by Hughes, Ted
The guards indeed more defenceless
More terribly naked needing
The music more
A Dove
Snaps its twig-tether – mounts –
Dream-yanked up into vacuum
Wings snickering.
Another, in a shatter, hurls dodging away up.
They career through tree-mazes –
Nearly uncontrollable love-weights.
Or now
Temple-dancers, possessed, and steered
By solemn powers
Through insane, stately convulsions.
Porpoises
Of dove-lust and blood splendour
With arcs
And plungings, and spray-slow explosions.
Now violently gone
Riding the snake of the long love-whip
Among flarings of mares and stallions
Now staying
Coiled on a bough
Bubbling molten, wobbling top-heavy
Into one and many.
INDEXES
INDEX OF TITLES
Anniversary 1
Apple Dumps 1
Apple Tragedy 1
Astrological Conundrums 1
Autumn Notes, from 1
Bawdry Embraced, Song from 1
Bayonet Charge 1
Beacon, The 1
Bear, The 1
Bedtime Anecdote 1
Being Christlike 1
Birth of Rainbow 1
Black Beast, The 1
Black Coat 1
Bones 1
Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days 1
Bringing in New Couples 1
Bull Moses, The 1
Cadenza 1
Canal’s Drowning Black, The 1
Casualty, The 1
Cat and Mouse 1
Chaucer 1
Childish Prank, A 1
Children 1
Chinese History of Colden Water 1
Cleopatra to the Asp 1
Cock-Crows 1
Coming Down Through Somerset 1
Conjuring in Heaven 1
Contender, The 1
Cormorant, A 1
Cranefly in September, A 1
Crow and the Birds 1
Crow Blacker than Ever 1
Crow Hill 1
Crow on the Beach 1
Crow’s Account of the Battle 1
Crow’s Battle Fury 1
Crow’s Elephant Totem Song 1
Crow’s Fall 1
Crow’s First Lesson 1
Crow’s Last Stand 1
Crow’s Vanity 1
Crow Tyrannosaurus 1
Crow Wakes 1
Curlews 1
Dawn’s Rose 1
Day He Died, The 1
Deaf School 1
Dehorning 1
Descent 1
Dogs Are Eating Your Mother, The 1
Do not Pick up the Telephone 1
Dove, A 1
Dust As We Are 1
Earthenware Head, The 1
Earth-Numb 1
Eclipse 1
Eel, An 1
Egg-Head 1
Emily Brontë 1
Error, The 1
Esther’s Tomcat 1
Evening Thrush 1
Examination at the Womb-Door 1
Executioner, The 1
Fallgrief’s Girlfriends 1
Famous Poet 1
February 1
February 17th 1
Fern 1
Fire-Eater 1
Flayed Crow in the Hall of Judgement, A 1
Folktale 1
Football at Slack 1
For Billy Holt 1
For the Duration 1
Fourth of July 1
Fragment of an Ancient Tablet 1
Full Moon and Little Frieda 1
Ghost Crabs 1
Gnat-Psalm 1
God, A 1
God, The 1
Go Fishing 1
Gog 1
Green Wolf, The 1
Grosse Fuge 1
Guide, The 1
Gulkana, The 1
Hare, The 1
Harvest Moon, The 1
Hawk Roosting 1
Hen, The 1
Heptonstall 1
Heptonstall Old Church 1
Her Husband 1
His Legs Ran About 1
Honey Bee, The 1
Horrible Religious Error, A 1
Horses, The 1
Howling of Wolves, The 1
How Water Began to Play 1
In Laughter 1
In the Likeness of a Grasshopper 1
In the M5 Restaurant 1
Jaguar, The 1
Japanese River Tales 1
Kafka 1
Knight, The 1
Kreutzer Sonata 1
Lake, The 1
Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers, The 1
Leaf Mould 1
Leaves 1
life is Trying to be Life 1
Lineage 1
Lines about Elias 1
Littleblood 1
Little Whale Song 1
Locket, The 1
Long Tunnel Ceiling, The 1
Lovepet, The 1
Lovesong 1
Low Water 1
Man Seeking Experience Enquires His Way of a Drop of Water, The 1
March Calf, A 1
Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar, The 1
Match, A 1
Mayday on Holderness 1
Meeting 1
Memory 1
Memory, A 1
Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan 1
Moors 1
Motorbike, A 1
Mount Zion 1
New Foal 1
New Moon in January 1
Night Arrival of Sea-Trout 1
Notes for a Little Play 1
November 1
October Dawn 1
October Salmon 1
Old Oats 1
On the Reservations 1
Ophelia 1
Opus 1 2
Orts 1
Other, The 1
Otter, An 1
Out 1
Owl’s Song 1
Performance 1
Pibroch 1
Pike 1
Poets 1
Prometheus on His Crag, from 1
Prospero and Sycorax 1
Public Bar TV 1
Rain 1
Rain-Charm for the Duchy 1
Ravens 1
Reckless Head 1
Recklings 1
Relic 1
Remembering Teheran 1
Retired Colonel, The 1
Revenge Fable 1
Rhododendrons 1
Risen, The 1
River in March, The 1
River, The 1
Robin Song 1
Roe-Deer 1
Sacrifice 1
Salmon Eggs 1
Scapegoats and Rabies 1
Scream, The 1
Second Glance at a Jaguar 1
Seven Dungeon Songs, from 1
Sheep 1
Shibboleth 1
Six Young Men 1
Sketching a Thatcher 1
