A Ted Hughes Bestiary

by Ted Hughes

  Into the hound’s mouth? As I write this down

  He runs still fresh, with all his chances before him.

  27 December 1975

  Roe-deer

  In the dawn-dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year

  Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.

  They had happened into my dimension

  The moment I was arriving just there.

  They planted their two or three years of secret deerhood

  Clear on my snow-screen vision of the abnormal

  And hesitated in the all-way disintegration

  And stared at me. And so for some lasting seconds

  I could think the deer were waiting for me

  To remember the password and sign

  That the curtain had blown aside for a moment

  And there where the trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road

  The deer had come for me.

  Then they ducked through the hedge, and upright they rode their legs

  Away downhill over a snow-lonely field

  Towards tree dark – finally

  Seeming to eddy and glide and fly away up

  Into the boil of big flakes.

  The snow took them and soon their nearby hoofprints as well

  Revising its dawn inspiration

  Back to the ordinary.

  13 February 1973

  February 17th

  A lamb could not get born. Ice wind

  Out of a downpour dishclout sunrise. The mother

  Lay on the mudded slope. Harried, she got up

  And the blackish lump bobbed at her back-end

  Under her tail. After some hard galloping,

  Some manoeuvring, much flapping of the backward

  Lump head of the lamb looking out,

  I caught her with a rope. Laid her, head uphill

  And examined the lamb. A blood-ball swollen

  Tight in its black felt, its mouth gap

  Squashed crooked, tongue stuck out, black-purple,

  Strangled by its mother. I felt inside,

  Past the noose of mother-flesh, into the slippery

  Muscled tunnel, fingering for a hoof,

  Right back to the port-hole of the pelvis.

  But there was no hoof. He had stuck his head out too early

  And his feet could not follow. He should have

  Felt his way, tip-toe, his toes

  Tucked up under his nose

  For a safe landing. So I kneeled wrestling

  With her groans. No hand could squeeze past

  The lamb’s neck into her interior

  To hook a knee. I roped that baby head

  And hauled till she cried out and tried

  To get up and I saw it was useless. I went

  Two miles for the injection and a razor.

  Sliced the lamb’s throat-strings, levered with a knife

  Between the vertebrae and brought the head off

  To stare at its mother, its pipes sitting in the mud

  With all earth for a body. Then pushed

  The neck-stump right back in, and as I pushed

  She pushed. She pushed crying and I pushed gasping.

  And the strength

  Of the birth push and the push of my thumb

  Against that wobbly vertebra were deadlock,

  A to-fro futility. Till I forced

  A hand past and got a knee. Then like

  Pulling myself to the ceiling with one finger

  Hooked in a loop, timing my effort

  To her birth push groans, I pulled against

  The corpse that would not come. Till it came.

  And after it the long, sudden, yolk-yellow

  Parcel of life

  In a smoking slither of oils and soups and syrups –

  And the body lay born, beside the hacked-off head.

  17 February 1974

  Coming down through Somerset

  I flash-glimpsed in the headlights – the high moment

  Of driving through England – a killed badger

  Sprawled with helpless legs. Yet again

  Manoeuvred lane-ends, retracked, waited

  Out of decency for headlights to die,

  Lifted by one warm hindleg in the world-night

  A slain badger. August dust-heat. Beautiful,

  Beautiful, warm, secret beast. Bedded him

  Passenger, bleeding from the nose. Brought him close

  Into my life. Now he lies on the beam

  Torn from a great building. Beam waiting two years

  To be built into new building. Summer coat

  Not worth skinning off him. His skeleton – for the future.

  Fangs, handsome concealed. Flies, drumming,

  Bejewel his transit. Heatwave ushers him hourly

  Towards his underworlds. A grim day of flies

  And sunbathing. Get rid of that badger.

  A night of shrunk rivers, glowing pastures,

  Sea-trout shouldering up through trickles. Then the sun again

  Waking like a torn-out eye. How strangely

  He stays on into the dawn – how quiet

  The dark bear-claws, the long frost-tipped guard hairs!

  Get rid of that badger today.

  And already the flies.

  More passionate, bringing their friends. I don’t want

  To bury and waste him. Or skin him (it is too late).

  Or hack off his head and boil it

  To liberate his masterpiece skull. I want him

  To stay as he is. Sooty gloss-throated,

  With his perfect face. Paws so tired,

  Power-body relegated. I want him

  To stop time. His strength staying, bulky,

  Blocking time. His rankness, his bristling wildness,

  His thrillingly painted face.

  A badger on my moment of life.

  Not years ago, like the others, but now.

  I stand

  Watching his stillness, like an iron nail

  Driven, flush to the head,

  Into a yew post. Something has to stay.

