by Hughes, Ted
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
Still Life
Outcrop stone is miserly
With the wind. Hoarding its nothings,
Letting wind run through its fingers,
It pretends to be dead of lack.
Even its grimace is empty,
Waited with quartz pebbles from the sea’s womb.
It thinks it pays no rent,
Expansive in the sun’s summerly reckoning.
Under rain, it gleams exultation blackly
As if receiving interest.
Similarly, it bears the snow well.
Wakeful and missing little and landmarking
The fly-like dance of the planets,
The landscape moving in sleep,
It expects to be in at the finish.
Being ignorant of this other, this harebell,
That trembles, as under threats of death,
In the summer turf’s heat-rise,
And in which – filling veins
Any known name of blue would bruise
Out of existence – sleeps, recovering,
The maker of the sea.
Her Husband
Comes home dull with coal-dust deliberately
To grime the sink and foul towels and let her
Learn with scrubbing brush and scrubbing board
The stubborn character of money.
And let her learn through what kind of dust
He has earned his thirst and the right to quench it
And what sweat he has exchanged for his money
And the blood-weight of money. He’ll humble her
With new light on her obligations.
The fried, woody chips, kept warm two hours in the oven,
Are only part of her answer.
Hearing the rest, he slams them to the fire back
And is away round the house-end singing
‘Come back to Sorrento’ in a voice
Of resounding corrugated iron.
Her back has bunched into a hump as an insult.
For they will have their rights.
Their jurors are to be assembled
From the little crumbs of soot. Their brief
Goes straight up to heaven and nothing more is heard of it.
Cadenza
The violinist’s shadow vanishes.
The husk of a grasshopper
Sucks a remote cyclone and rises.
The full, bared throat of a woman walking water,
The loaded estuary of the dead.
And I am the cargo
Of a coffin attended by swallows.
And I am the water
Bearing the coffin that will not be silent.
The clouds are full of surgery and collision
But the coffin escapes – a black diamond,
A ruby brimming blood,
An emerald beating its shores,
The sea lifts swallow wings and flings
A summer lake open,
Sips and bewilders its reflection,
Till the whole sky dives shut like a burned land back to its spark –
A bat with a ghost in its mouth
Struck at by lightnings of silence –
Blue with sweat, the violinist
Crashes into the orchestra, which explodes.
Ghost Crabs
At nightfall, as the sea darkens,
A depth darkness thickens, mustering from the gulfs and the submarine badlands,
To the sea’s edge. To begin with
It looks like rocks uncovering, mangling their pallor.
Gradually the labouring of the tide
Falls back from its productions,
Its power slips back from glistening nacelles, and they are crabs.
Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring inland
Like a packed trench of helmets.
Ghosts, they are ghost-crabs.
They emerge
An invisible disgorging of the sea’s cold
Over the man who strolls along the sands.
They spill inland, into the smoking purple
Of our woods and towns – a bristling surge
Of tall and staggering spectres
Gliding like shocks through water.
Our walls, our bodies, are no problem to them.
Their hungers are homing elsewhere.
We cannot see them or turn our minds from them.
Their bubbling mouths, their eyes
In a slow mineral fury
Press through our nothingness where we sprawl on beds,
Or sit in rooms. Our dreams are ruffled maybe,
Or we jerk awake to the world of possessions
With a gasp, in a sweat burst, brains jamming blind
Into the bulb-light. Sometimes, for minutes, a sliding
Staring
Thickness of silence
Presses between us. These crabs own this world.
All night, around us or through us,
They stalk each other, they fasten on to each other,
They mount each other, they tear each other to pieces,
They utterly exhaust each other.
They are the powers of this world.
We are their bacteria,
Dying their lives and living their deaths.
At dawn, they sidle back under the sea’s edge.
They are the turmoil of history, the convulsion
In the roots of blood, in the cycles of concurrence.
To them, our cluttered countries are empty battleground.
All day they recuperate under the sea.
Their singing is like a thin sea-wind flexing in the rocks of a headland,
Where only crabs listen.
They are God’s only toys.
Public Bar TV
On a flaked ridge of the desert
Outriders have found foul water. They say nothing;
With the cactus and the petrified tree
Crouch numbed by a wind howling all
Visible horizons equally empty.
The wind brings dust and nothing
Of the wives, the children, the grandmothers
With the ancestral bones, who months ago
Left the last river,
Coming at the pace of oxen.
Kafka
And he is an owl
He is an owl, ‘Man’ tattooed in his armpit
Under the broken wing
(Stunned by the wall of glare, he fell here)
Under the broken wing of huge shadow that twitches across the floor.
He is a man in hopeless feathers.
Second Glance at a Jaguar
Skinful of bowls he bowls them,
The hip going in and out of joint, dropping the spine
With the urgency of his hurry
Like a cat going along under thrown stones, under cover,
Glancing sideways, running
Under his spine. A terrible, stump-legged waddle
Like a thick Aztec disemboweller,
Club-swinging, trying to grind some square
Socket between his hind legs round,
Carrying his head like a brazier of spilling embers,
And the black bit of his mouth, he takes it
Between his back teeth, he has to wear his skin out,
He swipes a lap at the water-trough as he turns,
Swivelling the ball of his heel on the polished spot,
Showing his belly like a butterfly.
