New and Selected Poems

by Hughes, Ted

  Creation and destruction of matter

  And of anti-matter

  Pulses and flares, shudders and fades

  Like the Northern Lights in their feathers.

  My mother is telling Miriam

  About her life, which was mine. Her voice comes, piping,

  Down a deep gorge of woodland echoes:

  ‘This is the water-line, dark on my dress, look,

  Where I dragged him from the reservoir.

  And that is the horse on which I galloped

  Through the brick wall

  And out over the heather simply

  To bring him a new pen. This is the pen

  I laid on the altar. And these

  Are the mass marriages of him and his brother

  Where I was not once a guest.’ Then suddenly

  She is scattering the red coals with her fingers

  To find where I had fallen

  For the third time. She laughs

  Helplessly till she weeps. Miriam

  Who died at eighteen

  Is Madonna-like with pure wonder

  To hear of all she missed. Now my mother

  Shows her the rosary prayers of unending worry,

  Like pairs of shoes, or one dress after another,

  ‘This is the sort of thing‚’ she is saying,

  ‘I liked to wear best.’ And: ‘Much of it,

  You know, was simply sitting at the window

  Watching the horizon. Truly

  Wonderful it was, day after day,

  Knowing they were somewhere. It still is.

  Look.’

  And they pause, on the brink

  Of the starry dew. They are looking at me.

  My mother, darker with her life,

  Her Red Indian hair, her skin

  So strangely olive and other-worldly,

  Miriam now sheer flame beside her.

  Their feathers throb softly, iridescent.

  My mother’s face is glistening

  As if she held it into the skyline wind

  Looking towards me. I do this for her.

  She is using me to tune finer

  Her weeping love for my brother, through mine,

  As if I were the shadow cast by his approach.

  As when I came a mile over fields and walls

  Towards her, and found her weeping for him –

  Able for all that distance to think me him.

  Chaucer

  ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

  The droghte of March hath perced to the roote…

  At the top of your voice, where you swayed on the top of a stile,

  Your arms raised – somewhat for balance, somewhat

  To hold the reins of the straining attention

  Of your imagined audience – you declaimed Chaucer

  To a field of cows. And the Spring sky had done it

  With its flying laundry, and the new emerald

  Of the thorns, the hawthorn, the blackthorn,

  And one of those bumpers of champagne

  You snatched unpredictably from pure spirit.

  Your voice went over the fields towards Grantchester.

  It must have sounded lost. But the cows

  Watched, then approached: they appreciated Chaucer.

  You went on and on. Here were reasons

  To recite Chaucer. Then came the Wyf of Bath,

  Your favourite character in all literature.

  You were rapt. And the cows were enthralled.

  They shoved and jostled shoulders, making a ring,

  To gaze into your face, with occasional snorts

  Of exclamation, renewed their astounded attention,

  Ears angling to catch every inflection,

  Keeping their awed six feet of reverence

  Away from you. You just could not believe it.

  And you could not stop. What would happen

  If you were to stop? Would they attack you,

  Scared by the shock of silence, or wanting more – ?

  So you had to go on. You went on –

  And twenty cows stayed with you hypnotized.

  How did you stop? I can’t remember

  You stopping. I imagine they reeled away –

  Rolling eyes, as if driven from their fodder.

  I imagine I shooed them away. But

  Your sostenuto rendering of Chaucer

  Was already perpetual. What followed

  Found my attention too full

  And had to go back into oblivion.

  You Hated Spain

  Spain frightened you. Spain

  Where I felt at home. The blood-raw light,

  The oiled anchovy faces, the African

  Black edges to everything, frightened you.

  Your schooling had somehow neglected Spain.

  The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum.

  You did not know the language, your soul was empty

  Of the signs, and the welding light

  Made your blood shrivel. Bosch

  Held out a spidery hand and you took it

  Timidly, a bobby-sox American.

  You saw right down to the Goya funeral grin

  And recognized it, and recoiled

  As your poems winced into chill, as your panic

  Clutched back towards college America.

  So we sat as tourists at the bullfight

  Watching bewildered bulls awkwardly butchered,

  Seeing the grey-faced matador, at the barrier

  Just below us, straightening his bent sword

  And vomiting with fear. And the horn

  That hid itself inside the blowfly belly

  Of the toppled picador punctured

  What was waiting for you. Spain

  Was the land of your dreams: the dust-red cadaver

  You dared not wake with, the puckering amputations

  No literature course had glamorized.

  The juju land behind your African lips.