Skylarks 1
Small Events 1
Smile, The 1
Snow 1
Snowdrop 1
Soliloquy 1
Song 1
Song from Bawdry Embraced 1
Song of a Rat 1
Speech out of Shadow 1
Stanbury Moor 1
Stations 1
Stealing Trout on a May Morning 1
Still Life 1
Stone, The 1
Strangers 1
Strawberry Hill 1
Sunstroke 1
Sunstruck 1
Sunstruck Foxglove 1
Swifts 1
Telegraph Wires 1
Tender Place, The 1
Tern 1
That Moment 1
That Morning 1
That Star 1
&n
bsp; Theology 1
Thistles 1
Thought-Fox, The 1
Thrushes 1
Tiger-Psalm 1
To Paint a Water Lily 1
Tractor 1
Tree 1
Trees 1
Tutorial 1
TV Off 1
Two Legends 1
Two Tortoiseshell Butterflies 1
Vampire 1
View of a Pig 1
Violet at Lough Aughresberg, A 1
Walt 1
Warriors of the North, The 1
Water 1
When Men Got to the Summit 1
Where I Sit Writing My Letter 1
Widdop 1
Wilfred Owen’s Photographs 1
Wind 1
Witches 1
Wodwo 1
Woman Unconscious, A 1
You Hated Spain 1
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
A bang – a burning 155
Above – the well-known lips, delicately downed 114
A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket 87
A fallen immortal found this valley 160
After the fiesta, the beauty contests, the drunken wrestling 133
After the five-month drought 285
Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men 55
A great bird landed here 171
A green level of lily leaves 31
A hoist up and I could lean over 32
A lamb could not get born. Ice wind 186
A leaf’s otherness 10
All darkness comes together, rounding an egg 124
And he is an owl 60
A priest from a different land 170
A primrose petal’s edge 151
Are a stage 160
A splinter, flicked 75
A stoat danced on the lawns here 26
As we came through the gate to look at the few new lambs 184
As you bend to touch 227
At nightfalll, as the sea darkens 58
At the bottom of the Arctic sea, they say 155
A trap 232
Bad-tempered bullying bunch, the horned cows 176
Began under the groan of the oldest forest 107
Better disguised than the leaf-insect 51
Between plunging valleys, on a bareback of hill 157
Beyond a twilight of limes and willows 140
Bird-bones is on the roof. Seventy-eight 182
Blackness 168
Black village of gravestones 78
Black was the without eye 89
Bloody Mary’s venomous flames can curl 19
Bones is a crazy pony 214
Born at the bottom of the heap. And as he grew upwards 271
Bred wild leopards – among the pale depth fungus 166
Bringing their frozen swords, their salt-bleached eyes 75
Burning 113
Calves harshly parted from their mamas 154
Cars collide and erupt luggage and babies 102
Collision with the earth has finally come 149
Comes home dull with coal-dust deliberately 56
Creation quaked voices 93
Crowd the horizons, poised, wings 204
Dawn – a smouldering fume of dry frost 193
Dawn. The river thins 249
Daylong this tomcat lies stretched flat 27
Dead, she became space-earth 198
Death is also trying to be life 196
Did music help him? Indeed it helped him 313
Dripped a chill virulence 161
Fallen from heaven, lies across 243
Farmers in the fields, housewives behind steamed windows 15
Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts 134
Fills up 122
First – the sun coming closer, growing by the minute 116
For half an hour, through a magnifying glass 228
Frightening the blood in its tunnel 42
From what dog’s dish or crocodile’s rotten 20
God tried to teach Crow how to talk 92
Going up for the assault that morning 275
Has conquered. He has surrendered everything 123
Has not yet been cut 207
Hearing shingle explode, seeing it skip 99
He did not know she had risen out of the cinders 309
He hears lithe trees and last leaves swatting the glass 208
He loved her and she loved him 114
Here before me, snake-head 258
Here is the fern’s frond, unfurling a gesture 61
He sang 104
He’s lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety 262
He smiles in a mirror, shrinking the whole 13
He stands, filling the doorway 128
Honeysuckle hanging her fangs 262
How it hung 211
I am the hunted king 103
I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark 7
I felt a strange fear when the war-talk 273
I flash-glimpsed in the headlights – the high moment 188
