by Hughes, Ted
Those two nippers she folds up under her nose
To bring things to her pincers, they were moving,
Glistening. He convulsed now and again.
Her abdomen pod twitched – spasmed slightly
Little mean ecstasies. Was she pulling him to pieces?
Something much more delicate, a much more
Delicate agreement was in process.
Under his abdomen he had a nozzle –
Presumably his lumpy little cock,
Just as ginger as the rest of him, a teat,
An infinitesimal nipple. Probably
Under a microscope it is tooled and designed
Like some micro-device in a space rocket.
To me it looked crude and simple. Far from simple,
Though, were her palps, her boxing-glove nippers –
They were like the mechanical hands
That manipulate radio-active matter
On the other side of safe screen glass.
But hideously dexterous. She reached out one,
I cannot imagine how she saw to do it,
And brought monkey-fingers from under her crab-nippers
And grasped his nipple cock. As soon as she had it
A bubble of glisteny clear glue
Ballooned up from her nipper, the size of her head,
Then shrank back, and as it shrank back
She wrenched her grip off his cock
As if it had locked there, and doubled her fistful
Of shining wet to her jaw-pincers
And rubbed her mouth and underskin with it,
Six, seven stiff rubs, while her abdomen twitched,
Her tail-tip flirted, and he hung passive.
Then out came her other clutcher, on its elbow,
And grabbed his bud, and the gloy-thick bubble
Swelled above her claws, a red spur flicked
Inside it, and he jerked in his ropes.
Then the bubble shrank and she twisted it off
And brought it back to stuff her face-place
With whatever it was. Very still,
Except for those stealths and those twitchings
They hung upside down, face to face,
Holding forelegs. It was still obscure
Just what was going on. It went on.
Half an hour. Finally she backed off.
He hung like a dead spider, just as he’d hung
All the time she’d dealt with him.
I thought it must be over. So now, I thought,
I see the murder. I could imagine now
If he stirred she’d think he was a fly,
And she’d be feeling ravenous. And so far
She’d shown small excitement about him
With all that concentration on his attachment,
As if he upside down were just the table
Holding the delicacy. She moved off.
Aimlessly awhile she moved round,
Till I realized she was concentrating
On a V of dusty white, a delta
Of floss that seemed just fuzz. Then I could see
How she danced her belly low in the V.
I saw her fitting, with accurate whisker-fine feet,
Blobs of glue to the fibres, and sticking others
To thicken and deepen the V, and knot its juncture.
Then she danced in place, belly down, on this –
Suddenly got up and hung herself
Over the V. Sitting in the cup of the V
Was a tiny blob of new whiteness.
A first egg? Already? Then very carefully
She dabbed at the blob, and worked more woolly fibres
Into the V, to either side of it,
Diminishing it as she dabbed. I could see
I was watching mighty nature
In a purposeful mood, but not what she worked at.
Soon, the little shapeless dot of white
Was a dreg of speck, and she left it. She returned
Towards her male, who hung still in position.
She paused and laboriously cleaned her hands,
Wringing them in her pincers. And suddenly
With a swift, miraculously-accurate snatch
Took something from her mouth, and dumped it
On an outermost cross-strand of web –
A tiny scrap of white – refuse, I thought,
From their lovemaking. So I stopped watching.
Ten minutes later they were at it again.
Now they have vanished. I have scrutinized
The whole rubbish tip of carcases
And the window-frame crannies beneath it.
They are hidden. Is she devouring him now?
Or are there still some days of bliss to come
Before he joins her antiques. They are hidden
Probably together in the fusty dark,
Holding forearms, listening to the rain, rejoicing
As the sun’s edge, behind the clouds,
Comes clear of our shadow.
In the Likeness of a Grasshopper
A trap
Waits on the field path.
A wicker contraption, with working parts,
Its spring tensed and set.
So flimsily made, out of grass
(Out of the stems, the joints, the raspy-dry flags).
