by Hughes, Ted
Was the silkiest day of the young year,
The first reconnaissance of the real spring,
The first confidence of the sun.
That was yesterday. Last night, frost.
And as hard as any of all winter.
Mars and Saturn and the Moon dangling in a bunch
On the hard, littered sky.
Today is Valentine’s day.
Earth toast-crisp. The snowdrops battered.
Thrushes spluttering. Pigeons gingerly
Rubbing their voices together, in stinging cold.
Crows creaking, and clumsily
Cracking loose.
The bright fields look dazed.
Their expression is changed.
They have been somewhere awful
And come back without him.
The trustful cattle, with frost on their backs,
Waiting for hay, waiting for warmth,
Stand in a new emptiness.
From now on the land
Will have to manage without him.
But it hesitates, in this slow realization of light,
Childlike, too naked, in a frail sun,
With roots cut
And a great blank in its memory.
A Memory
Your bony white bowed back, in a singlet,
Powerful as a horse,
Bowed over an upturned sheep
Shearing under the East chill through-door draught
In the cave-dark barn, sweating and freezing –
Flame-crimson face, drum-guttural African curses
As you bundled the sheep
Like tying some oversize, overweight, spilling bale
Through its adjustments of position
The attached cigarette, bent at its glow
Preserving its pride of ash
Through all your suddenly savage, suddenly gentle
Masterings of the animal
You were like a collier, a face-worker
In a dark hole of obstacle
Heedless of your own surfaces
Inching by main strength into the solid hour,
Bald, arch-wrinkled, weathered dome bowed
Over your cigarette comfort
Till you stretched erect through a groan
Letting a peeled sheep leap free
Then nipped the bud of stub from your lips
And with glove-huge, grease-glistening carefulness
Lit another at it
from EARTH-NUMB
Earth-Numb
Dawn – a smouldering fume of dry frost.
Sky-edge of red-hot iron.
Daffodils motionless – some fizzled out.
The birds – earth-brim simmering.
Sycamore buds unsticking – the leaf out-crumpling, purplish.
The pheasant cock’s glare-cry. Jupiter ruffling softly.
Hunting salmon. And hunted
And haunted by apparitions from tombs
Under the smoothing tons of dead element
In the river’s black canyons.
The lure is a prayer. And my searching –
Like the slow sun.
A prayer, like a flower opening.
A surgeon operating
On an open heart, with needles –
And bang! the river grabs at me
A mouth-flash, an electrocuting malice
Like a trap, trying to rip life off me –
And the river stiffens alive,
The black hole thumps, the whole river hauls
And I have one.
A piling voltage hums, jamming me stiff –
Something terrified and terrifying
Gleam-surges to and fro through me
From the river to the sky, from the sky into the river
Uprooting dark bedrock, shatters it in air,
Cartwheels across me, slices thudding through me
As if I were the current –
Till the fright flows all one way down the line
And a ghost grows solid, a hoverer,
A lizard green slither, banner heavy –
Then the wagging stone pebble head
Trying to think on shallows –
Then the steel spectre of purples
From the forge of water
Gagging on emptiness
As the eyes of incredulity
Fix their death-exposure of the celandine and the cloud.
A Motorbike
We had a motorbike all through the war
In an outhouse – thunder, flight, disruption
Cramped in rust, under washing, abashed, outclassed
By the Brens, the Bombs, the Bazookas elsewhere.
The war ended, the explosions stopped.
The men surrendered their weapons
And hung around limply.
Peace took them all prisoner.
They were herded into their home towns.
A horrible privation began
Of working a life up out of the avenues
And the holiday resorts and the dance-halls.
Then the morning bus was as bad as any labour truck,
The foreman, the boss, as bad as the S.S.
And the ends of the street and the bends of the road
And the shallowness of the shops and the shallowness of the beer
And the sameness of the next town
Were as bad as electrified barbed wire
The shrunk-back war ached in their testicles
And England dwindled to the size of a dog-track.
So there came this quiet young man
And he bought our motorbike for twelve pounds.
And he got it going, with difficulty.
He kicked it into life – it erupted
Out of the six-year sleep, and he was delighted.
A week later, astride it, before dawn,
A misty frosty morning,
He escaped
Into a telegraph pole
On the long straight west of Swinton.
Deaf School
The deaf children were monkey-nimble, fish-tremulous and sudden.
Their faces were alert and simple
Like faces of little animals, small night lemurs caught in the flash-light.
They lacked a dimension,
They lacked a subtle wavering aura of sound and responses to sound.
The whole body was removed
From the vibration of air, they lived through the eyes,
The clear simple look, the instant full attention.
Their selves were not woven into a voice
Which was woven into a face
Hearing itself, its own public and audience,
An apparition in camouflage, an assertion in doubt –
Their selves were hidden, and their faces looked out of hiding.
What they spoke with was a machine,
A manipulation of fingers, a control-panel of gestures
Out there in the alien space
Separated from them –
Their unused faces were simple lenses of watchfulness
Simple pools of earnest watchfulness
Their bodies were like their hands
Nimbler than bodies, like the hammers of a piano,
A puppet agility, a simple mechanical action
A blankness of hieroglyph
A stylized lettering
Spelling out approximate signals
While the self looked through, out of the face of simple concealment
A face not merely deaf, a face in darkness, a face unaware,
A face that was simply the front skin of the self concealed and separate
Life is Trying to be Life
Death also is trying to be life.
