New and Selected Poems

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New and Selected Poems Page 19

by Hughes, Ted


  Stupidly your string dangles into the abysses

  Plastic you are then stone a broken box of letters

  And you cannot utter

  Lies or truth, only the evil one

  Makes you tremble with sudden appetite to see somebody undone

  Blackening electrical connections

  To where death bleaches its crystals

  You swell and you writhe

  You open your Buddha gape

  You screech at the root of the house

  Do not pick up the detonator of the telephone

  A flame from the last day will come lashing out of the telephone

  A dead body will fell out of the telephone

  Do not pick up the telephone

  Reckless Head

  When it comes down to it

  Hair is afraid. Words from within are afraid.

  They sheer off, like a garment,

  Cool, treacherous, no part of you.

  Hands the same, feet, and all blood

  Till nothing is left. Nothing stays

  But what your gaze can carry.

  And maybe you vomit even that, like a too-much poison.

  Then it is

  That the brave hunger of your skull

  Supplants you. It stands where you stood

  And shouts, with a voice you can’t hear,

  For what you can’t take.

  from Prometheus on His Crag

  2

  Prometheus On His Crag

  Relaxes

  In the fact that it has happened.

  The blue wedge through his breastbone, into the rock,

  Unadjusted by vision or prayer – so.

  His eyes, brainless police.

  His brain, simple as an eye.

  Nevertheless, now he exults – like an eagle

  In the broadening vastness, the reddening dawn

  Of the fact

  That cannot be otherwise

  And could not have been otherwise,

  And never can be otherwise.

  And now, for the first time

  relaxing

  helpless

  The Titan feels his strength.

  3

  Prometheus On His Crag

  Pestered by birds roosting and defecating,

  The chattering static of the wind-honed summit,

  The clusterers to heaven, the sun-darkeners –

  Shouted a world’s end shout.

  Then the swallow folded its barbs and fell,

  The dove’s bubble of fluorescence burst,

  Nightingale and cuckoo

  Plunged into padded forests where the woodpecker

  Eyes bleached insane

  Howled laughter into dead holes.

  The birds became what birds have ever since been,

  Scratching, probing, peering for a lost world –

  A world of holy, happy notions shattered

  By the shout

  That brought Prometheus peace

  And woke the vulture.

  9

  Now I know I never shall

  Be let stir.

  The man I fashioned and the god I fashioned

  Dare not let me stir.

  This leakage of cry these face-ripples

  Calculated for me – for mountain water

  Dammed to powerless stillness.

  What secret stays

  Stilled under my stillness?

  Not even I know.

  Only he knows – that bird, that

  Filthy-gleeful emissary and

  The hieroglyph he makes of my entrails

  Is all he tells.

  10

  Prometheus On His Crag

  Began to admire the vulture

  It knew what it was doing

  It went on doing it

  Swallowing not only his liver

  But managing also to digest its guilt

  And hang itself again just under the sun

  Like a heavenly weighing scales

  Balancing the gift of life

  And the cost of the gift

  Without a tremor

  As if both were nothing.

  14

  Prometheus On His Crag

  Sees the wind

  Whip all things to whip all things

  The light whips the water the water whips the light

  And men and women are whipped

  By invisible tongues

  They claw and tear and labour forward

  Or cower cornered under the whipping

  They whip their animals and their engines

  To get them from under the whips

  They lift their faces and look all round

  For their master and tormentor

  When they collapse to curl inwards

  They are like cut plants and blind

  Already beyond pain or fear

  Even the snails are whipped

  The swifts too screaming to outstrip the whip

  Even as if being were a whipping

  Even the earth leaping

  Like a great ungainly top

  19

  Prometheus On His Crag

  Shouts and his words

  Go off in every direction

  Like birds

  Like startled birds

  They cry the way they fly away

  Start up others which follow

  For words are the birds of everything –

  So soon

  Everything is on the wing and gone

  So speech starts hopefully to hold

  Pieces of the wordy earth together

  But pops to space-silence and space-cold

  Emptied by words

  Scattered and gone.

