by Hughes, Ted
early August, in a hot lateness (only three hours before my boat), a glimpse of my watch and suddenly
up to my hip in a suck-hole then on again teetering over the broken-necked heath-bobs a good half-hour and me melting in my combined fuel of toil and clobber suddenly
The shock.
The sheer cavern of current piling silence
Under my feet.
So lonely-drowning deep, so drowned-hair silent
So clear
Cleansing the body cavity of the underbog.
Such a brilliant cut-glass interior
Sliding under me
And I felt a little bit giddy
Ghostly
As I fished the long pool-tail
Peering into that superabundance of spirit.
And now where were they, my fellow aliens from prehistory?
Those peculiar eyes
So like mine, but fixed at zero,
Pressing in from outer darkness
Eyes of aimed sperm and of egg on their errand,
Looking for immortality
In the lap of a broken volcano, in the furrow of a lost glacier,
Those shuttles of love-shadow?
Only humbler beings waved at me –
Weeds grazing the bottom, idling their tails.
Till the last pool –
A broad, coiling whorl, a deep ear
Of pondering amber,
Greenish and precious like a preservative,
With a ram’s skull sunk there – magnified, a Medusa,
Funereal, phosphorescent, a lamp
Ten feet under the whisky.
I heard this pool whisper a warning.
I tickled its leading edges with temptation.
I stroked its throat with a whisker.
I licked the moulded hollows
Of its collarbones
Where the depth, now underbank opposite,
Pulsed up from contained excitements –
Eerie how you know when it’s coming –
So I felt it now, my blood
Prickling and thickening, altering
With an ushering-in of chills, a weird onset
As if mountains were pushing mountains higher
Behind me, to crowd over my shoulder –
Then the pool lifted a travelling bulge
And grabbed the tip of my heart-nerve, and crashed,
Trying to wrench it from me, and again
Lifted a flash of arm for leverage
And it was a Gruagach of the Sligachan!
Some Boggart up from a crack in the granite!
A Glaistig out of the skull!
– what was it gave me
Such a supernatural, beautiful fright
And let go, and sank disembodied
Into the eye-pupil darkness?
Only a little salmon.
Salmo salar
The loveliest, left-behind, most-longed-for ogress
Of the Palaeolithic
Watched me through her time-warped judas-hole
In the ruinous castle of Skye
As I faded from the light of reality.
Low Water
This evening
The river is a beautiful idle woman.
The day’s August burn-out has distilled
A heady sundowner.
She lies back, bored and tipsy.
She lolls on her deep couch. And a long thigh
Lifts from the flash of her silks.
Adoring trees, kneeling, ogreish eunuchs
Comb out her spread hair, massage her fingers.
She stretches – and an ecstasy tightens
Over her skin, and deep in her gold body
Thrills spasm and dissolve. She drowses.
Her half-dreams lift out of her, light-minded
Love-pact suicides. Copulation and death.
She stirs her love-potion – ooze of balsam
Thickened with fish-mucus and algae.
You stand under leaves, your feet in shallows.
She eyes you steadily from the beginning of the world.
Japanese River Tales
I
Tonight
From the swaddled village, down the padded lane
Snow is hurrying
To the tryst, is touching
At her hair, at her raiment
Glint-slippered
Over the stubble,
naked under
Her light robe, jewels
In her hair, in her ears, at her bare throat
Dark eye-flash
twigs and brambles
Catch at her
as she lifts
The raggy curtains
Of the river’s hovel, and plunges
Into his grasping bed.
II
The lithe river rejoices all morning
In his juicy bride – the snow princess
Who peeped from clouds, and chose him,
and descended.
The tale goes on
With glittery laughter of immortals
Shaking the alders –
In the end a drowsy after-bliss
Blue-hazes the long valley. High gulls
Look down on the flash
And languor of suppled shoulders
Bedded in her ermine.
Night
Lifts off the illusion. Lifts
The beauty from her skull. The sockets, in fact,
Are root-arches – empty
To ashes of stars. Her kiss
Grips through the full throat and locks
On the dislodged vertebrae.
