by Hughes, Ted
Passions, the most exquisite pleasures,
The noblest characters, the most god-like
Oceanic presence and poise –
The most terrible fall.
On the Reservations
for Jack Brown
I SITTING BULL ON CHRISTMAS MORNING
Who put this pit-head wheel,
Smashed but carefully folded
In some sooty fields, into his stocking?
And his lifetime nightshirt – a snarl
Of sprung celluloid? Here’s his tin flattened,
His helmet. And the actual sun closed
Into what looks like a bible of coal
That drops to bits as he lifts it. Very strange.
Packed in mossy woods, mostly ashes,
Here’s a doll’s cot. And a tiny coffin.
And here are Orca Tiger Eagle tattered
In his second birthday’s ragbook
From before memory began.
All the props crushed, the ceilings collapsed
In his stocking. Torremolinos, Cleethorpes –
The brochures screwed up in a tantrum
As her hair shrivelled to a cinder
In his stocking. Pit boots. And, strange,
A London, burst, spewing tea-leaves,
With a creased postcard of the Acropolis.
Chapels pews broken television.
(Who dumped these, into his stocking,
Under coal-slag in a flooded cellar?)
Pink Uns and a million whippet collars –
Did he ask for these? A jumbo jet
Parcelled in starred, split, patched Christmas wrappings
Of a concrete yard and a brick wall
Black with scribble
In his stocking. No tobacco. A few
Rabbits and foxes broken leaking feathers.
Nevertheless, he feels like a new man –
Though tribally scarred (stitch-tattoos of coal-dust),
Though pale (soiled, the ivory bulb of a snowdrop
Dug up and tossed aside),
Though one of the lads (the horde, the spores of nowhere
Cultured under lamps and multiplied
In the laboratories
Between Mersey and Humber),
He stands, lungs easy, freed hands –
Bombarded by pollens from the supernovae,
Two eyepits awash in the millennia –
With his foot in his stocking.
II NIGHTVOICE
My young men shall never work. Men who work cannot dream, and wisdom comes in dreams.’ Smohalla, Nez Percé Indians
She dreams she sleepwalks crying the Don River
relieves its nine
circles through her kitchen her kids
mops and brooms herself a squeegee and not
soaking in but
bulging pulsing out of their pores the
ordure déjà vu in Tesco’s makes her
giddy
She dreams she sleepwalks crying her Dad alive
dug up is being
pushed into a wood-burning stove
by pensioners who chorus in croaks
While Shepherds
Watched Their television gives her
palpitations
She dreams she sleepwalks crying all the dead
huddle
in the slag-heaps wrong
land wrong
time tepees a final
resting for the epidemic
solution every
pit-shaft a
mass-grave herself
in a silly bottle shawled
in the canal’s
fluorescence the message
of the survivors a surplus people
the words
washed off her wrists
and hands she complains keep feeling
helpless
She dreams she sleepwalks mainstreet nightly crying
Stalin
keeps her as an ant
in a formicary in a
garbage-can which is his private office
urinal she thinks her aerials
must be bent
Remembering how a flare of pure torrent
sluiced the pit muck
off his shoulder-slopes while her hands
soapy with milk blossom anointed
him and in their hearth
fingers of the original sun opened
the black
bright book of the stone
he’d brought from beneath dreams
or did she dream it
III THE GHOST DANCER
‘We are not singing sportive songs. It is as if we were weeping, asking for life –’ Owl, Fox Indians
A sulky boy. And he stuns your ear with song.
Swastika limbs, his whole physique – a dance.
The fool of prophecy, nightlong, daylong
Out of a waste lot brings deliverance.
Just some kid, with a demonic roar
Spinning in vacuo, inches clear of the floor.
Half-anguish half-joy, half-shriek half-moan:
He is the gorgon against his own fear.
Through his septum a dog’s penile bone.
A chime of Chubb keys dangling at each ear.
Temenos Jaguar mask – a vogue mandala:
Half a Loa, half a drugged Oglala.
With woad cobras coiling their arm-clasp
Out of his each arm-pit, their ganch his grasp.
Bracelets, anklets; girlish, a bacchus chained.
An escapologist’s pavement, padlock dance.
