New and Selected Poems (29 page)

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Authors: Ted Hughes

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BOOK: New and Selected Poems
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II THE ATLANTIC
 

Night after night he’d sat there,

Eighty-four, still telling the tale.

With his huge thirst for anaesthetics.

‘Time I were dead‚’ I’d heard. ‘I want to die.’

 

That’s altered.

                            We lean to a cliff rail

Founded in tremblings.

Beneath us, two thousand five hundred

Miles of swung worldweight

Hit England’s western wall

With a meaningless bump.

 

‘Aye!’ he sighs. Over and over. ‘Aye!’

And massages his temples.

 

Can he grasp what’s happened? His frown

Won’t connect. Familiar eagle frown –

Dark imperial eye. The ground flinches.

Mountains of dissolution

Boil cold geysers, bespatter us.

                                                     Tranquillizers,

Steroids, and a whole crateful

Of escapist Madeira, collided

Three evenings ago –

They swamped and drowned

The synapses, the breath-born spinnaker shells

Of consonants and vowels.

                                              I found him

Trying to get up out of a chair,

Fish-eyed, and choking, clawing at air,

Dumbness like a bone stuck in his throat.

He’s survived with a word – one last word.

A last mouthful. I listen.

And I almost hear a new baby’s

Eyeless howl of outrage – sobered to ‘Aye!’

Sighed slow. Like blessed breath. He breathes it.

 

I dare hardly look at him. I watch.

He’d crept into my care.

A cursed hulk of marriage, a full-rigged fortune

Cast his body, crusted like Job’s,

Onto my threshold. Strange Dead Sea creature.

He crawled in his ruins, like Timon.

The
Times
Index was his morning torture.

Fairy gold of a family of dead leaves.

‘Why?’ he’d cried. ‘Why can’t I just die?’

His memory was so sharp – a potsherd.

He raked at his skin, whispering ‘God! God!’

Nightly, a nurse eased his scales with ointment.

 

I’ve brought him out for air. And the cliffs. And there

The sea towards America – wide open.

Untrodden, glorious America!

Look, a Peregrine Falcon – they’re rare!

 

Nothing will connect.

He peers down past his shoes

Into a tangle of horizons –

 

Black, tilted bedrock struggling up,

Mouthing disintegration.

Every weedy breath of the sea

Is another swell of overwhelming.

Meaningless. And a sigh. Meaningless.

 

Now he’s closed his eyes. He caresses

His own skull, over and over, comforting.

The Millmaster, the Caesar whose frown

Tossed my boyhood the baffling coin ‘guilty’.

His fingers are my mother’s. They seem astray

In quaverings and loss

As he strokes and strokes at his dome.

The sea thuds and sighs. Bowed at the rail

He seems to be touching at a wound he dare not touch.

He seems almost to find the exact spot.

His eyelids quiver, in the certainty of touch –

 

And ‘Aye!’ he breathes. ‘Aye!’

 

We turn away. Then as he steadies himself,

Still gripping the rail, his reaching stare

Meets mine watching him. I can’t escape it

Or hold it. Walt! Walt!

                                     I bury it

Hugger-mugger anyhow

Inside my shirt.

 
Little Whale Song
 

for
Charles
Causley
 

 

What do they think of themselves

With their global brains –

The tide-power voltage illumination

Of those brains? Their X-ray all-dimension

 

Grasp of this world’s structures, their brains budded

Clone replicas of the electron world

Lit and re-imagining the world,

Perfectly tuned receivers and perceivers,

 

Each one a whole tremulous world

Feeling through the world? What

Do they make of each other?

 

‘We are beautiful. We stir

 

Our self-colour in the pot of colours

Which is the world. At each

Tail-stroke we deepen

Our being into the world’s lit substance,

 

And our joy into the world’s

Spinning bliss, and our peace

Into the world’s floating, plumed peace.’

 

Their body-tons, echo-chambered,

 

Amplify the whisper

Of currents and airs, of sea-peoples

 

And planetary manoeuvres,

Of seasons, of shores, and of their own

 

Moon-lifted incantation, as they dance

Through the original Earth-drama

In which they perform, as from the beginning,

The Royal House.

                               The loftiest, spermiest

 

Passions, the most exquisite pleasures,

The noblest characters, the most god-like

Oceanic presence and poise –

 

The most terrible fall.

 
On the Reservations
 

for
Jack
Brown

 
I SITTING BULL ON CHRISTMAS MORNING
 

Who put this pit-head wheel,

Smashed but carefully folded

In some sooty fields, into his stocking?