Her talons
Lengthened by moonlight, numb open
The long belly of blood.
And the river
Is a gutter of death,
A spill of glitters
dangling from her grasp
As she flies
Through the shatter of space and
Out of being.
Ophelia
Where the pool unfurls its undercloud –
There she goes.
And through and through
The kneading tumble and the water-hammer.
If a trout leaps into air, it is not for a breather.
It has to drop back immediately
Into this peculiar engine
That made it, and keeps it going,
And that works it to death –
there she goes
Darkfish, finger to her lips,
Staringly into the afterworld.
Strangers
Dawn. The river thins.
The combed-out coiffure at the pool-tail
Brightens thinly.
The slung pool’s long hammock still flat out.
The sea-trout, a salt flotilla, at anchor,
Substanceless, flame-shadowed,
Hang in a near emptiness of sunlight.
There they actually are, under homebody oaks,
Close to teddybear sheep, near purple loose-strife –
Space-helms bowed in preoccupation,
Only a slight riffling of their tail-ailerons
Corrective of drift,
Gills easing.
And the pool’s toiled rampart roots,
The cavorting of new heifers, water-skeeters
On their abacus, even the slow claim
Of the buzzard’s hand
Merely decorate a heaven
Where the sea-trout, fixed and pouring,
Lean in the speed of light.
And make nothing
Of the strafed hogweed sentry skeletons,
Nothing of the sun, so openly aiming down.
Thistle-floss bowls over them. First, lost leaves
Feel over them with blind shadows.
The sea-trout, upstaring, in trance,
Absorb everything and forget it
Into a blank of bliss.
And this is the real samadhi – worldless, levitated.
Till, bulging, a man-shape
Wobbles their firmament.
Now see the holy ones
Shrink their auras, slim, sink, focus, prepare
To scram like trout.
The Gulkana
Jumbled iceberg hills, away to the North –
And a long wreath of fire-haze.
The Gulkana, where it meets the Copper,
Swung, jade, out of the black spruce forest,
And disappeared into it.
Strange word, Gulkana. What does it mean?
A pre-Columbian glyph.
A pale blue thread – scrawled with a child’s hand
Across our map. A Lazarus of water
Returning from seventy below.
We stumbled,
Not properly awake
In a weird light – a bombardment
Of purplish emptiness –
Among phrases that lumped out backwards. Among rocks
That kept startling me – too rock-like,
Hypnagogic rocks –
A scrapyard of boxy shacks
And supermarket refuse, dogs, wrecked pick-ups,
The Indian village where we bought our pass
Was comatose – on the stagnation toxins
Of a cultural vasectomy. They were relapsing
To Cloud-like-a-boulder, Mica, Bear, Magpie.
We hobbled along a tightrope shore of pebbles
Under a trickling bluff
That bounced the odd pebble onto us, eerily.
(The whole land was in perpetual, seismic tremor.)
Gulkana –
Biblical, a deranging cry
From the wilderness – burst past us.
A stone voice that dragged at us.
I found myself clinging
To the lifted skyline fringe of rag spruce
And the subsidence under my bootsoles
With balancing glances – nearly a fear,
Something I kept trying to deny
With deliberate steps. But it came with me
As if it swayed on my pack –
A nape-of-the-neck unease. We’d sploshed far enough
Through the spongy sinks of the permafrost
For this river’s
Miraculous fossils – creatures that each midsummer
Resurrected through it, in a blood-rich flesh.
Pilgrims for a fish!
Prospectors for the lode in a fish’s eye!
In that mercury light, that ultra-violet,
My illusion developed. I felt hunted.
I tested my fear. It seemed to live in my neck –
A craven, bird-headed alertness.