  Spain was what you tried to wake up from

  And could not. I see you, in moonlight,

  Walking the empty wharf at Alicante

  Like a soul waiting for the ferry,

  A new soul, still not understanding,

  Thinking it is still your honeymoon

  In the happy world, with your whole life waiting,

  Happy, and all your poems still to be found.

  The Earthenware Head

  Who modelled your head of terracotta?

  Some American student friend.

  Life-size, the lips half-pursed, raw-edged

  With crusty tooling – a naturalistic attempt

  At a likeness that just failed. You did not like it.

  I did not like it. Unease magnetized it

  For a perverse rite. What possessed us

  To take it with us, in your red bucket bag?

  November fendamp haze, the river unfurling

  Dark whorls, ferrying slender willow yellows.

  The pollard willows wore comfortless antlers,

  Switch-horns, leafless. Just past where the field

  Broadens and the path strays up to the right

  To lose the river and puzzle for Grantchester,

  A chosen willow leaned towards the water.

  Above head height, the socket of a healed bole-wound,

  A twiggy crotch, nearly an owl’s porch,

  Made a mythic shrine for your double.

  I fitted it upright, firm. And a willow tree

  Was a Herm, with your head, watching East

  Through those tool-stabbed pupils. We left it

  To live the world’s life and weather forever.

  You ransacked Thesaurus in your poem about it,

  Veiling its mirror, rhyming yourself into safety

  From its orphaned fate.

  But it would not leave you. Weeks later

  We could not seem to hit on the tree. We did not

  Look too hard – just in passing.
Already

  You did not want to fear, if it had gone,

  What witchcraft might ponder it. You never

  Said much more about it.

  What happened?

  Maybe nothing happened. Perhaps

  It is still there, representing you

  To the sunrise, and happy

  In its cold pastoral, lips pursed slightly

  As if my touch had only just left it.

  Or did boys find it – and shatter it? Or

  Did the tree too kneel finally?

  Surely the river got it. Surely

  The river is its chapel. And keeps it. Surely

  Your deathless head, fired in a furnace,

  Face to face at last, kisses the Father

  Mudded at the bottom of the Cam,

  Beyond recognition or rescue,

  All our fears washed from it, and perfect,

  Under the stained mournful flow, saluted

  Only in summer briefly by the slender

  Punt-loads of shadows flitting towards their honey

  And the stopped clock.

  Evil.

  That was what you called the head. Evil.

  The Tender Place

  Your temples, where the hair crowded in,

  Were the tender place. Once to check

  I dropped a file across the electrodes

  Of a twelve-volt battery – it exploded

  Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up.

  Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed

  The thunderbolt into your skull.

  In their bleached coats, with blenched faces,

  They hovered again

  To see how you were, in your straps.

  Whether your teeth were still whole.

  The hand on the calibrated lever

  Again feeling nothing

  Except feeling nothing pushed to feel

  Some squirm of sensation. Terror

  Was the cloud of you

  Waiting for these lightnings. I saw

  An oak limb sheared at a bang.

  You your Daddy’s leg. How many seizures

  Did you suffer this god to grab you

  By the roots of the hair? The reports

  Escaped back into clouds. What went up

  Vaporized? Where lightning rods wept copper

  And the nerve threw off its skin

  Like a burning child

  Scampering out of the bomb-flash. They dropped you

  A rigid bent bit of wire

  Across the Boston City grid. The lights

  In the Senate House dipped

  As your voice dived inwards

  Right through the bolt-hole basement.

  Came up, years later,

  Over-exposed, like an X-ray –

  Brain-map still dark-patched

  With the scorched-earth scars

  Of your retreat. And your words,

  Faces reversed from the light,

  Holding in their entrails.

  Black Coat

  I remember going out there,

  The tide far out, the North Shore ice-wind

  Cutting me back

  To the quick of the blood – that outer-edge nostalgia,

  The good feeling. My sole memory

  Of my black overcoat. Padding the wet sandspit.

  I was staring at the sea, I suppose.

  Trying to feel thoroughly alone,

  Simply myself, with sharp edges –

  Me and the sea one big tabula rasa,

  As if my returning footprints

  Out of that scrim of gleam, that horizon-wide wipe,

  Might be a whole new start.

  My shoe-sole shapes

  My only sign.

  My minimal but satisfying discussion

  With the sea.

  Putting my remarks down, for the thin tongue

  Of the sea to interpret. Inaudibly.

