by Hughes, Ted
Salmon Eggs
The salmon were just down there –
Shivering together, touching at each other,
Shedding themselves for each other –
Now beneath flood-murmur
They peel away deathwards.
January haze,
With a veined yolk of sun. In bone-damp cold
I lean and watch the water, listening to water
Till my eyes forget me
And the piled flow supplants me, the mud-blooms
All this ponderous light of everlasting
Collapsing away under its own weight
Mastodon ephemera
Mud-curdling, bull-dozing, hem-twinkling
Caesarean of Heaven and Earth, unfelt
With exhumations and delirious advents –
Catkins
Wriggle at their mother’s abundance. The spider clings to his craft.
Something else is going on in the river
More vital than death – death here seems a superficiality
Of small scaly limbs, parasitical. More grave than life
Whose reflex jaws and famished crystals
Seem incidental
To this telling – these tidings of plasm –
The melt of mouthing silence, the charge of light
Dumb with immensity.
The river goes on
Sliding through its place, undergoing itself
In its wheel.
I make out the sunk foundations
Of dislocated crypts, a bedrock
Time-hewn, time-riven altar. And this is the liturgy
Of Earth’s advent – harrowing, crowned – a travail
Of raptures and rendings. Perpetual mass
Of the waters
Wells from the cleft.
This is the swollen vent
Of the nameless
Teeming inside atoms – and inside the haze
And inside the sun and inside the earth.
It is the font, brimming with touch and whisper,
Swaddling the egg.
Only birth matters
Say the river’s whorls.
And the river
Silences everything in a leaf-mouldering hush
Where sun rolls bare, and earth rolls,
And mind condenses on old haws.
A Cormorant
Here before me, snake-head
My waders weigh seven pounds.
My Barbour jacket, mainly necessary
For its pockets, is proof
Against the sky at my back. My bag
Sags with lures and hunter’s medicine enough
For a year in the Pleistocene.
My hat, of use only
If this May relapses to March,
Embarrasses me, and my net, long as myself,
Optimistic, awkward, infatuated
With every twig-snag and fence-barb
Will slowly ruin the day. I paddle
Precariously on slimed shale,
And infiltrate twenty yards
Of gluey and magnetized spider-gleam
Into the elbowing dense jostle-traffic
Of the river’s tunnel, and pray
With futuristic, archaic under-breath
So that some fish, telepathically overpowered,
Will attach its incomprehension
To the bauble I offer to space in general.
The cormorant eyes me, beak uptilted,
Body snake-low – sea-serpentish.
He’s thinking: ‘Will that stump
Stay a stump just while I dive?’ He dives.
He sheds everything from his tail end
Except fish-action, becomes fish,
Disappears from bird,
Dissolving himself
Into fish, so dissolving fish naturally
Into himself. Re-emerges, gorged,
Himself as he was, and escapes me.
Leaves me high and dry in my space-armour,
A deep-sea diver in two inches of water.
An Eel
I
The strange part is his head. Her head. The strangely ripened
Domes over the brain, swollen nacelles
For some large containment. Lobed glands
Of some large awareness. Eerie the eel’s head.
This full, plum-sleeked fruit of evolution.
Beneath it, her snout’s a squashed slipper-face,
The mouth grin-long and perfunctory,
Undershot predatory. And the iris, dirty gold
Distilled only enough to be different
From the olive lode of her body,
The grained and woven blacks. And ringed larger
With a vaguer vision, an earlier eye
Behind her eye, paler, blinder,
Inward. Her buffalo hump
Begins the amazement of her progress.
Her mid-shoulder pectoral fin – concession
To fish-life – secretes itself
Flush with her concealing suit: under it
The skin’s a pale exposure of deepest eel
As her belly is, a dulled pearl.
Strangest, the thumb-print skin, the rubberized weave
Of her insulation. Her whole body
Damascened with identity. This is she
Suspends the Sargasso
In her inmost hope. Her life is a cell
Sealed from event, her patience
Global and furthered with love
By the bending stars as if she
Were earth’s sole initiate. Alone
In her millions, the moon’s pilgrim,
The nun of water.
II
Where does the river come from?
And the eel, the night-mind of water –
The river within the river and opposite –
The night-nerve of water?
Not from the earth’s remembering mire
Not from the air’s whim
Not from the brimming sun. Where from?
From the bottom of the nothing pool
Sargasso of God
Out of the empty spiral of stars
A glimmering person
Performance
Just before the curtain falls in the river
The Damselfly, with offstage, inaudible shriek
Reappears, weightless.
Hover-poised, in her snake-skin leotards,
Her violet-dark elegance.
Eyelash-delicate, a dracula beauty,
In her acetylene jewels.
Her mascara smudged, her veils shimmer-fresh –
Late August. Some sycamore leaves
Already in their museum, eaten to lace.
Robin song bronze-touching the stillness
Over posthumous nettles. The swifts, as one,
Whipcracked, gone. Blackberries.
And now, lightly,
Adder-shock of this dainty assassin
Still in mid-passion –
still in her miracle play:
Masked, archaic, mute, insect mystery
Out of the sun’s crypt.
Everything is forgiven
Such a metamorphosis in love!
Phaedra Titania
Dragon of crazed enamels!
Tragedienne of the ultra-violet,
So sulphurous and so frail,
Stepping so magnetically to her doom!
Lifted out of the river with tweezers
Dripping the sun’s incandescence –
suddenly she
Switches her scene elsewhere.
(Find him later, halfway up a nettle,
A touch-crumple petal of web and dew –
Midget puppet-clown, tranced on his strings,
In the nightfall pall of balsam.)
