by Hughes, Ted
And your own amber and the tongues
Of fire told their tale. And suddenly
Everybody knew everything.
Your God snuffed up the fatty reek.
His roar was like a basement furnace
In your ears, thunder in the foundations.
Then you wrote in a fury, weeping,
Your joy a trance-dancer
In the smoke in the flames.
‘God is speaking through me,’ you told me.
‘Don’t say that,’ I cried, ‘Don’t say that.
That is horribly unlucky!’
As I sat there with blistering eyes
Watching everything go up
In the flames of your sacrifice
That finally caught you too till you
Vanished, exploding
Into the flames
Of the story of your God
Who embraced you
And your mummy and your daddy –
Your Aztec, Black Forest
God of the euphemism Grief.
The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother
That is not your mother but her body.
She leaped from our window
And fell there. Those are not dogs
That seem to be dogs
Pulling at her. Remember the lean hound
Running up the lane holding high
The dangling raw windpipe and lungs
Of a fox? Now see who
Will drop on all fours at the end of the street
And come romping towards your mother,
Pulling her remains, with their lips
Lifted like dog’s lips
Into new positions. Protect her
And they will tear you down
As if you were more her.
They will find you every bit
As succulent as she is. Too late
To salvage what she was.
I buried her where she fell.
You played around the grave. We arranged
Sea-shells and big veined pebbles
Carried from Appledore
As if we were herself. But a kind
Of hyena came aching upwind.
They dug her out. Now they batten
On the cornucopia
Of her body. Even
Bite the face off her gravestone,
Gulp down the grave ornaments,
Swallow the very soil.
So leave her.
Let her be their spoils. Go wrap
Your head in the snowy rivers
Of the Brooks Range. Cover
Your eyes with the writhing airs
Off the Nullarbor Plains. Let them
Jerk their tail-stumps, bristle and vomit
Over their symposia.
Think her better
Spread with holy care on a high grid
For vultures
To take back into the sun. Imagine
These bone-crushing mouths the mouths
That labour for the beetle
Who will roll her back into the sun.
The Other
She had too much so with a smile you took some.
Of everything she had you had
Absolutely nothing, so you took some.
At first, just a little.
Still she had so much she made you feel
Your vacuum, which nature abhorred,
So you took your fill, for nature’s sake.
Because her great luck made you feel unlucky
You had redressed the balance, which meant
Now you had some too, for yourself.
As seemed only fair. Still her ambition
Claimed the natural right to screw you up
Like a crossed-out page, tossed into a basket.
Somebody, on behalf of the gods,
Had to correct that hubris.
A little touch of hatred steadied the nerves.
Everything she had won, the happiness of it,
You collected
As your compensation
For having lost. Which left her absolutely
Nothing. Even her life was
Trapped in the heap you took. She had nothing.
Too late you saw what had happened.
It made no difference that she was dead.
Now that you had all she had ever had
You had much too much.
Only you
Saw her smile, as she took some.
At first, just a little.
The Locket
Sleeping and waking in the Song of Songs
You were half-blissful. But on occasion
Casually as a yawn, you’d open
Your death and contemplate it.
Your death
Was so utterly within your power
It was as if you had trapped it. Maybe by somehow
Giving it some part of you, for its food.
Now it was your curio pet,
Your familiar. But who else would have nursed it
In a locket between her breasts!
Smiling, you’d hold it up.
You’d swing it on its chain, to tease life.
It lent you uncanny power. A secret, blueish,
Demonic flash
When you smiled and gently bit the locket.
I have read how a fiery cross
Can grow and brighten in the dreams of a spinster.
But a crooked key turned in your locket.
It had sealed your door in Berlin
With the brand of the burnt. You knew exactly
How your death looked. It was a long-cold oven
Locked with a swastika.
The locket kept splitting open.
I would close it. You would smile.
Its lips kept coming apart – just a slit.
The clasp seemed to be faulty.
Who could have guessed what it was trying to say?
Your beauty, a folktale wager,
Was a quarter century posthumous.