  And the mouth shuts

  Savagely on a mouthful

  Of space-fright which makes the ears ring.

  from FLOWERS AND INSECTS

  A Violet at Lough Aughresberg

  The tide-swell grinds crystal, under cliffs.

  Against the opened furnace of the West –

  A branch of apple-blossom.

  A bullock of sooted bronze

  Cools on an emerald

  That is crumbling to granite embers.

  Milk and blood are frail

  In the shivering wind off the sea.

  Only a purple flower – this amulet

  (Once Prospero’s) – holds it all, a moment,

  In a rinsed globe of light.

  Two Tortoiseshell Butterflies

  Mid-May – after May frosts that killed the Camellias,

  After May snow. After a winter

  Worst in human memory, a freeze

  Killing the hundred-year-old Bay Tree,

  And the ten-year-old Bay Tree – suddenly

  A warm limpness. A blue heaven just veiled

  With the sweatings of earth

  And with the sweatings-out of winter

  Feverish under the piled

  Maywear of the lawn.

  Now two

  Tortoiseshell butterflies, finding themselves alive,

  She drunk with the earth-sweat, and he

  Drunk with her, float in eddies

  Over the Daisies’ quilt. She prefers Dandelions,

  Settling to nod her long spring tongue down

  Into the nestling pleats, into the flower’s

  Thick-folded throat, her wings high-folded.

  He settling behind her, among plain glistenings

  Of the new grass, edging and twitching

  To nearly touch – pulsing and convulsing

  Wings wide open to tight-closed to flat open

  Quivering to keep her so near, almost reaching

  To stroke her abdomen with his antennae –

  Then she’s up and away, and he startlingly

  Swallowlike overtaking, crowding her, heading her

  Off any escape. She turns that

  To her purpose, and veers down

  Onto another Dandelion, attaching

  Her weightless yacht to its cr
est.

  Wobbles to stronger hold, to deeper, sweeter

  Penetration, her wings tight shut above her,

  A sealed book, absorbed in itself.

  She ignores him

  Where he edges to left and to right, flitting

  His wings open, titillating her fur

  With his perfumed draughts, spasming his patterns,

  His tropical, pheasant appeals of folk-art,

  Venturing closer, grass-blade by grass-blade,

  Trembling with inhibition, nearly touching –

  And again she’s away, dithering blackly. He swoops

  On an elastic to settle accurately

  Under her tail again as she clamps to

  This time a Daisy. She’s been chosen,

  Courtship has claimed her. And he’s been conscripted

  To what’s required

  Of the splitting bud, of the talented robin

  That performs piercings

  Out of the still-bare ash,

  The whole air just like him, just breathing

  Over the still-turned-inward earth, the first

  Caresses of the wedding coming, the earth

  Opening its petals, the whole sky

  Opening a flower

  Of unfathomably-patterned pollen.

  Where I Sit Writing My Letter

  Suddenly hooligan baby starlings

  Rain all round me squealing,

  Shouting how it’s tremendous and everybody

  Has to join in and they’re off this minute!

  Probably the weird aniseed corpse-odour

  Of the hawthorn flower’s disturbed them,

  As it disturbs me. Now they all rise

  Flutter-floating, oddly eddying,

  Squalling their dry gargles. Then, mad, they

  Hurl off, on a new wrench of excitement,

  Leaving me out.

  I pluck apple-blossom,

  Cool, blood-lipped, wet open.

  And I’m just quieting thoughts towards my letter

  When they all come storming back,

  Giddy with hoarse hissings and snarls

  And clot the top of an ash sapling –

  Sizzling bodies, snaky black necks craning

  For a fresh thrill – Where next? Where now? Where? – they’re off

  All rushing after it

  Leaving me fevered, and addled.

  They can’t believe their wings.

  Snow-bright clouds boil up.

  Tern

  for Norman Nicholson

  The breaker humps its green glass.

  You see the sunrise through it, the wrack dark in it,

  And over it – the bird of sickles

  Swimming in the wind, with oiled spasm.

