by Ted Hughes
Lumb is spreadeagled beneath it.
A long-handled hook rips the bull’s underbelly from ribs
to testicles.
Half a ton of guts
Balloon out and drop on to Lumb.
He fights in the roping hot mass.
He pushes his head clear, trying to wipe his eyes clear.
Curtains of live blood cascade from the open bull above
him.
Wallowing in the greasy pulps, he tries to crawl clear.
But men in bloody capes are flinging buckets of fresh
blood over him.
Many bulls swing up, on screeching pulleys.
Intestines spill across blood-flooded concrete.
The din is shattering, despair of beasts
And roaring of men, and impact of steel gates.
Bull’s skins stripped off, heads tumbling in gutters.
Carcases fall apart into two halves.
Lumb scrambles from the swamp.
He tries to wipe his eyes and to see.
Men crowd round him, laughing like madmen,
Emptying more buckets of the hot blood over him.
They are trying to drown him with blood
And to bury him in guts and lungs,
Roaring their laughter
As if they imitated lions.
Till he crawls on all fours to the wall, and hauls himself
up by the edge of a sliding steel door
And forces it open
As the men come at him, jabbing with their electrified
clubs
And roaring their infernal laughter
And he runs blind into pitch darkness and the din is
muffled away.
And he walks
With outstretched protecting arms
Till he sees a doorway to daylight.
He sees a ginnel, beyond it. Then stone steps upwards into daylight. He stands at the bottom of the steps and looks up at moving clouds. He hears street noises and sees the top of a bus go past and a woman with shopping. A mongrel dog peers down at him between rusty railings. He turns back, and finds himself in a derelict basement full of builder’s old lumber. He looks down at his blood-varnished body, crusting black, already flaking, and trembling with shock and bewilderment. He strives to remember what has just happened to him. He can no longer believe it, and concludes that he must have been involved in some frightful but ordinary accident. He searches round for some other exit from this basement, in growing agitation, but there is only the door to the street. He returns to the bottom of the steps and stands looking up again at the clouds, till his trembling becomes hard shivering. Suddenly he remembers the streets full of corpses, but his dread then was nothing like what he feels now. He forces himself to move.
He climbs the stone steps.
GAUDETE
Binoculars
Powerful, age-thickened hands.
Neglected, the morning’s correspondence
Concerning the sperm of bulls.
The high-velocity rifles, in their glass-fronted cupboard,
Creatures in hibernation, an appetite
Not of this landscape.
Coffee on the desk, untasted, now cold,
Beside the tiger’s skull – massive paperweight with a small man-made hole between the dragonish eye-sockets.
Major Hagen, motionless at his window,
As in a machan,
Shoulders hunched, at a still focus.
The parkland unrolls, lush with the full ripeness of the last week in May, under the wet midmorning light. The newly plumped grass shivers and flees. Giant wheels of light ride into the chestnuts, and the poplars lift and pour like the tails of horses. Distance blues beyond distance.
The scene
balances on the worm’s stealth, the milled focal adjustment, under the ginger-haired, freckle-backed thick fingers and the binocular pressure of Hagen’s attention.
Across the middle distance, beyond the wide scatter of bulls, the prone stripe of the lake’s length reflects the sky’s metals. Crawling with shadow, hackled with reeds, snaggy with green bronze nymphs, maned with willows.
Everything hangs
In a chill dewdrop suspension,
Wobbled by the gossamer shimmer of the crosswind.
Hagen’s face is graven, lichenous.
Outcrop of the masonry of his terrace.
Paradeground gravel in the folded gnarl of his jowls.
A perfunctory campaign leatheriness.
A frontal Viking weatherproof
Drained of the vanities, pickled in mess-alcohol and
smoked dark.
Anaesthetised
For ultimate cancellations
By the scathing alums of King’s regulations,
The petrifying nitrates of garrison caste.
A nerve is flickering
Under the exemplary scraped steel hair on the bleak
skull,
But the artillery target-watching poise of his limbs,
stiff-kneed and feet apart,
Absorbs the tremor,
And the underlip, so coarsely wreathed
And undershot, like the rim of a crude archaic piece of
earthenware
Is not moved
Forty generations from the freezing salt and the
longships.
In his hardening lenses
The rhododendrons of the shrubbery island
Wince their chilled scarlet eruptions.
The willows convulse, they coil and uncoil, silvery, like swans trying to take off. Their long fringes keep lifting from the Japanese bridge. On the bridge, two figures com plete the landscape artist’s arrangement
The Reverend Lumb’s long sallow skull
Seeming dark as oiled walnut
Rests on the shoulder
Of Pauline Hagen, the Major’s wife,
Whose body’s thirty-five year old womb-fluttered
abandon
Warms his calming hands
Beneath her ample stylish coat.