  A therapy,

  Instructions too complicated for me

  At the moment, but stowed in my black box for later.

  Like feeding a wild deer

  With potato crisps

  As you do in that snapshot where you exclaim

  Back towards me and my camera.

  So I had no idea I had stepped

  Into the telescopic sights

  Of the paparazzo sniper

  Nested in your brown iris.

  Perhaps you had no idea either,

  So far off, half a mile maybe,

  Looking towards me. Watching me

  Pin the sea’s edge down.

  No idea

  How that double image,

  Your eye’s inbuilt double exposure

  Which was the projection

  Of your two-way heart’s diplopic error,

  The body of the ghost and me the blurred see-through

  Came into single focus,

  Sharp-edged, stark as a target,

  Set up like a decoy

  Against that freezing sea

  From which your dead father had just crawled.

  I did not feel

  How, as your lenses tightened,

  He slid into me.

  Being Christlike

  You did not want to be Christlike. Though your Father

  Was your God and there was no other, you did not

  Want to be Christlike. Though you walked

  In the love of your Father. Though you stared

  At the stranger your Mother.

  What had she to do with you

  But tempt you from your Father?

  When her great hooded eyes lowered

  Their moon so close

  Promising the earth you saw

  Your fate and you cried

  Get thee behind me. You did not

  Want to be Christlike. You wanted

  To be with your Father

  In wherever he was. And your body

  Barred your passage. And your family

  Which were your flesh and blood

  Burdened it. And a god

  That was not your Father

  Was a false god. But you did not

  Want to be Christlike.

  The God

  You were like a religious fanatic

  Without a god – unable to pray.

  You wanted to be a writer.

  Wanted to write? What was it within you

  Had to tell its tale?

  The story that has to be told

  Is the writer’s God, who calls

  Out of sleep, inaudibly: ‘Write.’

  Write what?

  Your heart, mid-Sahara, raged

  In its emptiness.

  Your dreams were empty.

  You bowed at your desk and you wept

  Over the story that refused to exist,

  As over a prayer

  That could not be prayed

  To a non-existent God. A dead God

  With a terrible voice.

  You were like those desert ascetics

  Who fascinated you,

  Parching in such a torturing

  Vacuum of God

  It sucked goblins out of their finger-ends,

  Out of the soft motes of the sun-shaft,

  Out of the blank rock face.

  The gagged prayer of their sterility

  Was a God.

  So was your panic of emptiness – a God.

  You offered him verses. First

  Little phials of the emptiness

  Into which your panic dropped its tears

  That dried and left crystalline spectra.

  Crusts of salt from your sleep.

  Like the dewy sweat

  On some desert stones, after dawn.

  Oblations to an absence.

  Little sacrifices. Soon

  Your silent howl through the night

  Had made itself a moon, a fiery idol

  Of your God.

  Your crying carried its moon

  Like a woman a dead child. Like a woman

  Nursi
ng a dead child, bending to cool

  Its lips with tear-drops on her finger-tip,

  So I nursed you, who nursed a moon

  That was human but dead, withered and

  Burned you like a lump of phosphorus.

  Till the child stirred. Its mouth-hole stirred.

  Blood oozed at your nipple,

  A drip feed of blood. Our happy moment!

  The little god flew up into the Elm Tree.

  In your sleep, glassy eyed,

  You heard its instructions. When you woke

  Your hands moved. You watched them in dismay

  As they made a new sacrifice.

  Two handfuls of blood, your own blood,

  And in that blood gobbets of me,

  Wrapped in a tissue of story that had somehow

  Slipped from you. An embryo story.

  You could not explain it or who

  Ate at your hands.

  The little god roared at night in the orchard,

  His roar half a laugh.

  You fed him by day, under your hair-tent,

  Over your desk, in your secret

  Spirit house, you whispered,

  You drummed on your thumb with your fingers,

  Shook Winthrop shells for their sea-voices,

  And gave me an effigy – a Salvia

  Pressed in a Lutheran Bible.

  You could not explain it. Sleep had opened.

  Darkness poured from it, like perfume.

  Your dreams had burst their coffin.

  Blinded I struck a light

  And woke upside down in your spirit-house

  Moving limbs that were not my limbs,

  And telling, in a voice not my voice,

  A story of which I knew nothing,

  Giddy

  With the smoke of the fire you tended

  Flames I had lit unwitting

  That whitened in the oxygen jet

  Of your incantatory whisper.

  You fed the flames with the myrrh of your mother

  The frankincense of your father