New and Selected Poems (22 page)

Read New and Selected Poems Online

Authors: Ted Hughes

Tags: #nepalifiction, #TPB

BOOK: New and Selected Poems
7.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
from
Seven Dungeon Songs
 
 

 

I
 

Dead, she became space-earth

Broken to pieces.

Plants nursed her death, unearthed her goodness.

 

But her murderer, mad-innocent

Sucked at her offspring, reckless of blood,

Consecrating them in fire, muttering

It is good to be God.

 

He used familiar hands

Incriminating many,

 

And he borrowed mouths, leaving names

Being himself nothing

 

But a tiger’s sigh, a wolf’s music

A song on a lonely road

 

What it is

Risen out of mud, fallen from space

That stares through a face.

 
II
 

Face was necessary – I found face.

Hands – I found hands.

 

I found shoulders, I found legs

I found all bits and pieces.

 

We were me, and lay quiet.

I got us all of a piece, and we lay quiet.

 

We just lay.

Sunlight had prepared a wide place

 

And we lay there.

Air nursed us.

 

We recuperated.

While maggots blackened to seeds, and blood warmed its stone.

 

Only still something

Stared at me and screamed

 

Stood over me, black across the sun,

And mourned me, and would not help me get up.

 
II
I
 

The earth locked out the light,

Blocking the light, like a door locked.

But a crack of light

 

Between sky and earth, was enough.

He called it, Earth’s halo.

 

And the lizard spread of his fingers

Reached for it.

 

He called it, The leakage of air

Into this suffocation of earth.

 

And the gills of his rib-cage

Gulped to get more of it.

 

His lips pressed to its coolness

Like an eye to a crack.

 

He lay like the already-dead

 

Tasting the tears

Of the wind-shaken and weeping

Tree of light.

 
IV
 

I walk

Unwind with activity of legs

The tangled ball

Which was once the orderly circuit of my body

 

Some night in the womb

All my veins and capillaries were taken out

By some evil will

And knotted in a great ball and stuffed back inside me

 

Now I rush to and fro

I try to attach a raw broken end

To some steady place, then back away

I look for people with clever fingers

Who might undo me

 

The horrible ball just comes

People’s fingers snarl it worse

I hurl myself

To jerk out the knot

Or snap it

 

And come up short

 

So dangle and dance

The dance of unbeing

 
V
 

If mouth could open its cliff

If ear could unfold from this strata

If eyes could split their rock and peep out finally

 

If hands of mountain-fold

Could get a proper purchase

If feet of fossil could lift

 

If head of lakewater and weather

If body of horizon

If whole body and balancing head

 

If skin of grass could take messages

And do its job properly

 

If spine of earth-foetus

Could unfurl

 

If man-shadow out there moved to my moves

 

The speech that works air

Might speak me

 
Tiger-Psalm
 
 

The tiger kills hungry. The machine-guns

Talk, talk, talk across their Acropolis.

The tiger

Kills expertly, with anaesthetic hand.

The machine-guns

Carry on arguing in heaven

Where numbers have no ears, where there is no blood.

The tiger

Kills frugally, after close inspection of the map.

The machine-guns shake their heads,

They go on chattering statistics.

The tiger kills by thunderbolt:

God of her own salvation.

The machine-guns

Proclaim the Absolute, according to morse,

In a code of bangs and holes that makes men frown.

The tiger

Kills with beautiful colours in her face,

Like a flower painted on a banner.

The machine-guns

Are not interested.

They laugh. They are not interested. They speak and

Their tongues burn soul-blue, haloed with ashes,

Puncturing the illusion.

The tiger

Kills and licks her victim all over carefully.

The machine-guns

Leave a crust of blood hanging on the nails

In an orchard of scrap-iron.

The tiger

Kills

With the strength of five tigers, kills exalted.

The machine-guns

Permit themselves a snigger. They eliminate the error

With a to-fro dialectic

And the point proved stop speaking.

The tiger

Kills like the fall of a cliff, one-sinewed with the earth,

Himalayas under eyelid, Ganges under fur –

Does not kill.

 

Does not kill. The tiger blesses with a fang.

The tiger does not kill but opens a path

Neither of Life nor of Death:

The tiger within the tiger:

The Tiger of the Earth.

                                     O Tiger!

O Sister of the Viper!

                                  O Beast in Blossom!