While I juggled our futures, it kept up its whisper
To my deafened ear: fait accompli.
Shibboleth
Your German
Found its royal licence in the English
Your mother had bought (peering into the future)
By mail order, from Fortnum and Mason. Your Hebrew
Survived on bats and spiders
In the guerrilla priest-hole
Under your tongue. Nevertheless,
At the long-weekend Berkshire county table,
In a dizzy silence, your cheekbones
(From the Black Sea, where the roses bloom thrice)
Flushed sootier –
Stared at by English hounds
Whose tails had stopped wagging. When the lips lifted,
The trade-routes of the Altai
Tangled in your panic, tripped you. It was
The frontier glare of customs.
The gun-barrels
Of the imperious noses
Pointed at something pinioned. Then a drawl:
‘Lick of the tar-brush?’
There you saw it,
Your lonely Tartar death,
Surrounded and ‘dumb like the bound
Wolf on Tolstoy’s horse’.
Snow
Snow falling. Snowflakes clung and melted
In the sparkly black fox fur of your hat.
Soft chandeliers, ghostly wreckage
Of the Moscow Opera. Flakes perching and
Losing their hold on the heather tips. An unending
Walk down the cobbled hill into the oven
Of empty fire. Among the falling
Heavens. A short walk
That could never end was
Never ending. Down, on down
Under the thick, loose flocculence
Of a life
Burning out in the air. Between char-black buildings
Converted to closed cafés and Brontë gift-shops.
Beyond them, the constellations falling
&
nbsp; Through the Judaean thorns, into the fleeces
Of the Pennine sheep. Deepening
Over the faces of your school-friends,
Beside their snowed-under tanks, locked into the Steppe
Where the mud had frozen again
While they drank their coffee. You escaped
Deeper into the falling flakes. They were clinging
To the charcoal crimped black ponyskin
Coat you wore. Words seemed warm. They
Melted in our mouths
Whatever was trying to cling.
Leaning snow
Folded you under its cloak and ushered you away
Down the hill. Back to where you came from.
I watched you. Feeling the snow’s touch.
Already, it was burying your footprints,
Drawing its white sheet over everything,
Closing the air behind you.
Folktale
He did not know she had risen out of cinders.
She knew he had nothing.
So they ransacked each other. What he wanted
Was the gold, black-lettered pelt
Of the leopard of Ein-Gedi.
She wanted only the runaway slave.
What he wanted was Turgenev’s antimacassar.
She wanted escape without a passport.
What he wanted was Bach’s aerobatic
Gutturals in Arabic.
She wanted the enemy without his gun.
He wanted the seven treasures of Asia –
Skin, eyes, lips, blood, hair knotted roughly
In seven different flags.
She wanted the silent heraldry
Of the purple beech by the noble wall.
He wanted Cabala the ghetto demon
With its polythene bag full of ashes.
She wanted only shade from the noon’s
Broken-armed Catherine Wheel
Under an island leaf. She wanted
A love-knot Eden-cool as two lob-worms
And a child of acorn.
He wanted a mother of halva.
She wanted the hill-stream’s tabula rasa.
He wanted the thread-end of himself.
So they ransacked each other for everything
That could not be found. And their fingers met
And were wrestling, like flames
In the crackling thorns
Of everything they lacked –
as midnight struck.
Opus 131
Opus 131 in C Sharp Minor
Opened the great door
In the air, and through it
Flooded horror. The door in the hotel room
And the curtain at the window and even
The plain homely daylight blocking the window
Were in the wrong dimension
To shut it out. The counterpoint pinned back
The flaps of the body. Naked, faceless,
The heart panted there, like a foetus.
Where was the lifeline music? What had happened
To consolation, prayer, transcendence –
To the selective disconnecting
Of the pain centre? Dark insects
Fought with their instruments
Scampering through your open body
As if you had already left it. Beethoven
Had broken down. You strained listening
Maybe for divorce to be resolved
In the arithmetic of vibration
To pure zero, for the wave-particles
To pronounce on the unimportance
Of the menopause. Beethoven
Was trying to repair
The huge constellations of his silence
That flickered and glinted in the wind.