  8 August 1975

  While she chews sideways

  He gently noses the high point of her rear-end

  Then lower and on each side of the tail,

  Then flattens one ear, and gazes away, then decidedly turns, wheels,

  And moves in on the pink-eyed long-horned grey.

  He sniffs the length of her spine, arching slightly

  And shitting a tumble-thud shit as he does so.

  Now he’s testy.

  He takes a push at the crazy galloway with the laid back ears.

  Now strolling away from them all, his aim at the corner gate.

  He is scratching himself on the fence, his vibration

  Travels the length of the wire.

  His barrel bulk is a bit ugly.

  As bulls go he’s no beauty.

  His balls swing in their sock, one side idle.

  His skin is utility white, shit-patched,

  Pink sinewed at the groin, and the dewlap nearly naked.

  A feathery long permed bush of silky white tail –

  It hangs straight like a bell rope

  From the power-strake of his spine.

  He eats steadily, not a cow in the field is open,

  His gristly pinkish head, like a shaved blood-hound,

  Jerking at the grass.

  Overmuch muscle on the thighs, jerk-weight settling

  Of each foot, as he eats forward.

  His dangle tassel swings, his whole mind

  Anchored to it and now dormant.

  He’s feeding disgustedly, impatiently, carelessly.

  His nudity is a bit disgusting. Overmuscled

  And a bit shameful, like an overdeveloped body-builder.

  He has a juvenile look, a delinquent eye

  Very unlikeable as he lifts his nostrils

  And his upper lip, to test a newcomer.

  Today
none of that mooning around after cows,

  That trundling obedience, like a trailer. None of the cows

  Have any power today, and he’s stopped looking.

  He lays his head sideways, and worries the grass,

  Keeping his intake steady.

  15 September 1973

  Sheep

  I

  The sheep has stopped crying.

  All morning in her wire-mesh compound

  On the lawn, she has been crying

  For her vanished lamb. Yesterday they came.

  Then her lamb could stand, in a fashion,

  And make some tiptoe cringing steps.

  Now he has disappeared.

  He was only half the proper size.

  And his cry was wrong. It was not

  A dry little hard bleat, a baby-cry

  Over a flat tongue, it was human,

  It was a despairing human smooth Oh!

  Like no lamb I ever heard. Its hindlegs

  Cowered in under its lumped spine,

  Its feeble hips leaned towards

  Its shoulders for support. Its stubby

  White wool pyramid head, on a tottery neck,

  Had sad and defeated eyes, pinched, pathetic,

  Too small, and it cried all the time

  Oh! Oh! staggering towards

  Its alert, baffled, stamping, storming mother

  Who feared our intentions. He was too weak

  To find her teats, or to nuzzle up in under,

  He hadn’t the gumption. He was fully

  Occupied just standing, then shuffling

  Towards where she’d removed to. She knew

  He wasn’t right, she couldn’t

  Make him out. Then his rough-curl legs,

  So stoutly built, and hooved

  With real quality tips,

  Just got in the way, like a loose bundle

  Of firewood he was cursed to manage,

  Too heavy for him, lending sometimes

  Some support, but no strength, no real help.

  When we sat his mother on her tail, he mouthed her teat,

  Slobbered a little, but after a minute

  Lost aim and interest, his muzzle wandered,

  He was managing a difficulty

  Much more urgent and important. By evening

  He could not stand. It was not

  That he could not thrive, he was born

  With everything but the will –

  That can be deformed, just like a limb.

  Death was more interesting to him.

  Life could not get his attention.

  So he died, with the yellow birth-mucus

  Still in his cardigan.

  He did not survive a warm summer night.

  Now his mother has started crying again.

  The wind is oceanic in the elms

  And the blossom is all set.

  20 May 1974

  II

  The mothers have come back

  From the shearing, and behind the hedge

  The woe of sheep is like a battlefield

  In the evening, when the fighting is over,

  And the cold begins, and the dew falls,

  And bowed women move with water.

  Mother Mother Mother the lambs

  Are crying, and the mothers are crying.

  Nothing can resist that probe, that cry

  Of a lamb for its mother, or a ewe’s crying

  For its lamb. The lambs cannot find

  Their mothers among those shorn strangers.

  A half-hour they have lamented,

  Shaking their voices in desperation.

  Bald brutal-voiced mothers braying out,

  Flat-tongued lambs chopping off hopelessness

  Their hearts are in panic, their bodies

  Are a mess of woe, woe they cry,

  They mingle their trouble, a music

  Of worse and worse distress, a worse entangling,

  They hurry out little notes

  With all their strength, cries searching this way and that.

  The mothers force out sudden despair, blaaa!

  On restless feet, with wild heads.

  Their anguish goes on and on, in the June heat.

  Only slowly their hurt dies, cry by cry,

  As they fit themselves to what has happened.

  4 June 1976

  The Lovepet

  Was it an animal was it a bird?