 
Orts
 
 
In
the
M5
Restaurant
 

Our sad coats assemble at the counter

 

The tyre face pasty

The neon of plaster flesh

With little inexplicable eyes

Holding a dish with two buns

 

Symbolic food

Eaten by symbolic faces

Symbolic eating movements

 

The road drumming in the wall, drumming in the head

 

The road going nowhere and everywhere

 

My freedom evidently

Is to feed my life

Into a carburettor

 

Petroleum has burned away all

But a still-throbbing column

Of carbon-monoxide and lead.

 

I attempt a firmer embodiment

With illusory coffee

And a gluey quasi-pie.

 
That
Star
 

That star

Will blow your hand off

 

That star

Will scramble your brains and your nerves

 

That star

Will frazzle your skin off

 

That star

Will turn everybody yellow and stinking

 

That star

Will scorch everything dead fumed to its blueprint

 

That star

Will make the earth melt

 

That star … and so on.

 

And they surround us. And far into infinity.

These are the armies of the night.

There is no escape.

Not one of them is good, or friendly, or corruptible.

 

One chance remains: KEEP ON DIGGING THAT HOLE

 

KEEP ON DIGGING AWAY AT THAT HOLE

 
Poets
 

Crowd the horizons, poised, wings

Lifted in elation, vast

Armadas of illusion

Waiting for a puff.

 

Or they dawn, singing birds – all

Mating calls

Battle bluff

And crazy feathers.

 

Or disappear

Into the grass-blade atom – one flare

Annihilating the world

To the big-eyed, simple light that fled

 

When the first word lumped out of the flint.

 
Grosse
Fuge
 

Rouses in its cave

Under faint peaks of light

 

Flares abrupt at the sun’s edge, dipping again

This side of the disc

Now coming low out of the glare

 

Coming under skylines

Under seas, under liquid corn

Snaking among poppies

 

Soft arrival pressing the roof of ghost

Creaking of old foundations

The ear cracking like a dry twig

 

Heavy craving weight

Of eyes on your nape

Unadjusted to world

 

Huge inching through hair, through veins

Tightening stealth of blood

Breath in the tunnel of spine

 

And the maneater

Opens its mouth and the music

Sinks its claw

Into your skull, a single note

 

Picks you up by the small of the back, weightless

Vaults into space, dangling your limbs

 

Devours you leisurely among litter of stars

Digests you into its horrible joy

This is the tiger of heaven

 

Hoists people out of their clothes

 

Leaves its dark track across the octaves

 
Children
 

                                new to the blood

Whose hot push has surpassed

The sabretooth

Never doubt their rights of conquest.

 

Their voices, under the leaf-dazzle

An occupying army

A foreign tongue

Loud in their idleness and power.

 

Figures in the flaming of hell

A joy beyond good and evil

Breaking their toys.

 

Soon they’ll sleep where they struck.

They’ll leave behind

A man like a licked skull

A gravestone woman, their playthings.

 
Prospero
and
Sycorax
 

She knows, like Ophelia,

The task has swallowed him.

She knows, like George’s dragon,

Her screams have closed his helmet.

 

She knows, like Jocasta,

It is over.

He prefers

Blindness.

 

She knows, like Cordelia,

He is not himself now,

And what speaks through him must be discounted –

Though it will be the end of them both.

 

She knows, like God,

He has found

Something

Easier to live with –

 

His death, and her death.

 
The Beacon
 
 
The
Stone
 

Has not yet been cut.

It is too heavy already

For consideration. Its edges

Are so super-real, already,

And at this distance,

They cut real cuts in the unreal

Stuff of just thinking. So I leave it
.

Somewhere it is.

Soon it will come.

I shall not carry it. With horrible life

It will transport its face, with sure strength,

To sit over mine, wherever I look,

Instead of hers.

It will even have across its brow

Her name.

Somewhere it is coming to the end

Of its million million years –

Which have worn her out.

It is coming to the beginning

Of her million million million years

Which will wear out it.

 

Because she will never move now

Till it is worn out.

She will not move now

Till everything is worn out.

 
TV
Off
 

He hears lithe trees and last leaves swatting the glass –

Other books

Lily (Flower Trilogy) by Lauren Royal
Dragon by Stone, Jeff
Claire Delacroix by The Rogue
Our Man in Camelot by Anthony Price
Kill Call by Stephen Booth
Power by Howard Fast
Dog Daze by Lauraine Snelling
Hottie by Alex, Demi, Fanning, Tia