But the notes, with their sharp faces,
Were already carrying you off,
Each with a different bit, into the corners
Of the Universe.
Descent
You had to strip off Germany
The crisp shirt with its crossed lightnings
And go underground.
You were forced to strip off Israel
The bodice woven of the hairs of the cactus
To be bullet-proof, and go deeper.
You had to strip off Russia
With those ear-rings worn in honour
Of Eugene Onegin. And go deeper.
You had to strip off British Columbia
And the fish-skin mock-up waterproof
From the cannery, with its erotic motif
Of porcupine quills, that pierced you
And came with you, working deeper
As you moved deeper.
Finally you had to strip off England
With your wedding rings
And go deeper.
Then suddenly you were abandoned
By the gem-stones, rubies, emeralds, all you had hoarded
In a fold of paper
At the back of a drawer – you had thought
These would protect you in the end,
Urim and Thummim. Cowardly
They scattered in the splinters of weeping
As your own hands, stronger than your choked outcry,
Took your daughter from you. She was stripped from you,
The last raiment
Clinging round your neck, the sole remnant
Between you and the bed
In the underworld
Where Inanna
Has to lie naked, between strata
That can never be opened, except as a book.
The Error
When her grave opened its ugly mouth
Why didn’t you just fly,
Wrap yourself in your hair and make yourself scarce,
Why did you kneel down at the grave’s edge
To be identified
Accused and convicted
By all who held in their hands
Pieces of the gravestone grey granite
Proof of their innocence?
You must have misheard a sentence.
You were always mishearing
Into Hebrew or German
What was muttered in English.
Her grave mouthed its riddle right enough.
But maybe you heard in the air somewhere
An answer to one of your own
Unspoken enigmas. Misheard,
Mistook, and kneeled meekly.
Maybe they wouldn’t stone you
If you became a nun
And selflessly incinerated yourself
In the shrine of her death.
Because that is what you did. From that moment
Shops, jobs, baby daughter, the German au pair
Had to become mere shapes
In the offered-up flames, a kind of writhing
That enfolded you and devoured
Your whole life.
I watched you feeding the flames.
Why didn’t you wrap yourself in a carpet
Get to a hospital
Drop the whole mistake – simply call it
An error in translation?
Instead you fed those flames
Six full calendar years –
Every tarred and brimstone
Day torn carefully off,
One at a time, not one wasted, patient
As if you were feeding a child.
You were not feeding a child.
All you were doing was being strong,
Waiting for your ashes
To be complete and to cool.
Finally they made a small cairn.
Lines about Elias
for Thom Gunn
Did music help him? Indeed it helped him.
His crude music, instruments
Imitated uncannily but weirdly
Restored the order of music
Within the terror of the Camp.
They could have been baboons
In some demented phase of tribal breakdown
During a famine, or under the effects
Of a poisonous dust from space.
Yet his music, for its few moments
Ushered them into a formation
Where the Camp did not exist
Where their sorrowful bodies did not exist.
So the scabies on his belly the sores and
Inflammations which made Elias
That ferocious clown crow
And ridiculed him, ripping down his trousers
Fighting with him in the mud
They did not touch his music
Did not adhere to any note of it
Or disturb his performance
Through which his fellow-prisoners escaped
Their rags, their last few horrible hours, their next few
Frightful possibly fatal days, sooner
Or later nearly certainly fatal days
Standing aside from them, stepping a little
Out of the time corridor, standing in a group
Just outside it, where the air was still,
In the solidarity of souls, where music uttered
The dumbness of naked bodies
As if it were the inside of the earth
And everything else –
The hours where their soft surfaces
Tore against the hard –
Were merely rags
It happened to wear, and could ignore.
Music poured out of nowhere
Strange food
And made them for those moments unaware
Of their starvation and indifferent
To their humanity
While the guards too, shedding and
Escaping their humanity
Lowered themselves into the sound
As into a communal bath
Where all were anonymous new-born
Innocent all equally
Innocent equally defenceless