  She stroked it. He spoke to it softly.

  She made her voice its happy forest.

  He brought it out with sugarlump smiles.

  Soon it was licking their kisses.

  She gave it the strings of her voice which it swallowed

  He gave it the blood of his face it grew eager

  She gave it the liquorice of her mouth it began to thrive

  He opened the aniseed of his future

  And it bit and gulped, grew vicious, snatched

  The focus of his eyes

  She gave it the steadiness of her hand

  He gave it the strength of his spine it ate everything

  It began to cry what could they give it

  They gave it their calendars it bolted their diaries

  They gave it their sleep it gobbled their dreams

  Even while they slept

  It ate their bodyskin and the muscle beneath

  They gave it vows its teeth clashed its starvation

  Through every word they uttered

  It found snakes under the floor it ate them

  It found a spider horror

  In their palms and ate it

  They gave it double smiles and blank silence

  It chewed holes in their carpets

  They gave it logic

  It ate the colour of their hair

  They gave it every argument that would come

  They gave it shouting and yelling they meant it

  It ate the faces of their children

  They gave it their photograph albums they gave it their records

  It ate the colour of the sun

  They gave it a thousand letters they gave it money

  It ate their future complete it waited for them

  Staring and starving

  They gave it screams it had gone too far

  It ate into their brains

  It ate the roof

  It ate lonely stone it ate wind crying famine

  It went furiously off

  They wept they called it back it could have everything

  It stripped out their nerves chewed chewed flavourless

  It bit at their numb bodies they did not resist

  It bit into their blank brains they hardly knew

  It moved bellowing

  Through a ruin of starlight and crockery

  It drew slowly off they could not move

  It went far away they could not speak

  Mosquito

  To get into life

  Mosquito died many deaths.

  The slow millstone of polar ice, turned by the galaxy,

  Only polished her egg.

  Sub-zero, bulging all its mountain-power,

  Failed to fracture her bubble.

  The lake that squeezed her kneeled,

  Tightened to granite – splintering quartz teeth,

  But only sharpened her needle.

  Till the strain was too much, even for Earth.

  The stars drew off, trembling.

  The mountains sat back, sweating.

  The lake burst.

  Mosquito

  Flew up singing, over the broken waters –

  A little haze of wings, a midget sun.

  Cuckoo

  Cuckoo’s first cry, in light April,

  Taps at the cool, suspended, ponderous jar

  Of maiden blood

  Like a finger-tip at a barometer.

  That first ribald whoop, as a stolen kiss

  Sets the diary trembling.

  The orchard flushes. The hairy cop
se grows faint

  With bluebells.

  Sudden popping up of a lolling Priapus –

  Hooha! Hooha!

  Dizzying Milkymaids with innuendo.

  Cuckoo jinks in – dowses his hawk-fright crucifix

  Over the nest-bird’s eye

  And leaves his shadow in the egg.

  Then his cry flees guilty – woodland to woodland,

  Hunted by itself, all day dodging

  The dropped double that dogs it.

  O Orphan of Orphans! O moon-witted

  Ill-bred dud-hawk!

  Cavorting on pylons, you and your witchy moll!

  With heartless blow on blow all afternoon

  He opens hair-fine fractures through the heirloom

  Chinaware hearts of spinsters in rose-cottages.

  Then comes ducking under gates, pursued by a husband.

  Or, invisibly, stately, through the blue shire

  Trawls a vista-shimmering shawl of echo.

  Later, the pair of them sit hiccoughing,

  Chuckling, syncopating, translating

  That lewd loopy shout

  Into a ghoulish

  Double-act, stuttering

  Gag about baby-murder.

  Swans

  Washed in Arctic,

  Return to their ballroom of glass

  Still in the grip of the wizard,

  With the jewel stuck in their throats.

  Each one still condemned

  To meditate all day on her mirror

  Hypnotised with awe.

  Each swan glued in her reflection

  Airy

  As the water-caught plume of a swan.

  Each snowdrop lyrical daughter possessed

  By the coil

  Of a black and scowling serpent –

  Dipping her eyes into subzero darkness,

  Searching the dregs of old lakes

  For her lost music.

  Then they all writhe up the air,

  A hard-hooved onset of cavalry –

  Harp the iceberg wall with soft fingers.

  Or drift, at evening, far out

  Beyond islands, where the burning levels

  Spill into the sun

  And the snowflake of their enchantment melts.

  Buzzard

  Big hands, big thumbs, broad workaday hands

  Darkened with working the land

  Kneading the contours, squeezing out rats and rabbits.

  Most of the day elongates a telephone pole

  With his lighthouse lookout and swivel noddle.

  O beggared eagle! O down-and-out falcon!

  Mooning and ambling along hedgerow levels,

  Forbidden the sun’s glittering ascent –

  As if you were sentenced to pick blackberries