New and Selected Poems (10 page)

Read New and Selected Poems Online

Authors: Ted Hughes

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BOOK: New and Selected Poems
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II THE RAT’S VISION
 

The rat hears the wind saying something in the straw

And the night-fields that have come up to the fence, leaning their silence,

The widowed land

With its trees that know how to cry

 

The rat sees the farm bulk of beam and stone

Wobbling like reflection on water.

The wind is pushing from the gulf

Through the old barbed wire, in through the trenched gateway, past the gates of the ear, deep into the worked design of days,

 

Breathes onto the solitary snow crystal

 

The rat screeches

And ‘Do not go’ cry the dandelions, from their heads of folly

And ‘Do not go’ cry the yard cinders, who have no future, only their infernal aftermath

And ‘Do not go’ cries the cracked trough by the gate, fatalist of starlight and zero

 

‘Stay’ says the arrangement of stars

 

Forcing the rat’s head down into godhead.

 
III THE RAT’S FLIGHT
 

The heaven shudders, a flame unrolled like a whip,

And the stars jolt in their sockets.

And the sleep-souls of eggs

Wince under the shot of shadow –

 

That was the Shadow of the Rat

Crossing into power

Never to be buried

 

The horned Shadow of the Rat

Casting here by the door

A bloody gift for the dogs

 

While it supplants Hell.

 
Heptonstall
 
 

Black village of gravestones.

Skull of an idiot

Whose dreams die back

Where they were born.

 

Skull of a sheep

Whose meat melts

Under its own rafters.

Only the flies leave it.

 

Skull of a bird,

The great geographies

Drained to sutures

Of cracked windowsills. 

 

Life tries.

 

Death tries.

 

The stone tries.

 

Only the rain never tires.

 
Skylarks
 
 
I
 

The lark begins to go up

Like a warning

As if the globe were uneasy –

Barrel-chested for heights,

Like an Indian of the high Andes,

 

A whippet head, barbed like a hunting arrow,

 

But leaden

With muscle

For the struggle

Against

Earth’s centre.

 

And leaden

For ballast

In the rocketing storms of the breath.

 

Leaden

Like a bullet

To supplant

Life from its centre.

 
II
 

Crueller than owl or eagle

 

A towered bird, shot through the crested head

With the command, Not die

 

But climb

 

Climb

 

Sing

 

Obedient as to death a dead thing.

 
III
 

I suppose you just gape and let your gaspings

Rip in and out through your voicebox

                                                          O lark

 

And sing inwards as well as outwards

Like a breaker of ocean milling the shingle

                                                                 O lark

 

O song, incomprehensibly both ways –

Joy! Help! Joy! Help!

                                  O lark

 
IV
 

You stop to rest, far up, you teeter

Over the drop

 

But not stopping singing

 

Resting only for a second

 

Dropping just a little

 

Then up and up and up

 

Like a mouse with drowning fur

Bobbing and bobbing at the well-wall

 

Lamenting, mounting a little –

 

But the sun will not take notice

And the earth’s centre smiles.

 
V
 

My idleness curdles

Seeing the lark labour near its cloud

Scrambling

In a nightmare difficulty

Up through the nothing

 

Its feathers thrash, its heart must be drumming like a motor,

As if it were too late, too late

 

Dithering in ether

Its song whirls faster and faster

And the sun whirls

The lark is evaporating

Till my eye’s gossamer snaps

                           and my hearing floats back widely to earth

 

After which the sky lies blank open

Without wings, and the earth is a folded clod.

 

Only the sun goes silently and endlessly on with the lark’s song.

 
VI
 

All the dreary Sunday morning

Heaven is a madhouse

With the voices and frenzies of the larks,

 

Squealing and gibbering and cursing

 

Heads flung back, as I see them,

Wings almost torn off backwards – far up

 

Like sacrifices set floating

The cruel earth’s offerings

 

The mad earth’s missionaries.

 
VII
 

Like those flailing flames

The lift from the fling of a bonfire

Claws dangling full of what they feed on

 

The larks carry their tongues to the last atom

Battering and battering their last sparks out at the limit –

So it’s a relief, a cool breeze

When they’ve had enough, when they’re burned out

 

And the sun’s sucked them empty

And the earth gives them the O.K.

