by Hughes, Ted
Rasp you alive, towel you awake with tongues.
Now they start gnawing the small of your back.
The cry you dare not cry in these moments
Will last you a lifetime.
III TELL
This was my dream. Suddenly my old steel bow
Sprang into my hand and my whole body
Leaned into the bend a harp frame
So perfectly strung it seemed weightless.
I saw the Raven sitting alone
On the crest of the globe. I could see
The Raven’s eye agleam in the sky river
Like an emblem on a flowing banner.
I saw the Raven’s eye watching me
Through the slitted fabric of the skyflow.
I bent the bow’s full weight against the star
In that eye until I could see nothing
But that star. Then as I sank my aim
Deeper into the star that had grown
To fill the Universe I heard a whisper:
‘Be careful. I’m here. Don’t forget me.’
With all my might – I hesitated.
Dust As We Are
My post-war father was so silent
He seemed to be listening. I eavesdropped
On the hot line. His lonely sittings
Mangled me, in secret – like TV
Watched too long, my nerves lasered.
Then, an after image of the incessant
Mowing passage of machine-gun effects,
What it filled a trench with. And his laugh
(How had that survived – so nearly intact?)
Twitched the curtain never quite deftly enough
Over the hospital wards
Crowded with his (photographed) shock-eyed pals.
I had to use up a lot of spirit
Getting over it. I was helping him.
I was his supplementary convalescent.
He took up his pre-war joie de vivre.
But his displays of muscular definition
Were a bleached montage – lit landscapes:
Swampquakes of the slime of puddled soldiers
Where bones and bits of equipment
Showered from every shell-burst.
Naked men
Slithered staring where their mothers and sisters
Would never have to meet their eyes, or see
Exactly how they sprawled and were trodden.
So he had been salvaged and washed.
His muscles very white – marble white.
He had been heavily killed. But we had revived him.
Now he taught us a silence like prayer.
There he sat, killed but alive – so long
As we were very careful. I divined,
With a comb,
Under his wavy, golden hair, as I combed it,
The fragility of skull. And I filled
With his knowledge.
After mother’s milk
This was the soul’s food. A soap-smell spectre
Of the massacre of innocents. So the soul grew.
A strange thing, with rickets – a hyena.
No singing – that kind of laughter.
Telegraph Wires
Take telegraph wires, a lonely moor,
And fit them together. The thing comes alive in your ear.
Towns whisper to towns over the heather.
But the wires cannot hide from the weather.
So oddly, so daintily made
It is picked up and played.
Such unearthly airs
The ear hears, and withers!
In the revolving ballroom of space,
Bowed over the moor, a bright face
Draws out of telegraph wires the tones
That empty human bones.
Sacrifice
Born at the bottom of the heap. And as he grew upwards
The welts of his brow deepened, fold upon fold.
Like the Tragic Mask.
Cary Grant was his living double.
They said: When he was little he’d drop
And kick and writhe, and kick and cry:
‘I’ll break my leg! I’ll break my leg!’
Till he’d ground his occiput bald.
While the brothers built cords, moleskins, khakis
Into dynastic, sweated ziggurats,
His fateful forehead sank
Away among Westerns, the ruts of the Oregon Trail.
Screwdriver, drill, chisel, saw, hammer
Were less than no use.
A glass-fronted cabinet was his showpiece.
His wife had locked him in there with the china.
His laugh jars at my ear. That laugh
Was an elastic vault into freedom.
Sound as a golfball.
He’d belt it into the blue.
He never drank in a bar. When he stood
Before he’d stepped she’d plumped the cushions beneath him.
So perfectly kept.
Sundays they drove here and there in the car.
An armchair Samson. Baffled and shorn
His dream bulged into forearms
That performed their puppet-play of muscles
To make a nephew stare. He and I
Lammed our holly billets across Banksfields –
A five-inch propeller climbing the skylines
For two, three seconds – to the drop. And the paced-out length
Of his leash! The limit of human strength!
Suddenly he up and challenged
His brothers for a third of the partnership.
The duumvirate of wives turned down their thumbs.
