush to the head,

  Into a yew post. Something has to stay.

  8 August 1975

  The Day He Died

 

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