Baited with a fur-soft caterpillar,
A belly of amorous life, pulsing signals.
Along comes a love-sick, perfume-footed
Music of the wild earth.
The trap, touched by a breath,
Jars into action, its parts blur –
And music cries out.
A sinewy violin
Has caught its violinist.
Cloud-fingered summer, the beautiful trapper,
Picks up the singing cage
And takes out the Song, adds it to the Songs
With which she robes herself, which are her wealth,
Sets her trap again, a yard further on.
from WHAT IS THE TRUTH?
New Foal
Yesterday he was nowhere to be found
In the skies or under the skies.
Suddenly he’s here – a warm heap
Of ashes and embers, fondled by small draughts.
A star dived from outer space – flared
And burned out in the straw.
Now something is stirring in the smoulder.
We call it a foal.
Still stunned
He has no idea where he is.
His eyes, dew-dusky, explore gloom walls and a glare doorspace.
Is this the world?
It puzzles him. It is a great numbness.
He pulls himself together, getting used to the weight of things
And to that tall horse nudging him, and to this straw.
He rests
From the first blank shock of light, the empty daze
Of the questions –
What has happened? What am I?
His ears keep on asking, gingerly.
But his legs are impatient,
Recovering from so long being nothing
They are restless with ideas, they start to try a few out,
Angling this way and that,
Feeling for leverage, learning fast –
And suddenly he’s up
And stretching – a giant hand
Strokes him from nose to heel
Perfecting his outline, as he tightens
The knot of himself.
Now he comes teetering
Over the weird earth. His nose
Downy and magnetic, draws him, incredulous,
Towards his mother. And the world is warm
And careful and gentle. Touch by touch
Everything fits him together.
Soon he’ll be almost a horse.
He wants only to be Horse,
Pretending each day more and more Horse
Till he’s perfect Horse. Then unearthly Horse
>
Will surge through him, weightless, a spinning of flame
Under sudden gusts,
It will coil his eyeball and his heel
In a single terror – like the awe
Between lightning and thunderclap.
And curve his neck, like a sea-monster emerging
Among foam,
And fling the new moons through his stormy banner,
And the full moons and the dark moons.
The Hen
The Hen
Worships the dust. She finds God everywhere.
Everywhere she finds his jewels.
And she does not care
What the cabbage thinks.
She has forgotten flight
Because she has interpreted happily
Her recurrent dream
Of clashing cleavers, of hot ovens,
And of the little pen-knife blade
Splitting her palate.
She flaps her wings, like shallow egg-baskets,
To show her contempt
For those who live on escape
And a future of empty sky.
She rakes, with noble, tireless foot,
The treasury of the dirt,
And clucks with the mechanical alarm clock
She chose instead of song
When the Creator
Separated the Workers and the Singers.
With her eye on reward
She tilts her head religiously
At the most practical angle
Which reveals to her
That the fox is a country superstition,
That her eggs have made man her slave
And that the heavens, for all their threatening,
Have not yet fallen.
And she is stern. Her eye is fierce – blood
(That weakness) is punished instantly.
She is a hard bronze of uprightness.
And indulges herself in nothing
Except to swoon a little, a delicious slight swoon,
One eye closed, just before sleep,
Conjuring the odour of tarragon.
The Hare
I
That Elf
Riding his awkward pair of haunchy legs
That weird long-eared Elf
Wobbling down the highway
Don’t overtake him, don’t try to drive past him,
He’s scatty, he’s all over the road,
He can’t keep his steering, in his ramshackle go-cart,
His big loose wheels, buckled and rusty,
Nearly wobbling off
And all the screws in his head wobbling and loose
And his eyes wobbling
II
The Hare is a very fragile thing.
The life in the hare is a glassy goblet, and her yellow-fringed frost-flake belly says: Fragile.
The hare’s bones are light glass. And the hare’s face –
Who lifted her face to the Lord?