And his lifetime nightshirt – a snarl

Of sprung celluloid? Here’s his tin flattened,

His helmet. And the actual sun closed

Into what looks like a bible of coal

That drops to bits as he lifts it. Very strange.

Packed in mossy woods, mostly ashes,

Here’s a doll’s cot. And a tiny coffin.

 

And here are Orca Tiger Eagle tattered

In his second birthday’s ragbook

From before memory began.

All the props crushed, the ceilings collapsed

In his stocking. Torremolinos, Cleethorpes –

The brochures screwed up in a tantrum

As her hair shrivelled to a cinder

In his stocking. Pit boots. And, strange,

A London, burst, spewing tea-leaves,

With a creased postcard of the Acropolis.

 

Chapels pews broken television.

(Who dumped these, into his stocking,

Under coal-slag in a flooded cellar?)

Pink
Uns
and a million whippet collars –

Did he ask for these? A jumbo jet

Parcelled in starred, split, patched Christmas wrappings

Of a concrete yard and a brick wall

Black with scribble

In his stocking. No tobacco. A few

Rabbits and foxes broken leaking feathers.

Nevertheless, he feels like a new man –

 

Though tribally scarred (stitch-tattoos of coal-dust),

Though pale (soiled, the ivory bulb of a snowdrop

Dug up and tossed aside),

Though one of the lads (the horde, the spores of nowhere

Cultured under lamps and multiplied

In the laboratories

Between Mersey and Humber),

He stands, lungs easy, freed hands –

Bombarded by pollens from the supernovae,

Two eyepits awash in the millennia –

 

With his foot in his stocking.

 
II NIGHTVOICE
 

My young men shall never work. Men who work cannot dream, and wisdom comes in dreams.’
Smohalla,
Nez
Percé
Indians

 

She dreams she sleepwalks crying the Don River

relieves its nine

circles through her kitchen her kids

mops and brooms herself a squeegee and not

soaking in but

bulging pulsing out of their pores the

ordure
déjà
vu
in Tesco’s makes her

giddy

 

She dreams she sleepwalks crying her Dad alive

dug up is being

pushed into a wood-burning stove

by pensioners who chorus in croaks

While Shepherds

Watched Their television gives her

palpitations

 

She dreams she sleepwalks crying all the dead

huddle

in the slag-heaps wrong

land wrong

time tepees a final

resting for the epidemic

solution every

pit-shaft a

mass-grave herself

in a silly bottle shawled

in the canal’s

fluorescence the message

of the survivors a surplus people

the words

washed off her wrists

and hands she complains keep feeling

helpless

 

She dreams she sleepwalks mainstreet nightly crying

Stalin

keeps her as an ant

in a formicary in a

garbage-can which is his private office

urinal she thinks her aerials

must be bent

 

Remembering how a flare of pure torrent

sluiced the pit muck

off his shoulder-slopes while her hands

soapy with milk blossom anointed

him and in their hearth

fingers of the original sun opened

the black

bright book of the stone

he’d brought from beneath dreams

or did she dream it

 
III THE GHOST DANCER
 

‘We are not singing sportive songs. It is as if we were weeping, asking for life –’
Owl,
Fox
Indians
 

 

A sulky boy. And he stuns your ear with song.

Swastika limbs, his whole physique – a dance.

The fool of prophecy, nightlong, daylong

Out of a waste lot brings deliverance.

 

Just some kid, with a demonic roar

Spinning
in
vacuo
, inches clear of the floor.

 

Half-anguish half-joy, half-shriek half-moan:

He is the gorgon against his own fear.

Through his septum a dog’s penile bone.

A chime of Chubb keys dangling at each ear.

 

Temenos Jaguar mask – a vogue mandala:

Half a Loa, half a drugged Oglala.

 

With woad cobras coiling their arm-clasp

Out of his each arm-pit, their ganch his grasp.

 

Bracelets, anklets; girlish, a bacchus chained.

An escapologist’s pavement, padlock dance.

A mannequin elf, topped with a sugarfloss mane

Or neon rhino power-cone on a shorn sconce,

 

Or crest of a Cock of the Rock, or Cockatoo shock,

Or the sequinned crown of a Peacock.

 

And snake-spined, all pentecostal shivers,

This megawatt, berserker medium

With his strobe-drenched battle cry delivers

The nineteenth century from his mother’s womb:

 

The work-house dread that brooded, through her term,

Over the despair of salvaged sperm.

 

Mau-Mau Messiah’s showbiz lightning stroke

Puffs the stump of Empire up in smoke.