And in my eye
That felt blind somehow to what I stared at
As if it stared at me. And in my ear –
So wary for the air-stir in the spruce-tips
My ear-drum almost ached. I explained it
To my quietly arguing, lucid panic
As my fear of one inside me,
A bodiless twin, some doppelgänger
Disinherited other, unliving,
Ever-living, a larva from prehistory,
Whose journey this was, who now exulted
Recognizing his home,
And whose gaze I could feel as he watched me
Fiddling with my gear – the interloper,
The fool he had always hated. We pitched our tent
And for three days
Our tackle scratched the windows of the express torrent.
We seemed underpowered. Whatever we hooked
Bent in air, a small porpoise,
Then went straight downriver under the weight
And joined the glacial landslide of the Copper
Which was the colour of cement.
Even when we got one ashore
It was too big to eat.
But there was the eye!
I peered into that lens
Seeking what I had come for. (What had I come for?
The camera-flash? The burned-out, ogling bulb?)
What I saw was small, crazed, snake-like.
It made me think of a dwarf, shrunken sun
And of the black, refrigerating pressures
Under the Bering Sea.
We relaunched their mulberry-dark torsos,
Those gulping, sooted mouths, the glassy visors –
Arks of an undelivered covenant,
Egg-sacs of their own Eden,
Seraphs of heavy ore
They surged away, magnetized,
Into the furnace boom of the Gulkana.
Bliss had fixed their eyes
Like an anaesthetic. They were possessed
By that voice in the river
And its accompaniment –
The flutes, the drumming. And they rose and sank
Like voices, themselves like singers
In its volume. We watched them, deepening away.
They looked like what they were, somnambulists,
Drugged, ritual victims, melting away
Towards a sacrament –
a consummation
That could only be death.
Which it would be, within some numbered days,
On some stony platform of water,
In a spillway, where a man could hardly stand –
Aboriginal Americans,
High among rains, in an opening of the hills,
They will begin to circle,
Shedding their ornaments,
In shufflings and shudders, male by female,
Begin to dance their deaths –
The current hosing over their brows and shoulders,
Bellies riven open and shaken empty
Into a gutter of pebbles
In the orgy of eggs and sperm,
The dance orgy of being reborn
From which masks and regalia drift empty,
Torn off – at last their very bodies,
In the numbed, languorous frenzy, as obstacles,
Ripped away –
ecstasy dissolving
In the mercy of water, at the star of the source,
Devoured by revelation,
Every molecule drained, and counted, and healed
Into the amethyst of emptiness –
I came back to myself. A spectre of fragments
Lifted my quivering coffee, in the aircraft,
And sipped at it.
I imagined the whole 747
As if a small boy held it
Making its noise. A spectre,
Escaping the film’s flicker, peered from the porthole
Under the sun’s cobalt core-darkness
Down at Greenland’s corpse
Tight-sheeted with snow-glare.
Word by word
The voice of the river moved in me.
It was like lovesickness.
A numbness, a secret bleeding.
Waking in my body.
Telling of the King
Salmon’s eye.
Of the blood-mote mosquito.
And the stilt-legged, subarctic, one-rose rose
With its mock-aperture
Tilting towards us
In our tent-doorway, its needle tremor.
And the old Indian Headman, in his tatty jeans and socks, who smiled
Adjusting to our incomprehension – his face
A whole bat, that glistened and stirred.
Go Fishing
Join water, wade in underbeing
Let brain mist into moist earth
Ghost loosen away downstream
Gulp river and gravity
Lose words
Cease
Be assumed into glistenings of lymph
As if creation were a wound
As if this flow were all plasm healing
Be supplanted by mud and leaves and pebbles
By sudden rainbow monster-structures
That materialize in suspension gulping
And dematerialize under pressure of the eye
Be
cleft by the sliding prow
Displaced by the hull of light and shadow
Dissolved in earth-wave, the soft sun-shock,
Dismembered in sun-melt
Become translucent – one untangling drift
Of water-mesh, and a weight of earth-taste light
Mangled by wing-shadows
Everything circling and flowing and hover-still
Crawl out over roots, new and nameless
Search for face, harden into limbs
Let the world come back, like a white hospital
Busy with urgency words
Try to speak and nearly succeed
Heal into time and other people