New and Selected Poems

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New and Selected Poems Page 18

by Hughes, Ted


  Neither of Life nor of Death:

  The tiger within the tiger:

  The Tiger of the Earth.

  O Tiger!

  O Sister of the Viper!

  O Beast in Blossom!

  Orts

  In the M5 Restaurant

  Our sad coats assemble at the counter

  The tyre face pasty

  The neon of plaster flesh

  With little inexplicable eyes

  Holding a dish with two buns

  Symbolic food

  Eaten by symbolic faces

  Symbolic eating movements

  The road drumming in the wall, drumming in the head

  The road going nowhere and everywhere

  My freedom evidently

  Is to feed my life

  Into a carburettor

  Petroleum has burned away all

  But a still-throbbing column

  Of carbon-monoxide and lead.

  I attempt a firmer embodiment

  With illusory coffee

  And a gluey quasi-pie.

  That Star

  That star

  Will blow your hand off

  That star

  Will scramble your brains and your nerves

  That star

  Will frazzle your skin off

  That star

  Will turn everybody yellow and stinking

  That star

  Will scorch everything dead fumed to its blueprint

  That star

  Will make the earth melt

  That star … and so on.

  And they surround us. And far into infinity.

  These are the armies of the night.

  There is no escape.

  Not one of them is good, or friendly, or corruptible.

  One chance remains: KEEP ON DIGGING THAT HOLE

  KEEP ON DIGGING AWAY AT THAT HOLE

  Poets

  Crowd the horizons, poised, wings

  Lifted in elation, vast

  Armadas of illusion

  Waiting for a puff.

  Or they dawn, singing birds – all

  Mating calls

  Battle bluff

  And crazy feathers.

  Or disappear

  Into the grass-blade atom – one flare

  Annihilating the world

  To the big-eyed, simple light that fled

  When the first word lumped out of the flint.

  Grosse Fuge

  Rouses in its cave

  Under faint peaks of light

  Flares abrupt at the sun’s edge, dipping again

  This side of the disc

  Now coming low out of the glare

  Coming under skylines

  Under seas, under liquid corn

  Snaking among poppies

  Soft arrival pressing the roof of ghost

  Creaking of old foundations

  The ear cracking like a dry twig

  Heavy craving weight

  Of eyes on your nape

  Unadjusted to world

  Huge inching through hair, through veins

  Tightening stealth of blood

  Breath in the tunnel of spine

  And the maneater

  Opens its mouth and the music

  Sinks its claw

  Into your skull, a single note

  Picks you up by the small of the back, weightless

  Vaults into space, dangling your limbs

  Devours you leisurely among litter of stars

  Digests you into its horrible joy

  This is the tiger of heaven

  Hoists people out of their clothes

  Leaves its dark track across the octaves

  Children

  new to the blood

  Whose hot push has surpassed

  The sabretooth

  Never doubt their rights of conquest.

  Their voices, under the leaf-dazzle

  An occupying army

  A foreign tongue

  Loud in their idleness and power.

  Figures in the flaming of hell

  A joy beyond good and evil

  Breaking their toys.

  Soon they’ll sleep where they struck.

  They’ll leave behind

  A man like a licked skull

  A gravestone woman, their playthings.

  Prospero and Sycorax

  She knows, like Ophelia,

  The task has swallowed him.

  She knows, like George’s dragon,

  Her screams have closed his helmet.

  She knows, like Jocasta,

  It is over.

  He prefers

  Blindness.

  She knows, like Cordelia,

  He is not himself now,

  And what speaks through him must be discounted –

  Though it will be the end of them both.

  She knows, like God,

  He has found

  Something

  Easier to live with –

  His death, and her death.

  The Beacon

  The Stone

  Has not yet been cut.

  It is too heavy already

  For consideration. Its edges

  Are so super-real, already,

  And at this distance,

  They cut real cuts in the unreal

  Stuff of just thinking. So I leave it.

  Somewhere it is.

  Soon it will come.

  I shall not carry it. With horrible life

  It will transport its face, with sure strength,

  To sit over mine, wherever I look,

  Instead of hers.

  It will even have across its brow

  Her name.

  Somewhere it is coming to the end

  Of its million million years –

  Which have worn her out.

  It is coming to the beginning

  Of her million million million years

  Which will wear out it.

  Because she will never move now

  Till it is worn out.

  She will not move now

  Till everything is worn out.

  TV Off

  He hears lithe trees and last leaves swatting the glass –

  Staring into flames, through the grille of age

  Like a late fish, face clothed with fungus,

  Keeping its mouth upstream.

  Remorseful for what nobody any longer suffers

  Nostalgic for what he would not give twopence to see back

  Hopeful for what he will not miss when it fails

  Who lay a night and a day and a night and a day

  Golden-haired, while his friend beside him

  Attending a small hole in his brow

  Ripened black.

  A God

  Pain was pulled down over his eyes like a fool’s hat.

  They pressed electrodes of pain through the parietals.

  He was helpless as a lamb

  Which cannot be born

  Whose head hangs under its mother’s anus.

  Pain was stabbed through his palm, at the crutch of the M,

  Made of iron, from earth’s core.

  From that pain he hung,

  As if he were being weighed.

  The cleverness of his fingers availed him

  As the bullock’s hooves, in the offal bin,

  Avail the severed head

  Hanging from its galvanized hook.

  Pain was hooked through his foot.

  From that pain, too, he hung

  As on display.

  His patience had meaning only for him

  Like the sanguine upside-down grin

  Of a hanging half-pig.

  There, hanging,

  He accepted the pain beneath his ribs

  Because he could no more escape it

  Than the poulterer’s hanging hare,

  Hidden behind eyes growing concave,

  Can escape

  What has replaced its belly.