  That is the tern. A blood-tipped harpoon

  Hollow-ground in the roller-dazzle,

  Honed in the wind-flash, polished

  By his own expertise –

  Now finished and in use.

  The wings – remote-controlled

  By the eyes

  In his submarine swift shadow

  Feint and tilt in their steel.

  Suddenly a triggered magnet

  Connects him downward, through a thin shatter,

  To a sand-eel. He hoists out, with a twinkling,

  Through some other wave-window.

  His eye is a gimlet.

  Deep in the churned grain of the roller

  His brain is a gimlet. He hangs,

  A blown tatter, a precarious word

  In the mouth of ocean pronouncements.

  His meaning has no margin. He shudders

  To the tips of his tail-tines.

  Momentarily, his lit scrap is a shriek.

  The Honey Bee

  The Honey Bee

  Brilliant as Einstein’s idea

  Can’t be taught a thing.

  Like the sun, she’s on course forever.

  As if nothing else at all existed

  Except her flowers.

  No mountains, no cows, no beaches, no shops.

  Only the rainbow waves of her flowers

  A tremor in emptiness

  A flying carpet of flowers

  – a pattern

  Coming and going – very loosely woven –

  Out of which she works her solutions.

  Furry goblin midgets

  (The beekeeper’s thoughts) clamber stickily

  Over the sun’s face – gloves of shadow.

  But the Honey Bee

  Cannot imagine him, in her brilliance,

  Though he’s a stowaway on her carpet of colour-waves

  And drinks her sums.

  Sunstruck Foxglove

  As you bend to touch

  The gypsy girl

  Who waits for you in the hedge

  Her loose dress falls open.

  Midsummer ditch-sickness!

  Flushed, freckled with earth-fever,

  Swollen lips parted, her eyes closing,

  A lolling armful, and so young! Hot

  Among the insane spiders.

  You glimpse the reptile under-speckle

  Of her sunburned breasts

  And your head swims. You close your eyes.

  Can the foxes talk? Your head throbs.

  Remember the bird’s tolling echo,

  The dripping fern-roots, and the butterfly touches

  That woke you.

  Remember your mother’s

  Long, dark dugs.

  Her silky body a soft oven

  For loaves of pollen.

  Eclipse

  For half an hour, through a magnifying glass,

  I’ve watched the spiders making love undisturbed,

  Ignorant of the voyeur, horribly happy.

  First in the lower left-hand corner of the window

  I saw an average spider stirring. There

  In a midden of carcases, the shambles

  Of insects dried in their colours,

  A trophy den of uniforms, reds, greens,

  Yellow-striped and detached wing-frails, last year’s

  Leavings, parched a winter, scentless – heads,

  Bodices, corsets, leg-shells, a crumble of shards

  In a museum of dust and neglect, there

  In the crevice, concealed by corpses in their old wrappings,

  A spider has come to live. She has spun

  An untidy nearly invisible

  Floss of strands, a few aimless angles

  Camouflaged as the grey dirt of the rain-stains

  On the glass. I saw her moving. Then a smaller,

  Just as ginger, similar all over,

  Only smaller. He had suddenly appeared.

  Upside down, she was doing a gentle

  Sinister dance. All legs clinging

  Except for those leading two, which tapped on the web,

  Trembling it, I thought, like a fly, to attract

  The immobile, upside-down male, near the frame,

  Only an inch from her. He moved away,

  Turning ready to flee, I guessed. Maybe

  Fearful of her intentions and appetites:

  Doubting. But her power, focussing,

  Making no error after the millions of years

  Perfecting this art, turned him round

  At a distance of two inches, and hung him

  Upside down, head under, belly towards her.

  Motionless, except for a faint

  And just-detectable throb of his hair-leg tips.

  She came closer, upside down, gently,

  And enmeshed his forelegs in hers.

  So, I imagined, here is the famous murder.

  I got closer to watch. Something

  Difficult to understand, difficult

  To properly observe was going on.

  Her two hands seemed swollen, like tiny crab-claws.

 

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