Brotherly concern – Rain from Rochdale!
Snow from Halifax! Stars over valley walls!
His fireside escape
Simple as leaping astride a bare-back pinto
Was a kick at the ceiling, and that laugh.
He toiled in his attic after midnight
Mass-producing toy ducks
On wooden wheels, that went with clicks.
Flight! Flight!
The brothers closed their eyes. They quivered their jowls:
British Columbia’s the place for a chap like thee!
The lands of the future! Look at Australia –
Crying out for timber buildings! Get out there!
On the canal bridge bend, at Hawkscluffe,
A barrel bounced off a lorry.
His motorbike hit the wall.
‘I just flew straight up – and when I dropped
I missed the canal! I actually missed the canal!
I nearly broke the bank! For once
I landed smack on my feet!
My shoelaces burst from top to bottom!
His laugh thumped my body.
When he tripped
The chair from beneath him, in his attic,
Midsummer dusk, his sister, forty miles off,
Cried out at the hammer blow on her nape.
And his daughter
Who’d climbed up to singsong: ‘Supper, Daddy’
Fell back down the stairs to the bottom.
For the Duration
I felt a strange fear when the war-talk,
Like a creeping barrage, approached you.
Jig and jag I’d fitted much of it together.
Our treasure, your D.C.M. – again and again
Carrying in the wounded
Collapsing with exhaustion. And as you collapsed
A shell-burst
Just in front of you lifting you upright
For the last somnambulist yards
Before you fell under your load into the trench.
The shell, some other time, that buried itself
Between your feet as you walked
And thoughtfully failed to go off.
The shrapnel hole, over your heart – how it spun you.
The blue scar of the bullet at your ankle
From a traversing machine-gun that tripped you
; As you cleared the parapet. Meanwhile
The horrors were doled out, everybody
Had his appalling tale.
But what alarmed me most
Was your silence. Your refusal to tell.
I had to hear from others
What you survived and what you did.
Maybe you didn’t want to frighten me.
Now it’s too late.
Now I’d ask you shamelessly.
But then I felt ashamed.
What was my shame? Why couldn’t I have borne
To hear you telling what you underwent?
Why was your war so much more unbearable
Than anybody else’s? As if nobody else
Knew how to remember. After some uncle’s
Virtuoso tale of survival
That made me marvel and laugh –
I looked at your face, your cigarette
Like a dial-finger. And my mind
Stopped with numbness.
Your day-silence was the coma
Out of which your night-dreams rose shouting.
I could hear you from my bedroom –
The whole hopelessness still going on,
No man’s land still crying and burning
Inside our house, and you climbing again
Out of the trench, and wading back into the glare
As if you might still not manage to reach us
And carry us to safety.
Walt
I UNDER HIGH WOOD
Going up for the assault that morning
They passed the enclosure of prisoners.
‘A big German stood at the wire‚’ he said,
‘A big German, and he caught my eye.
And he cursed me. I felt his eye curse me.’
Halfway up the field, the bullet
Hit him in the groin. He rolled
Into a shell-hole. The sun rose and burned.
A sniper clipped his forehead. He wormed
Deeper down. Bullet after bullet
Dug at the crater rim, searching for him.
Another clipped him. Then the sniper stopped.
All that day he lay. He went walks
Along the Heights Road, from Peckett to Midgley,
Down to Mytholmroyd (past Ewood
Of his ancestors, past the high-perched factory
Of his future life). Up the canal bank,
Up Redacre, along and down into Hebden,
Then up into Crimsworth Dene, to their old campground
In the happy valley.
And up over Shackleton Hill, to Widdop,
Back past Greenwood Lea, above Hardcastles,
To Heptonstall – all day
He walked about the valley, as he lay
Under High Wood in the shell-hole.
I knew the knot of scar on his temple.
We stood in the young March corn
Of a perfect field. His fortune made.
His life’s hope over. Me beside him
Just the age he’d been when that German
Took aim with his eye and hit him so hard
It brought him and his wife down together,
With all his children one after the other.
A misty rain prickled and hazed.
‘Here‚’ he hazarded. ‘Somewhere just about here.