  He could
not understand what had happened.

  Or what he had become.

  UNCOLLECTED

  Remembering Teheran

  How it hung

  In the electrical loom

  Of the Himalayas – I remember

  The spectre of a rose.

  All day the flag on the military camp flowed South.

  In the Shah’s Evin Motel

  The Manageress – a thunderhead Atossa –

  Wept on her bed

  Or struck awe. Tragic Persian

  Quaked her bosom – precarious balloons of water –

  But still nothing worked.

  Everything hung on a prayer, in the hanging dust.

  With a splash of keys

  She ripped through the lock, filled my room, sulphurous,

  With plumbers –

  Twelve-year-olds, kneeling to fathom

  A pipeless tap sunk in a blank block wall.

  *

  I had a funny moment

  Beside the dried-up river of boulders. A huddle of families

  Were piling mulberries into wide bowls, under limp, dusty trees.

  All the big males, in their white shirts,

  Drifted out towards me, hands hanging –

  I could see the bad connections sparking inside their heads

  As I picked my way among thistles

  Between dead-drop wells – open man-holes

  Parched as snake-dens –

  Later, three stoned-looking Mercedes,

  Splitting with arms and faces, surfed past me

  Warily over a bumpy sea of talc,

  The uncials on their number-plates like fragments of scorpions.

  *

  I imagined all Persia

  As a sacred scroll, humbled to powder

  By the God-conducting script on it –

  The lightning serifs of Zoroaster –

  The primal cursive.

  *

  Goats, in charred rags,

  Eyes and skulls

  Adapted to sunstroke, woke me

  Sunbathing among the moon-clinker.

  When one of them slowly straightened into a goat-herd

  I knew I was in the wrong century

  And wrongly dressed.

  All around me stood

  The tense, abnormal thistles, desert fanatics;

  Politicos, in their zinc-blue combat issue;

  Three-dimensional crystal theorems

  For an optimum impaling of the given air;

  Arsenals of pragmatic ideas –

  I retreated to the motel terrace, to loll there

  And watch the officers half a mile away, exercising their obsolete horses.

  A bleaching sun, cobalt-cored,

  Played with the magnetic field of the mountains.

  And prehistoric giant ants, outriders, long-shadowed,

  Cast in radiation-proof metals,

  Galloped through the land, lightly and unhindered,

  Stormed my coffee-saucer, drinking the stain –

  At sunset

  The army flag rested for a few minutes

  Then began to flow North.

  *

  I found a living thread of water

  Dangling from a pipe. A snake-tongue flicker.

  An incognito whisper.

  It must have leaked and smuggled itself, somehow,

  From the high Mother of Snows, halfway up the sky.

  It wriggled these last inches to ease

  A garden of pot-pourri, in a tindery shade of peach-boughs,

  And played there, a fuse crackling softly –

  As the whole city

  Sank in the muffled drumming

  Of a subterranean furnace.

  And over it

  The desert’s bloom of dust, the petroleum smog, the transistor commotion

  Thickened a pinky-purple thunderlight.

  The pollen of the thousands of years of voices

  Murmurous, radio-active, rubbing to flash-point –

  *

  Scintillating through the migraine

  The world-authority on Islamic Art

  Sipped at a spoonful of yoghurt

  And smiling at our smiles described his dancing

  Among self-beheaded dancers who went on dancing with their heads

  (But only God, he said, can create a language).

  Journalists proffered, on platters of silence,

  Split noses, and sliced-off ears and lips –

  *

  Chastened, I listened. Then for the belly-dancer

  (Who would not dance on my table, would not kiss me

  Through her veil, spoke to me only

  Through the mouth

  Of her demon-mask

  Warrior drummer)

  I composed a bouquet – a tropic, effulgent

  Puff of publicity, in the style of Attar,

  And saw myself translated by the drummer

  Into her liquid

  Lashing shadow, those arabesques of God,

  That thorny fount.

  Bones

  Bones is a crazy pony.

  Moon-white – star-mad.

  All skull and skeleton.

  Her hooves pound. The sleeper awakes with a cry.

  Who has broken her in?

  Who has mounted her and come back

  Or kept her?

  She lifts under them, the snaking crest of a bullwhip.

  Hero by hero they go –

  Grimly get astride

  And their hair lifts.

  She laughs, smelling the battle – their cry comes back.

  Who can live her life?

  Every effort to hold her or turn her falls off her

  Like rotten harness.

  Their smashed faces come back, the wallets and the watches.

  And this is the stunted foal of the earth –

  She that kicks the cot

  To flinders and is off.

  Do not Pick up the Telephone

  That plastic Buddha jars out a Karate screech

  Before the soft words with their spores

  The cosmetic breath of the gravestone

  Death invented the phone it looks like the altar of death

  Do not worship the telephone

  It drags its worshippers into actual graves

  With a variety of devices, through a variety of disguised voices

  Sit godless when you hear the religious wail of the telephone

  Do not think your house is a hide-out it is a telephone

  Do not think you walk your own road, you walk down a telephone

  Do not think you sleep in the hand of God you sleep in the mouthpiece of a telephone

  Do not think your future is yours it waits upon a telephone

  Do not think your thoughts are your own thoughts they are the toys of the telephone

  Do not think these days are days they are the sacrificial priests of the telephone

  The secret police of the telephone

  O phone get out of my house

  You are a bad god

  Go and whisper on some other pillow

  Do not lift your snake head in my house

  Do not bite any more beautiful people

  You plastic crab

  Why is your oracle always the same in the end?

  What rake-off for you from the cemeteries?

  Your silences are as bad

  When you are needed, dumb with the malice of the clairvoyant insane

  The stars whisper together in your breathing

  World’s emptiness oceans in your mouthpiece

 

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