 

And they relax, drifting with changed notes

 

Dip and float, not quite sure if they may

Then they are sure and they stoop

 

And maybe the whole agony was for this

 

The plummeting dead drop

 

With long cutting screams buckling like razors

 

But just before they plunge into the earth

 

They flare and glide off low over grass, then up

To land on a wall-top, crest up,

 

Weightless,

Paid-up,

Alert,

 

Conscience perfect.

 
VIII
 

Manacled with blood,

Cuchulain listened bowed,

Strapped to his pillar (not to die prone)

Hearing the far crow

Guiding the near lark nearer

With its blind song 

 

‘That
some
sorry
little
wight
more
feeble
and
misguided
than
thyself

Take
thy
head

Thine
ear
 

And
thy
life’s
career
from
thee.’
 

 
Pibroch
 
 

The sea cries with its meaningless voice

Treating alike its dead and its living,

Probably bored with the appearance of heaven

After so many millions of nights without sleep,

Without purpose, without self-deception.

 

Stone likewise. A pebble is imprisoned

Like nothing in the Universe.

Created for black sleep. Or growing

Conscious of the sun’s red spot occasionally,

Then dreaming it is the foetus of God.

 

Over the stone rushes the wind

Able to mingle with nothing,

Like the hearing of the blind stone itself.

Or turns, as if the stone’s mind came feeling

A fantasy of directions.

 

Drinking the sea and eating the rock

A tree struggles to make leaves –

An old woman fallen from space

Unprepared for these conditions.

She hangs on, because her mind’s gone completely.

 

Minute after minute, aeon after aeon,

Nothing lets up or develops.

And this is neither a bad variant nor a tryout.

This is where the staring angels go through.

This is where all the stars bow down.

 
The Howling of Wolves
 
 

Is without world.

 

What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound

That dissolve in the mid-air silence?

 

Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,

Brings the wolves running.

Tuning of a viola, in this forest delicate as an owl’s ear,

Brings the wolves running – brings the steel traps clashing and slavering,

The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,

The eyes that never learn how it has come about

That they must live like this,

 

That they must live

 

Innocence crept into minerals.

 

The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.

It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.

 

The earth is under its tongue,

A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.

The wolf is living for the earth.

But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.

 

It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly.

 

It must feed its fur.

 

The night snows stars and the earth creaks.

 
Gnat-Psalm
 
 

When the gnats dance at evening

Scribbling on the air, sparring sparely,

Scrambling their crazy lexicon,

Shuffling their dumb Cabala,

Under leaf shadow

 

Leaves only leaves

Between them and the broad swipes of the sun

Leaves muffling the dusty stabs of the late sun

From their frail eyes and crepuscular temperaments

 

Dancing

Dancing

Writing on the air, rubbing out everything they write

Jerking their letters into knots, into tangles

Everybody everybody else’s yoyo

 

Immense magnets fighting around a centre

 

Not writing and not fighting but singing

That the cycles of this Universe are no matter

That they are not afraid of the sun

That the one sun is too near

It blasts their song, which is of all the suns

That they are their own sun

Their own brimming over

At large in the nothing

Their wings blurring the blaze

Singing

 

That they are the nails

In the dancing hands and feet of the gnat-god

That they hear the wind suffering

Through the grass

And the evening tree suffering

 

The wind bowing with long cat-gut cries

And the long roads of dust

Dancing in the wind

The wind’s dance, the death-dance, entering the mountain

And the cow dung villages huddling to dust

 

But not the gnats, their agility

Has outleaped that threshold

And hangs them a little above the claws of the grass

Dancing

Dancing

In the glove shadows of the sycamore

 

A dance never to be altered

A dance giving their bodies to be burned

 

And their mummy faces will never be used

 

Their little bearded faces

Weaving and bobbing on the nothing

Shaken in the air, shaken, shaken

And their feet dangling like the feet of victims

 

O little Hasids

Ridden to death by your own bodies

Riding your bodies to death

You are the angels of the only heaven!

 

And God is an Almighty Gnat!

You are the greatest of all the galaxies!

My hands fly in the air, they are follies

My tongue hangs up in the leaves

My thoughts have crept into crannies

 

Your dancing

 

Your dancing

 

Rolls my staring skull slowly away into outer space.

 

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