Her nerve-harrowed face
Crisping towards a sparse harvest handsomeness
Rests on his shoulder.
She has been weeping
And now looks through blur into the streaming leaf-shoal
of the willows.
Lumb’s downward gaze has anchored
On the tough-looking lilies, their clenched knob-flowers
In the cold morning water.
A deadlock of submarine difficulty
Which their draughty hasty lovemaking has failed to
disentangle
And which has brought words to a stop.
Hagen
Contemplates their stillness. The man-shape
To which his wife clings.
He does not detect
Lumb’s absence. He can watch his wife
But not the darkness into which she has squeezed her eyes,
The placeless, limitless warmth
She has fused herself into,
Clasping that shape
And shutting away the painful edges and clarities of the
gusty distance,
Under the toppling continents of hard-blossomed cumulus
The tattery gaps of blue
And the high, taut mad cirrus.
The vista quivers.
Decorative and ordered, it tugs at a leash.
A purplish turbulence
Boils from the stirred chestnuts, and the spasms of the
new grass, and the dark nodes of bulls.
Hagen
Undergoes the smallness and fixity
Of tweed and shoes and distance. And the cruelty
Of the wet midmorning light. The perfection
Of the lens.
And a tremor
Like a remote approaching express
In the roots of his teeth.
Hagen is striding
Exerting his leg-muscles, as if for health, breasting the oxygen, his clea
ted boots wrenching the gravel, down the long colonnade of chestnuts
Under the damp caves and black-beamed ruinous attics
Of intergroping boughs
That lean out and down over the meadow on either side,
Supporting their continents of leaf, their ramshackle
tottery masks.
His black labrador revolves passionately in its excitements. His double-barrelled Purdey, cradled light in his left elbow, feels like power. It feels like far-roaming tightness, neatness, independence. With this weapon, Hagen is happy. A lonely masterful elation bristles through him. He glances constantly toward the perfection of the down-sloping barrels, blue and piercing, snaking along beside him, nosing over the poor grass and the ground ivy at the drive’s edge.
His features are fixed at enjoyment, a grille. He aims himself, tight with force, down the tree-tunnel, at the cold sheet of lakelight from which two figures, carefully separate, are approaching.
A ringdove, tumbling with a clatter
Into wing-space
Under the boughs and between boles
And swerving up towards open field-light
Is enveloped by shock and numbness.
The bang jerks the heads of twenty bulls
And breaks up the distance.
A feather mop cavorts.
With a kind of gentleness
The Major’s gingery horny fingers
Are gathering the muddled dove
From the labrador’s black lips.
A wing peaks up at a wrong angle, a pink foot reaches
deeply for safe earth.
Startlingly crimson and living
Blood hangs under his knuckles.
And the bird’s head rides alert, as if on a tree-top,
A liquid-soft blue head floating erect, as the eye gimbals
And the Major presents it, an offering,
To his wife.
His machine laughter
Unconnected to any nerve
Is like the flame her face shrivels from.
Now he offers it to the priest
As the meaning of his grin, which is like the grin of a patient
After a mouth-operation.
Lumb’s heavy hostile eye
Weighs what is ill-hidden.
The Major’s carapaced fingers and his mask
Of military utility
Contort together, and the dove erupts underdown –
Tiny puffs and squirts.
He tosses it cartwheeling to Lumb
Who catches it
As if to save it, and clasps it to him
As if to protect it
Feeling its hard-core heat
And drinking its last cramping convulsions
Into the strength of his grip.
The Major calls his dog and stalks past these two, as on
matters of higher command.
He leaves them
Under the breathing and trembling of the trees
Marooned
In the vacuum of his shot.
The dove’s head, on its mauled neck,
Dangles like a fob,
Squandering its ruby unstoppably
Into the sterile gravel.
A mile away
Joe Garten, petty poacher and scrounger, in steep woodland, drives his narrow-bladed spade downward, deepening his furrowed concentration. His bowed shoulders jerk between the crumpled feet of gigantic beeches. His brow shines and his yellow hair flings, in a slant mist of bluebells. His moist eighteen year-old palms and fingers are jarred hot and again jarred, against perverse roots and sudden flints, as he follows his brown ferret cord down
Towards muffled subterranean
Thudding and squeals.
But now he comes weightlessly upright, hearing the wind-
carried bok of a twelve-bore.