 

Brain-box back to front, heart inside out,

Aura for body, and for so-called soul

Under the moment’s touch a reed that utters

Out of the solar cobalt core a howl

 

Bomblit, rainbowed, aboriginal:

‘Start afresh, this time unconquerable.’

 
from
RAIN-CHARM FOR THE DUCHY
 
 
Rain-Charm for the Duchy
 

for
H.R.H.
Prince
Harry

 

After the five-month drought

My windscreen was frosted with dust.

Sight itself had grown a harsh membrane

Against glare and particles.

 

Now the first blobby tears broke painfully.

 

Big, sudden thunderdrops. I felt them sploshing like vapoury petrol

Among the ants

In Cranmere’s cracked heath-tinder. And into the ulcer craters

Of what had been river pools.

 

Then, like taking a great breath, we were under it.

Thunder gripped and picked up the city.

Rain didn’t so much fall as collapse.

The pavements danced, like cinders in a riddle.

 

Flash in the pan, I thought, as people scampered.

Soon it was falling vertical, precious, pearled.

Thunder was a brass-band accompaniment

To some festive, civic event. Squeals and hurry. With tourist bunting.

 

The precinct saplings lifted their arms and faces. And the heaped-up sky

Moved in mayoral pomp, behind buildings,

With flash and thump. It had almost gone by

And I almost expected the brightening. Instead, something like a shutter

 

Jerked and rattled – and the whole county darkened.

Then rain really came down. You scrambled into the car

Scattering oxygen like a drenched bush.

What a weight of warm Atlantic water!

 

The car-top hammered. The Cathedral jumped in and out

Of a heaven that had obviously caught fire

And couldn’t be contained.

A girl in high heels, her handbag above her head,

 

Risked it across the square’s lit metals.

We saw surf cuffed over her and the car jounced.

Grates, gutters, clawed in the backwash.

She kept going. Flak and shrapnel

 

Of thundercracks

Hit the walls and roofs. Still a swimmer

She bobbed off, into sea-smoke,

Where headlights groped. Already

 

Thunder was breaking up the moors.

It dragged tors over the city –

Uprooted chunks of map. Smeltings of ore, pink and violet,

Spattered and wriggled down

 

Into the boiling sea

Where Exeter huddled –

A small trawler, nets out.

‘Think of the barley!’ you said.

 

You remembered earlier harvests.

But I was thinking

Of joyful sobbings –

The throb

 

In the rock-face mosses of the Chains,

And of the exultant larvae in the Barle’s shrunk trench, their filaments ablur like propellers, under the churned ceiling of light,

 

And of the Lyn’s twin gorges, clearing their throats, deepening their voices, beginning to hear each other

Rehearse forgotten riffles,

 

And the Mole, a ditch’s choked whisper

Rousing the stagnant camps of the Little Silver, the Crooked Oak and the Yeo

To a commotion of shouts, muddied oxen

A rumbling of wagons,

 

And the red seepage, the smoke of life

Lowering its ringlets into the Taw,

 

And the Torridge, rising to the kiss,

Plunging under sprays, new-born,

A washed cherub, clasping the breasts of light,

 

And the Okement, nudging her detergent bottles, tugging at her nylon stockings, starting to trundle her Pepsi-Cola cans,

 

And the Tamar, roused and blinking under the fifty-mile drumming,

Declaiming her legend – her rusty knights tumbling out of their clay vaults, her cantrevs assembling from shillets,

With a cheering of aged stones along the Lyd and the Lew, the Wolf and the Thrushel,

 

And the Tavy, jarred from her quartzy rock-heap, feeling the moor shift

Rinsing her stale mouth, tasting tin, copper, ozone,

 

And the baby Erme, under the cyclone’s top-heavy, toppling sea-fight, setting afloat odd bits of dead stick,

 

And the Dart, her shaggy horde coming down

Astride bareback ponies, with a cry,

Loosening sheepskin banners, bumping the granite,

Flattening rowans and frightening oaks,

 

And the Teign, startled in her den

By the rain-dance of bracken

Hearing Heaven reverberate under Gidleigh,

 

And the highest pool of the Exe, her coil recoiling under the sky-shock

Where a drinking stag flings its head up

From a spilled skyful of lightning –

 

My windscreen wipers swam as we moved.

                                                  I imagined the two moors

 

The two stone-age hands

Cupped and brimming, lifted, an offering –

And I thought of those other, different lightnings, the patient, thirsting ones

 

Under Crow Island, inside Bideford Bar,

And between the Hamoaze anchor chains,

And beneath the thousand, shivering, fibreglass hulls

Inside One Gun Point, and aligned

 

Under the Ness, and inside Great Bull Hill:

 

The salmon, deep in the thunder, lit

And again lit, with glimpses of quenchings,

Twisting their glints in the suspense,

Biting at the stir, beginning to move.

 

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