New and Selected Poems

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,