He pinpoints it. He identifies it. He judges Hagen has shot a woodpigeon on his morning walk. Every frond of the wood listens with him.
His sweat glints, falling into the excavation. And as he listens
A new presence, like a press of wind, fills up the air, a thickening vibration. An echoing yawn of roar through all the mass of leaves. It pours down the sunken road, ten yards below him, among coiled, piling beech roots. And the narrow, tree-choked valley is suddenly alert, alarmed, as the sound ceases. Beside the little bridge in the bottom of the wood, a white Ford Cortina has come to rest in the layby.
Garten rises in his hole, peering. Mrs Westlake, the doctor’s wife, winds down her window, throws out a spent match, puffs smoke, relaxes tensely, waits.
The wood creeps rustling back. The million whispering busyness of the fronds, which seemed to have hesitated, start up their stitchwork, with clicking of stems and all the tiny excitements of their materials.
Garten half-lies, watching the white fox-fine profile, under dark hair, in the car window. Her stillness holds him. He eases his elbows and knees, hunching gently to his attentiveness, as to a rifle. His eyes, among bluebells and baby bracken, are circles of animal clarity, not yet come clear of their innocence.
Clouds slide off the sun. The trees stretch, stirring their tops. A thrush hones and brandishes its echoes down the long aisles, in the emerald light, as if it sang in an empty cathedral. Shrews storm through the undergrowth. Hover-flies move to centre, angle their whines, dazzle across the sunshafts. The humus lifts and sweats.
Garten’s eyes are quiet, like a hunter’s, watching the game feed closer. His heart deepens its beat, expectant.
His fantasy agitates, richly, monotonously, around the cool drawn features of Mrs Westlake, the high china cheekbone, the dark mouth. A tentacle of her cigarette smoke touches his nostril, and hangs, in the lit woodland.
He fastens himself to her, as if to a magnification, fading from himself, like a motionless lizard.
One, two, three cigarettes. In the bird-ringing peace.
Pauline Hagen
Has turned back from the drive gate.
A leaf-bordered blankness
Like the suck of a precipice
Draws her along the bleak sweep of drive
Towards the white house.
Her legs move, as if to remain still were even more futile.
She looks upward
Into the open hanging underbellies of the trees
As if those puzzles held something from her.
As she walks
She feels too present, too tall, too vivid.
The level sprawl of world
Draws away tinily, in every direction.
It separates itself from her exposure.
She looks down
At the chaotic gravel.
Her eyes claw at the gravel.
Something in her is preparing a scream, which she dare
not utter.
Her legs carry her towards the house.
Twitchings jerk her eyelid, her cheek,
A tugging tightens her brow, so she has to rub her face in
her hands.
Something overpowering
Like an unmanageable horse, a sudden wild bulk
Starts rearing and wheeling away, to one side then to the
other
As if it would break out of her.
She halts, balancing giddily.
She has closed her eyes
Where Lumb is still with her
His presence strays all over her body, like a flame on oil,
His after-nearness, the after-caress of his voice
As if she breathed inside the silk of his nearness.
At the drive’s edge, she kneels among bluebells.
She shuts her eyes more tightly.
The bunching beast-cry inside her shudders to be let out.
She folds her arms tightly
Over this rending,
She bends low, her face closes more tightly.
Her moan barely reaches the nearest tree.
She is gouging the leaf-mould,
She is anointing her face w
ith it.
She wants to rub her whole body with it.
She is wringing the bunched stems of squeaking spermy
bluebells
And anointing her face.
Lumb’s glance keeps glimpsing through her body
Churning tracks of soft phosphorescence
Like the first sweaty wafts of a sickness.
She wants to press her face into the soil, into the moist
mould,
And scream straight downward, into earth-stone darkness.
She cannot get far enough down, or near enough.
She hauls herself to her feet, towering
And walks
And enters the still house.
Rooms retreat.
A march of right angles. Barren perspectives
Cluttered with artefacts, in a cold shine.
Icebergs of taste, spacing and repose.
The rooms circle her slowly, like a malevolence.
She feels weirdly oppressed.
She remembers
A shadow-cleft redstone desert
At evening.
The carpet’s edge. The parquet.
The door-knob’s cut glass.
She observes these with new fear.
The kitchen’s magenta tiles. The blue Aga.
It is her fifteen years of marriage
Watching her, strange-faced, like a jury.
Coffee from silver, to disarm some minutes.
Leaning against the bar of the stove
She meditates blankly,
Fixedly.
She is like the eye of a spirit level
Intent
On earth’s poles, the sun’s pull, the moon’s imbalance.
A charioteer, for these moments,
On some rocking perimeter.