Her new-budded nostrils and lips,
For the daintiest pencillings, the last eyelash touches
Delicate as the down of a moth,
And the breath of awe
Which fixed the mad beauty-light
In her look
As if her retina
Were a moon perpetually at full.
Who is it, at midnight on the A30,
The Druid soul,
The night-streaker, the sudden lumpy goblin
That thumps your car under the belly
Then cries with human pain
And becomes a human baby on the road
That you dare hardly pick up?
Or leaps, like a long bat with little headlights,
Straight out of darkness
Into the driver’s nerves
With a jangle of cries
As if the car had crashed into a flying harp
So that the driver’s nerves flail and cry
Like a burst harp.
III
Uneasy she nears
As if she were being lured, but fearful,
Nearer.
Like a large egg toppling itself – mysterious!
Then she’ll stretch, tall, on her hind feet,
And lean on the air,
Taut – like a stilled yacht waiting on the air –
And what does the hunter see? A fairy woman?
A dream beast?
A kangaroo of the March corn?
The loveliest face listening,
Her black-tipped ears hearing the bud of the blackthorn
Opening its lips,
Her black-tipped hairs hearing tomorrow’s weather
Combing the mare’s tails,
Her snow-fluff belly feeling for the first breath,
Her orange nape, foxy with its dreams of the fox –
Witch-maiden
Heavy with trembling blood – astounding
How much blood there is in her body!
She is a moony pond of quaking blood
Twitched with spells, her gold-ringed eye spellbound –
Carrying herself so gently, balancing
Herself with the gentlest touches
As if her eyes brimmed –
IV
I’ve seen her,
A lank, lean hare, with her long thin feet
And her long, hollow thighs,
And her ears like ribbons
Careering by moonlight
In her Flamenco, her heels flinging the dust
On the drum of the hill.
And I’ve seen him, hobbling stiffly
God of Leapers
Surprised by dawn, earth-bound, and stained
With drying mud,
Painfully rocking over the furrows
With his Leaping-Legs, his Power-Thighs
Much too powerful for ordinary walking,
So powerful
They seem almost a burden, almost a problem,
Nearly an aching difficulty for him
When he tries to loiter or pause,
Nearly a heaving pain to lift and move
Like turning a cold car-engine with a bent crank handle –
Till a shock, a terror, with a bang
Grabs at her ears. An oven door
Bangs open, both barrels, and a barking
Bursts out of onions –
and she leaps
And her heels
Hard as angle-iron kick salt and pepper
Into the lurcher’s eyes –
and kick and kick
The spinning, turnip world
Into the lurcher’s gullet –
as she slips
Between thin hawthorn and thinner bramble
Into tomorrow.
from RIVER
The River
Fallen from heaven, lies across
The lap of his mother, broken by world.
But water will go on
Issuing from heaven
In dumbness uttering spirit brightness
Through its broken mouth.
Scattered in a million pieces and buried
Its dry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,
At a rending of veils.
It will rise, in a time after times,
After swallowing death and the pit
It will return stainless
For the delivery of this world.
So the river is a god
Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,
Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam
It is a god, and inviolable.
Immortal. And will wash itself of all deaths.
Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan
for Hilary and Simon
‘Up in the pools,’ they’d said, and ‘Two miles upstream.’
Something sinister about bogland rivers.
And a shock –
after the two miles of tumblequag, of Ice-Age hairiness, crusty, quaking cadaver and me lurching over it in elation like a daddy-long-legs –
; after crooked little clatterbrook and again clatterbrook (a hurry of shallow grey light so distilled it looked like acid) –
and after the wobbly levels of a razor-edged, blood-smeared grass, the flood-sucked swabs of bog-cotton, the dusty calico rip-up of snipe –
under those petrified scapulae, vertebrae, horn-skulls the Cuillins (asylum of eagles) that were blue-silvered like wrinkled baking foil in the blue noon that day, and tremulous –