Death is in the sperm like the ancient mariner
With his horrible tale.
Death mews in the blankets – is it a kitten?
It plays with dolls but cannot get interested.
It stares at the windowlight and cannot make it o
ut.
It wears baby clothes and is patient.
It learns to talk, watching the others’ mouths.
It laughs and shouts and listens to itself numbly.
It stares at people’s faces
And sees their skin like a strange moon, and stares at the grass
In its position just as yesterday.
And stares at its fingers and hears: ‘Look at that child!’
Death is a changeling
Tortured by daisy chains and Sunday bells
It is dragged about like a broken doll
By little girls playing at mothers and funerals.
Death only wants to be life. It cannot quite manage.
Weeping it is weeping to be life
As for a mother it cannot remember.
Death and Death and Death, it whispers
With eyes closed, trying to feel life
Like the shout in joy
Like the glare in lightning
That empties the lonely oak.
And that is the death
In the antlers of the Irish Elk. It is the death
In the cave-wife’s needle of bone. Yet it still is not death –
Or in the shark’s fang which is a monument
Of its lament
On a headland of life.
Speech out of Shadow
Not your eyes, but what they disguise
Not your skin, with just that texture and light
But what uses it as cosmetic
Not your nose – to be or not to be beautiful
But what it is the spy for
Not your mouth, not your lips, not their adjustments
But the maker of the digestive tract
Not your breasts
Because they are diversion and deferment
Not your sexual parts, your proffered rewards
Which are in the nature of a flower
Technically treacherous
Not the webs of your voice, your poise, your tempo
Your drug of a million micro-signals
But the purpose.
The unearthly stone in the sun.
The glare
Of the falcon, behind its hood
Tamed now
To its own mystifications
And the fingerings of men.
from Seven Dungeon Songs
I
Dead, she became space-earth
Broken to pieces.
Plants nursed her death, unearthed her goodness.
But her murderer, mad-innocent
Sucked at her offspring, reckless of blood,
Consecrating them in fire, muttering
It is good to be God.
He used familiar hands
Incriminating many,
And he borrowed mouths, leaving names
Being himself nothing
But a tiger’s sigh, a wolf’s music
A song on a lonely road
What it is
Risen out of mud, fallen from space
That stares through a face.
II
Face was necessary – I found face.
Hands – I found hands.
I found shoulders, I found legs
I found all bits and pieces.
We were me, and lay quiet.
I got us all of a piece, and we lay quiet.
We just lay.
Sunlight had prepared a wide place
And we lay there.
Air nursed us.
We recuperated.
While maggots blackened to seeds, and blood warmed its stone.
Only still something
Stared at me and screamed
Stood over me, black across the sun,
And mourned me, and would not help me get up.
III
The earth locked out the light,
Blocking the light, like a door locked.
But a crack of light
Between sky and earth, was enough.
He called it, Earth’s halo.
And the lizard spread of his fingers
Reached for it.
He called it, The leakage of air
Into this suffocation of earth.
And the gills of his rib-cage
Gulped to get more of it.
His lips pressed to its coolness
Like an eye to a crack.
He lay like the already-dead
Tasting the tears
Of the wind-shaken and weeping
Tree of light.
IV
I walk
Unwind with activity of legs
The tangled ball
Which was once the orderly circuit of my body
Some night in the womb
All my veins and capillaries were taken out
By some evil will
And knotted in a great ball and stuffed back inside me
Now I rush to and fro
I try to attach a raw broken end
To some steady place, then back away
I look for people with clever fingers
Who might undo me
The horrible ball just comes
People’s fingers snarl it worse
I hurl myself
To jerk out the knot
Or snap it
And come up short
So dangle and dance
The dance of unbeing
V
If mouth could open its cliff
If ear could unfold from this strata
If eyes could split their rock and peep out finally
If hands of mountain-fold
Could get a proper purchase
If feet of fossil could lift
If head of lakewater and weather
If body of horizon
If whole body and balancing head
If skin of grass could take messages
And do its job properly
If spine of earth-foetus
Could unfurl
If man-shadow out there moved to my moves
The speech that works air
Might speak me
Tiger-Psalm
The tiger kills hungry. The machine-guns
Talk, talk, talk across their Acropolis.
The tiger
Kills expertly, with anaesthetic hand.
The machine-guns
Carry on arguing in heaven
Where numbers have no ears, where there is no blood.
The tiger
Kills frugally, after close inspection of the map.
The machine-guns shake their heads,
They go on chattering statistics.
The tiger kills by thunderbolt:
God of her own salvation.
The machine-guns
Proclaim the Absolute, according to morse,
In a code of bangs and holes that makes men frown.
The tiger
Kills with beautiful colours in her face,
Like a flower painted on a banner.
The machine-guns
Are not interested.
They laugh. They are not interested. They speak and
Their tongues burn soul-blue, haloed with ashes,
Puncturing the illusion.
The tiger
Kills and licks her victim all over carefully.
The machine-guns
Leave a crust of blood hanging on the nails
In an orchard of scrap-iron.
The tiger
Kills
With the strength of five tigers, kills exalted.
The machine-guns
Permit themselves a snigger. They eliminate the error
With a to-fro dialectic
And the point proved stop speaking.
The tiger
Kills like the fall of a cliff, one-sinewed with the earth,
Himalayas under eyelid, Ganges under fur –
Does not kill.
Does not kill. The tiger blesses with a fang.
The tiger does not kill but opens a path
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