New and Selected Poems

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 –