Night Arrival of Sea-Trout
Honeysuckle hanging her fangs.
Foxglove rearing her open belly.
Dogrose touching the membrane.
Through the dew’s mist, the oak’s m
ass
Comes plunging, tossing dark antlers.
Then a shattering
Of the river’s hole, where something leaps out –
An upside-down, buried heaven
Snarls, moon-mouthed, and shivers.
Summer dripping stars, biting at the nape.
Lobworms coupling in saliva.
Earth singing under her breath.
And out in the hard corn a horned god
Running and leaping
With a bat in his drum.
October Salmon
He’s lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety,
Maybe only two feet under the no-protection of an outleaning small oak,
Half under a tangle of brambles.
After his two thousand miles, he rests,
Breathing in that lap of easy current
In his graveyard pool.
About six pounds weight,
Four years old at most, and hardly a winter at sea –
But already a veteran,
Already a death-patched hero. So quickly it’s over!
So briefly he roamed the gallery of marvels!
Such sweet months, so richly embroidered into earth’s beauty-dress,
Her life-robe –
Now worn out with her tirelessness, her insatiable quest,
Hangs in the flow, a frayed scarf –
An autumnal pod of his flower,
The mere hull of his prime, shrunk at shoulder and flank,
With the sea-going Aurora Borealis
Of his April power –
The primrose and violet of that first upfling in the estuary –
Ripened to muddy dregs,
The river reclaiming his sea-metals.
In the October light
He hangs there, patched with leper-cloths.
Death has already dressed him
In her clownish regimentals, her badges and decorations,
Mapping the completion of his service,
His face a ghoul-mask, a dinosaur of senility, and his whole body
A fungoid anemone of canker –
Can the caress of water ease him?
The flow will not let up for a minute.
What a change! from that covenant of polar light
To this shroud in a gutter!
What a death-in-life – to be his own spectre!
His living body become death’s puppet,
Dolled by death in her crude paints and drapes
He haunts his own staring vigil
And suffers the subjection, and the dumbness,
And the humiliation of the role!
And that is how it is,
That is what is going on there, under the scrubby oak tree, hour after hour,
That is what the splendour of the sea has come down to,
And the eye of ravenous joy – king of infinite liberty
In the flashing expanse, the bloom of sea-life,
On the surge-ride of energy, weightless,
Body simply the armature of energy
In that earliest sea-freedom, the savage amazement of life,
The salt mouthful of actual existence
With strength like light –
Yet this was always with him. This was inscribed in his egg.
This chamber of horrors is also home.
He was probably hatched in this very pool.
And this was the only mother he ever had, this uneasy channel of minnows
Under the mill-wall, with bicycle wheels, car tyres, bottles
And sunk sheets of corrugated iron.
People walking their dogs trail their evening shadows across him.
If boys see him they will try to kill him.
All this, too, is stitched into the torn richness,
The epic poise
That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient
In the machinery of heaven.
That Morning
We came where the salmon were so many
So steady, so spaced, so far-aimed
On their inner map, England could add
Only the sooty twilight of South Yorkshire
Hung with the drumming drift of Lancasters
Till the world had seemed capsizing slowly.
Solemn to stand there in the pollen light
Waist-deep in wild salmon swaying massed
As from the hand of God. There the body
Separated, golden and imperishable,
From its doubting thought – a spirit-beacon
Lit by the power of the salmon
That came on, came on, and kept on coming
As if we flew slowly, their formations
Lifting us toward some dazzle of blessing
One wrong thought might darken. As if the fallen
World and salmon were over. As if these
Were the imperishable fish
That had let the world pass away –
There, in a mauve light of drifted lupins,
They hung in the cupped hands of mountains
Made of tingling atoms. It had happened.
Then for a sign that we were where we were
Two gold bears came down and swam like men
Beside us. And dived like children.
And stood in deep water as on a throne
Eating pierced salmon off their talons.
So we found the end of our journey.
So we stood, alive in the river of light
Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.
from WOLFWATCHING
Astrological Conundrums
I THE FOOL’S EVIL DREAM
I was just walking about.
Trees here, trees there, ferny accompaniment.
Rocks sticking through their moss jerseys.
A twilight like smoked spectacles, depressive.
I saw a glowing beast – a tigress.
Only different with flower-smells, wet-root smells,
Fish-still-alive-from-their-weed-river smells
And eyes that hurt me with beauty.
She wanted to play so we gambolled.
She promised to show me her cave
Which was the escape route from death
And which came out into a timeless land.
To find this cave, she said, we lie down
And you hold me, so, and we fly.
So it was I came to be folded
In the fur of a tiger. And as we travelled
She told me of a very holy man
Who fed himself to a tigress
Because hunger had dried up her milk
And as he filled her belly he became
The never-dying god who gives everything
Which he had always wanted to be.
As I heard her story I dissolved
In the internal powers of tiger
And passed through a dim land
Swinging under her backbone. Till I heard
A sudden cry of fear, an infant’s cry –
Close, as if my own ear had cried it.
I sat up
Wet and alone
Among starry rocks.
A bright spirit went away weeping.
II NEARLY AWAKE
The bulls swing their headweights,
Eyes bulging storms and moon-terrors.
Their cleft roots creak all round you
Where you lie, face-bedded, vegetable.
A frozen stone – the stone of your headbone.
The Universe flies dark.
The bulls bulk darker, as their starred nostrils
Blow and ponder your spine.
You lie, helpless as grass. Your prayer,
Petrified into the earth’s globe,
Supports you, a crest of fear
On its unstirring.
The wild bulls of your mother have found you.
Huge nudgings of blood, sperm, saliva