I found this jawbone at the sea’s edge 29
I had exploded, a bombcloud, lob-headed, my huge fingers 53
I know well 153
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest 3
In Hardcastle Crags, that echoey museum 158
In the beginning was Scream 90
In the dawn-dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year 181
In the huge, wide-open, sleeping eye of the mountain 64
I park the car half in the ditch and switch off and sit 45
I remember going out there 298
I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp 150
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed 29
Is melting an old frost moon 107
I stood on a dark summit, among dark summits 167
Is without world 84
I was just walking about 267
I whispered to the holly 50
I woke to a shout: ‘I am Alpha and Omega’ 70
Join water, wade in underbeing 255
Jumbled iceberg hills, away to the North 250
Just before the curtain falls in the river 260
Light words forsook them 165
Like a propped skull 49
Looking close in the evil mirror Crow saw 101
‘Mad laughter’, your sister – her grey perm 289
Man’s and woman’s bodies lay without souls 91
Mid-May – after May frosts that killed the Camellias 223
My father sat in his chair recovering 72
My mother in her feathers of flame 291
My neighbour moves less and less, attempts less 63
My post-war father was so silent 269
new to the blood 206
No, the serpent did not 70
Not that she had no equal, not that she was 9
Not your eyes, but what they disguise 197
Now is the globe shrunk tight 40
Now the river is rich, but her voice is low 132
Now you have stabbed her good 71
October is marigold, and yet 14
Of the main-road canal bridge 169
O lady, when the tipped cup of the moon blessed you 4
O littleblood, hiding from the mountains in the mountains 119
On a flaked ridge of the desert 59
Once I said lightly 149
Once upon a time 105
Once was every woman the witch 39
On moors where people get lost and die of air 48
On the sheep-cropped summit, under hot sun 33
Opus 131 in C Sharp Minor 310
Our sad coats assemble at the counter 203
Outcrop stone is miserly 55
Pain was pulled down over his eyes like a fool’s hat 208
Pike, three inches long, perfect 41
Prometheus on His Crag 218
Rain. Floods. Frost. And after frost, rain 175
R
ight from the start he is dressed in his best — his blacks and his whites 131
Rouses in its cave 205
Russia and America circle each other 25
She gives him his eyes, she found them 127
She had too much so with a smile you took some 305
She is struggling through grass-mesh – not flying 147
She knows, like Ophelia 206
Skinful of bowls he bowls them 60
Sleeping and waking in the Song of Songs 306
Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning 154
Snaps its twig-tether – mounts 315
Snow falling. Snowflakes clung and melted 308
So finally there was nothing 104
Soldiers are marching singing down the lane 65
So on the seventh day 112
Spain frightened you. Spain 294
Spluttering near out, before it touches the moors 52
Stare at the monster: remark 5
Suddenly he awoke and was running – raw 16
Suddenly his poor body 61
Suddenly hooligan baby starlings 225
Take telegraph wires, a lonely moor 270
Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn 39
That Elf 238
That is not your mother but her body 304
That plastic Buddha jars out a Karate screech 215
That star 204
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun 4
The breaker humps its green glass 226
The bright mirror I braved: the devil in it 43
The celluloid of a photograph holds them well 17
The chestnut splits its padded cell 144
The deaf children were monkey-nimble, fish-tremulous and sudden 195
The farms are oozing craters in 25
The father capers across the yard cobbles 290
The flame-red moon, the harvest moon 142
The freedom of Saturday afternoons 162
The grass-blade is not without 152
The Hen 236
The Honey Bee 227
The hot shallows and seas we bring our blood from 27
The lark begins to go up 78
The longships got this far. Then 164
The month of the drowned dog. After long rain the land 36
The morass is bulging and aborting 48