At every stride he has to turn a corner
In himself and correct it. His head
Is like the worn down stump of another whole jaguar,
His body is just the engine shoving it forward,
Lifting the air up and shoving on under,
The weight of his fangs hanging the mouth open,
Bottom jaw combing the ground. A gorged look,
Gangster, club-tail lumped along behind gracelessly,
He’s wearing himself to
heavy ovals,
Muttering some mantra, some drum-song of murder
To keep his rage brightening, making his skin
Intolerable, spurred by the rosettes, the Cain-brands,
Wearing the spots off from the inside,
Rounding some revenge. Going like a prayer-wheel,
The head dragging forward, the body keeping up,
The hind legs lagging. He coils, he flourishes
The blackjack tail as if looking for a target,
Hurrying through the underworld, soundless.
Fern
Here is the fern’s frond, unfurling a gesture,
Like a conductor whose music will now be pause
And the one note of silence
To which the whole earth dances gravely.
The mouse’s ear unfurls its trust,
The spider takes up her bequest,
And the retina
Reins the creation with a bridle of water.
And, among them, the fern
Dances gravely, like the plume
Of a warrior returning, under the low hills,
Into his own kingdom.
Stations
I
Suddenly his poor body
Had its drowsy mind no longer
For insulation.
Before the funeral service foundered
The lifeboat coffin had shaken to pieces
And the great stars were swimming through where he had been.
For a while
The stalk of the tulip at the door that had outlived him,
And his jacket, and his wife, and his last pillow
Clung to each other.
II
I can understand the haggard eyes
Of the old
Dry wrecks
Broken by seas of which they could drink nothing.
III
They have sunk into deeper service. They have gone down
To labour with God on the beaches. They fatten
Under the haddock’s thumb. They rejoice
Through the warped mouth of the flounder
And are nowhere they are not here I know nothing
Cries the poulterer’s hare hanging
Upside down above the pavement
Staring into a bloody bag. Not here
Cry the eyes from the depths
Of the mirror’s seamless sand.
IV
You are a wild look – out of an egg
Laid by your absence.
In the great Emptiness you sit complacent,
Blackbird in wet snow.
If you could make only one comparison –
Your condition is miserable, you would give up.
But you, from the start, surrender to total Emptiness,
Then leave everything to it.
Absence. It is your own
Absence
Weeps its respite through your accomplished music,
Wraps its cloak dark about your feeding.
V
Whether you say it, think it, know it
Or not, it happens, it happens as
Over rails over
The neck the wheels leave
The head with its vocabulary useless,
Among the flogged plantains.
The Green Wolf
My neighbour moves less and less, attempts less.
If his right hand still moves, it is a farewell
Already days posthumous.
But the left hand seems to freeze,
And the left leg with its crude plumbing,
And the left half jaw and the left eyelid and the words all the huge cries
Frozen in his brain his tongue cannot unfreeze –
While somewhere through a dark heaven
The dark bloodclot moves in.
I watch it approaching but I cannot fear it.
The punctual evening star,
Worse, the warm hawthorn blossoms, their foam,
Their palls of deathly perfume,
Worst of all the beanflower
Badged with jet like the ear of the tiger
Unmake and remake me. That star
And that flower and that flower
And living mouth and living mouth all
One smouldering annihilation
Of old brains, old bowels, old bodies
In the scarves of dew, the wet hair of nightfall.
The Bear
In the huge, wide-open, sleeping eye of the mountain
The bear is the gleam in the pupil
Ready to awake
And instantly focus.
The bear is glueing
Beginning to end
With glue from people’s bones
In his sleep.
The bear is digging
In his sleep
Through the wall of the Universe
With a man’s femur.
The bear is a well
Too deep to glitter
Where your shout
Is being digested.
The bear is a river
Where people bending to drink
See their dead selves.
The bear sleeps
In a kingdom of walls
In a web of rivers.
He is the ferryman
To dead land.
His price is everything.
Scapegoats and Rabies
I A HAUNTING
Soldiers are marching singing down the lane
They get their abandon
From the fixed eyes of girls, from their own
Armed anonymity
And from having finally paid up
All life might demand. They get
Their heroic loom
From the statue stare of old women,
From the trembling chins of old men,
From the napes and bow legs of toddlers,
From the absolute steel
Of their automatic rifles, and the lizard spread
Of their own fingers, and from their bird stride.
They get their facelessness
From the blank, deep meadows and the muddling streams
And the hill’s eyeless outlook,
The babel of gravestones, the mouldering
Of letters and citations
On rubbish dumps. They get the drumming engine
Of their boots
From their hearts,
From their eyeless, earless hearts,
Their brainless hearts. And their bravery
From the dead millions of ghosts
Marching in their boots, cumbering their bodies,
Staring from under their brows, concentrating
Toward a repeat performance. And their hopelessness
From the millions of the future
Marching in their boots, blindfold and riddled,
Rotten heads on their singing shoulders,
The blown-off right hand swinging to the stride
Of the stump-scorched and blown-off legs
Helpless in the terrible engine of the boots.
The soldiers go singing down the deep lane
Wraiths into the bombardment of afternoon sunlight,
Whelmed under the flashing onslaught of the barley,
Strangled in the drift of honeysuckle.
Their bodiless voices rally on the slope and again
In the far woods
Then settle like dust
Under the ancient burden of the hill.
II THE MASCOT
Somewhere behind the lines, over the map,
The General’s face hangs in the dark, like a lantern.
Every shell that bursts
Blows it momentarily out, and he has to light it.
Every bullet that bangs off
Goes in at one of his ears and out at the other.
Every attack every rout
Storms through that face, like a flood through a footbridge.
Every new-dead ghost
Comes to that worn-out blood fo
r its death-ration.
Every remotest curse, weighted with a bloodclot,
Enters that ear like a blowfly.