A mannequin elf, topped with a sugarfloss mane
Or neon rhino power-cone on a shorn sconce,
Or crest of a Cock of the Rock, or Cockatoo shock,
Or the sequinned crown of a Peacock.
And snake-spined, all pentecostal shivers,
This megawatt, berserker medium
With his strobe-drenched battle cry delivers
The nineteenth century from his mother’s womb:
The work-house dread that brooded, through her term,
Over the despair of salvaged sperm.
Mau-Mau Messiah’s showbiz lightning stroke
Puffs the stump of Empire up in smoke.
Brain-box back to front, heart inside out,
Aura for body, and for so-called soul
Under the moment’s touch a reed that utters
Out of the solar cobalt core a howl
Bomblit, rainbowed, aboriginal:
‘Start afresh, this time unconquerable.’
from RAIN-CHARM FOR THE DUCHY
Rain-Charm for the Duchy
for H.R.H. Prince Harry
After the five-month drought
My windscreen was frosted with dust.
Sight itself had grown a harsh membrane
Against glare and particles.
Now the first blobby tears broke painfully.
Big, sudden thunderdrops. I felt them sploshing like vapoury petrol
Among the ants
In Cranmere’s cracked heath-tinder. And into the ulcer craters
Of what had been river pools.
Then, like taking a great breath, we were under it.
Thunder gripped and picked up the city.
Rain didn’t so much fall as collapse.
The pavements danced, like cinders in a riddle.
Flash in the pan, I thought, as people scampered.
Soon it was falling vertical, precious, pearled.
Thunder was a brass-band accompaniment
To some festive, civic event. Squeals and hurry. With tourist bunting.
The precinct saplings lifted their arms and faces. And the heaped-up sky
Moved in mayoral pomp, behind buildings,
With flash and thump. It had almost gone by
And I almost expected the brightening. Instead, something like a shutter
Jerked and rattled – and the whole county darkened.
Then rain really came down. You s
crambled into the car
Scattering oxygen like a drenched bush.
What a weight of warm Atlantic water!
The car-top hammered. The Cathedral jumped in and out
Of a heaven that had obviously caught fire
And couldn’t be contained.
A girl in high heels, her handbag above her head,
Risked it across the square’s lit metals.
We saw surf cuffed over her and the car jounced.
Grates, gutters, clawed in the backwash.
She kept going. Flak and shrapnel
Of thundercracks
Hit the walls and roofs. Still a swimmer
She bobbed off, into sea-smoke,
Where headlights groped. Already
Thunder was breaking up the moors.
It dragged tors over the city –
Uprooted chunks of map. Smeltings of ore, pink and violet,
Spattered and wriggled down
Into the boiling sea
Where Exeter huddled –
A small trawler, nets out.
‘Think of the barley!’ you said.
You remembered earlier harvests.
But I was thinking
Of joyful sobbings –
The throb
In the rock-face mosses of the Chains,
And of the exultant larvae in the Barle’s shrunk trench, their filaments ablur like propellers, under the churned ceiling of light,
And of the Lyn’s twin gorges, clearing their throats, deepening their voices, beginning to hear each other
Rehearse forgotten riffles,
And the Mole, a ditch’s choked whisper
Rousing the stagnant camps of the Little Silver, the Crooked Oak and the Yeo
To a commotion of shouts, muddied oxen
A rumbling of wagons,
And the red seepage, the smoke of life
Lowering its ringlets into the Taw,
And the Torridge, rising to the kiss,
Plunging under sprays, new-born,
A washed cherub, clasping the breasts of light,
And the Okement, nudging her detergent bottles, tugging at her nylon stockings, starting to trundle her Pepsi-Cola cans,
And the Tamar, roused and blinking under the fifty-mile drumming,
Declaiming her legend – her rusty knights tumbling out of their clay vaults, her cantrevs assembling from shillets,
With a cheering of aged stones along the Lyd and the Lew, the Wolf and the Thrushel,
And the Tavy, jarred from her quartzy rock-heap, feeling the moor shift
Rinsing her stale mouth, tasting tin, copper, ozone,
And the baby Erme, under the cyclone’s top-heavy, toppling sea-fight, setting afloat odd bits of dead stick,
And the Dart, her shaggy horde coming down
Astride bareback ponies, with a cry,
Loosening sheepskin banners, bumping the granite,
Flattening rowans and frightening oaks,
And the Teign, startled in her den
By the rain-dance of bracken
Hearing Heaven reverberate under Gidleigh,
And the highest pool of the Exe, her coil recoiling under the sky-shock
Where a drinking stag flings its head up
From a spilled skyful of lightning –
My windscreen wipers swam as we moved.