This is where he stopped me. I got this far.’
He frowned uphill towards the skyline tree-fringe
As through binoculars
Towards all that was left.
II THE ATLANTIC
Night after night he’d sat there,
Eighty-four, still telling the tale.
With his huge thirst for anaesthetics.
‘Time I were dead‚’ I’d heard. ‘I want to die.’
That’s altered.
We lean to a cliff rail
Founded in tremblings.
Beneath us, two thousand five hundred
Miles of swung worldweight
Hit England’s western wall
With a meaningless bump.
‘Aye!’ he sighs. Over and over. ‘Aye!’
And massages his temples.
Can he grasp what’s happened? His frown
Won’t connect. Familiar eagle frown –
Dark imperial eye. The ground flinches.
Mountains of dissolution
Boil cold geysers, bespatter us.
Tranquillizers,
Steroids, and a whole crateful
Of escapist Madeira, collided
Three evenings ago –
They swamped and drowned
The synapses, the breath-born spinnaker shells
Of consonants and vowels.
I found him
Trying to get up out of a chair,
Fish-eyed, and choking, clawing at air,
Dumbness like a bone stuck in his throat.
He’s survived with a word – one last word.
A last mouthful. I listen.
And I almost hear a new baby’s
Eyeless howl of outrage – sobered to ‘Aye!’
Sighed slow. Like blessed breath. He breathes it.
I dare hardly look at him. I watch.
He’d crept into my care.
A cursed hulk of marriage, a full-rigged fortune
Cast his body, crusted like Job’s,
Onto my threshold. Strange Dead Sea creature.
He crawled in his ruins, like Timon.
The Times Index was his morning torture.
Fairy gold of a family of dead leaves.
‘Why?’ he’d cried. ‘Why can’t I just die?’
His memory was so sharp – a potsherd.
He raked at his skin, whispering ‘God! God!’
Nightly, a nurse eased his scales with ointment.
I’ve brought him out for air. And the cliffs. And there
The sea towards America – wide open.
Untrodden, glorious America!
Look, a Peregrine Falcon – they’re rare!
Nothing will connect.
He peers down past his shoes
Into a tangle of horizons –
Black, tilted bedrock struggling up,
Mouthing disintegration.
Every weedy breath of the sea
Is another swell of overwhelming.
Meaningless. And a sigh. Meaningless.
Now he’s closed his eyes. He caresses
His own skull, over and over, comforting.
The Millmaster, the Caesar whose frown
Tossed my boyhood the baffling coin ‘guilty’.
His fingers are my mother’s. They seem astray
In quaverings and loss
As he strokes and strokes at his dome.
The sea thuds and sighs. Bowed at the rail
He seems to be touching at a wound he dare not touch.
He seems almost to find the exact spot.
His eyelids quiver, in the certainty of touch –
And ‘Aye!’ he breathes. ‘Aye!’
We turn away. Then as he steadies himself,
Still gripping the rail, his reaching stare
Meets mine watching him. I can’t escape it
Or hold it. Walt! Walt!
I bury it
Hugger-mugger anyhow
Inside my shirt.
Little Whale Song
for Charles Causley
What do they think of themselves
With their global brains –
The tide-power voltage illumination
Of those brains? Their X-ray all-dimension
Grasp of this world’s structures, their brains budded
Clone replicas of the electron world
Lit and re-imagining the world,
Perfectly tuned receivers and perceivers,
Each one a whole tremulous world
Feeling through the world? What
Do they make of each other?
‘We are beautiful. We stir
Our self-colour
in the pot of colours
Which is the world. At each
Tail-stroke we deepen
Our being into the world’s lit substance,
And our joy into the world’s
Spinning bliss, and our peace
Into the world’s floating, plumed peace.’
Their body-tons, echo-chambered,
Amplify the whisper
Of currents and airs, of sea-peoples
And planetary manoeuvres,
Of seasons, of shores, and of their own
Moon-lifted incantation, as they dance
Through the original Earth-drama
In which they perform, as from the beginning,
The Royal House.
The loftiest, spermiest