I imagined the two moors
The two stone-age hands
Cupped and brimming, lifted, an offering –
And I thought of those other, different lightnings, the patient, thirsting ones
Under Crow Island, inside Bideford Bar,
And between the Hamoaze anchor chains,
And beneath the thousand, shivering, fibreglass hulls
Inside One Gun Point, and aligned
Under the Ness, and inside Great Bull Hill:
The salmon, deep in the thunder, lit
And again lit, with glimpses of quenchings,
Twisting their glints in the suspense,
Biting at the stir, beginning to move.
UNCOLLECTED
Old Oats
‘Mad Laughter’, your sister – her grey perm
Rayed out in electrified frazzles.
But you were the backfiring
Heart of your double-humped,
Sooty, two hundred acres.
Alex cracked. Strabismic, pitiable,
Gawky, adopted Alex!
That morning on the stack – and you
In a Führer frenzy,
Your coalface vocabulary
Going up in one flame!
Alex never came back.
Where did you end up?
Chimpanzee, dangle-pawed,
Shambling, midget ogre. Jehovah
Of my fallen Eden.
Undershot, bristly jowl –
Chimpanzee. That dazzled scowl –
Chimpanzee. Shoulder wing-stumps
In the waistcoat bossed
And polished to metal –
Chimpanzee. Cap an oil-rag,
Chewing your twist,
Raw disintegrating boots –
Your free knuckles lay quaking
At ease on the mudguard
Or pointed out to me
The bright, startling, pretty
Shrapnel in the stubble.
Your spittle curse, bitten off
Among the unshaven silver,
You’d give me the damned farm!
Nothing too stubborn,
Ferguson brains, running on pink paraffin,
Up in the dark, head in the cow’s crutch
Under the throb of Dorniers,
Staring into the warm foam,
Hobbling with a bucket and a lantern
Under the sky-burn of Sheffield,
Breaking your labourers with voice –
A royal succession of Georges!
What was it all for?
Collapsing between the stooks,
Up again, jump-starting your old engine
With your hip-flask,
Hoisting the top-heavy stackyard
Summer after summer. How many horses
Worn to chaffy dust? How many tractors
Battered to scrap? What’s become of you? Nobody
Could have kept it up. Only
One thing’s certain. Somewhere
You rest.
The Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers
A Souvenir of the Gallipoli Landings
The father capers across the yard cobbles
Look, like a bird, a water-bird, an ibis going over pebbles
We laughed, like warships fluttering bunting.
Heavy-duty design, deep-seated in ocean-water
The warships flutter bunting.
A fiesta day for the warships
Where war is only an idea, as drowning is only an idea
In the folding of a wave, in the mourning
Funeral procession, the broadening wake
That follows a ship under power.
War is an idea in the muzzled calibre of the big guns.
In the grey, wolvish outline.
War is a kind of careless health, like the heart-beat
In the easy bodies of sailors, feeling the big engines
Idling between emergencies.
It is what has left the father
Who has become a bird.
Once he held war in his strong pint mugful of tea
And drank at it, heavily sugared.
It was all for him
Under the parapet, under the periscope, the look-out
Under Achi Baba and the fifty billion flies.
Now he has become a long-billed, spider-kneed bird
Bow-backed, finding his footing, over the frosty cobbles
A wader, picking curiosities from the shallows.
His sons don’t know why they laughed, watching him through the window
Remembering it, remembering their laughter
They only want
to weep
As after the huge wars
Senseless huge wars
Huge senseless weeping.
Anniversary
My mother in her feathers of flame
Grows taller. Every May Thirteenth
I see her with her sister Miriam. I lift
The torn-off diary page where my brother jotted
‘Ma died today’ – and there they are.
She is now as tall as Miriam.
In the perpetual Sunday morning
Of everlasting, they are strolling together
Listening to the larks
Ringing in their orbits. The work of the cosmos,