by Ted Hughes
It was like nothing the girls had ever seen, unless it was like a big weasel. It came up the gravelly beach below the rocks with that merry, hump-backed, snake-headed gallop of weasels. It came on over the rocks. It disappeared and they thought it had gone. It reappeared much closer and bigger. And all the time the man kept on with his strange, soft, painful cry.
Till at last the creature was sitting there in front of them, the size of a big cat, its dark fur all clawed with wet, craning towards the man, sniffing and shivering, so he could have reached out his hand and touched it, and the girls could smell the wild smell of the fish of the lough.
Again the man was silent. He sat watching the beast. And the beast went on trembling and sniffing and craning towards him. It seemed to be getting ready to jump into his lap. One of the girls could stand it no longer. She jerked in her foot, and hunched herself tighter, and a whimper escaped her.
The beast stood erect and stared. It stood up on its hind legs, like a person, and stared at them, quite still, as if they were very far away. The girls saw its foreign eyes, its wide whiskers. They thought they were going to be attacked at last, and got ready to shriek. Instead, it turned away and dropped off the back of its rock, and went on down over the rocks and over the beach and into the water. And all the time the man sat watching it without a word. The creature stood up again, in the shallow water, looking back. Then it had gone.
The priest listened to this story, and smiled at the excitement of the three girls.
‘If that is a miracle,’ he said finally, ‘To bring an otter up out of the lough, then what must that poor man think of the great world itself, this giant, shining beauty that God whistled up out of the waters of chaos?’
And as he spoke the priest was suddenly carried away by his words. His thoughts flew up into a great fiery space, and who knows what spark had jumped on to him from the flushed faces of the three girls? He seemed to be flying into an endless, blazing sunrise, and he described the first coming of Creation, as it rose from the abyss, an infinite creature of miracles, made of miracles and teeming miracles. And he went on, describing this creature, giving it more and more dazzlingly-shining eyes, and more and more glorious limbs, and heaping it with greater and more extraordinary beauties, till his heart was pounding and he was pacing the room talking about God himself, and the tears pouring from his eyes fell shattering and glittering down the front of his cassock.
The girls became dull, and the moment his words paused they vanished through the doorway. The priest hardly noticed, he was so astonished by his own emotion. He sat down, trembling and faint, as in a fever. He thought something supernatural had happened. Then he saw the notebook again, lying on the table, and he remembered the otter and the strange way it had come up out of the lough because a man whistled. He opened the notebook and began to decipher the words. He found a pen and clean paper and began to copy out the verses.
What will you make of half a man
Half a face
A ripped edge
His one-eyed waking
Is the shorn sleep of aftermath
His vigour
The bone-deformity of consequences
His talents
The deprivations of escape
How will you correct
The veteran of negatives
And the survivor of cease?
I hear your congregations at their rapture
Cries from birds, long ago perfect
And from the awkward gullets of beasts
That will not chill into syntax.
And I hear speech, the bossed Neanderthal brow-ridge
Gone into beetling talk
The Java Man’s bone grinders sublimed into chat.
Words buckle the voice in tighter, closer
Under the midriff
Till the cry rots, and speech
Is a fistula
Eking and deferring
Like a stupid or a crafty doctor
With his year after year
Of sanguinary nostrums
Of almosts and their tomorrows
Through a lifetime of fees.
Who are you?
The spider clamps the bluefly – whose death panic
Becomes sudden soulful absorption.
A stoat throbs at the nape of the lumped rabbit
Who watches the skylines fixedly.
Photographs of people – open-mouthed
In the gust of being shot and falling
And you grab me
So the blood jumps into my teeth
And ‘Quick!’ you whisper, ‘O quick!’
And ‘Now! Now! Now!’
Now what?
That I hear the age of the earth?
That I feel
My mother lift me up from between her legs?
At the top of my soul
A box of dolls.
In the middle of my soul
A circus of gods.
At the bottom of my soul
The usual mess of squabblers.
In front of me
A useful-looking world, a thrilling weapon.
Behind me
A cave
Inside the cave, some female groaning
In labour –
Or in hunger –
Or in fear, or sick, or forsaken –
Or –
At this point, I feel the sun’s strength.
I take a few still-aimless happy steps.
The lark sizzles in my ear
Like a fuse –
A prickling fever
A flush of the swelling earth –
When you touch his grains, who shall stay?
Over the lark’s crested tongue
Under the lark’s crested head
A prophecy
From the core of the blue peace
From the sapphire’s flaw
From the sun’s blinding dust
I watched a wise beetle
Walking about inside my body
I saw a tree
Grow inward from my navel
Hawks clashed their courtship
Between my ears.
Slowly I filled up with the whole world.
Only one thing stayed outside me, in the glare.
You beckoned.
In a world where all is temporary
And must pass for its opposite
The trousseau of the apple
Came by violence into my possession.
I neglected to come to degree of nature
In the patience of things.
I forestalled God –
I assailed his daughter.
Now I lie at the road’s edge.
People come and go.
Dogs watch me.
Collision with the earth has finally come –
How far can I fall?
A kelp, adrift
In my feeding substance
A mountain
Rooted in stone of heaven
A sea
Full of moon-ghost, with mangling waters
Dust on my head
Helpless to fit the pieces of water
A needle of many Norths
Ark of blood
Which is the magic baggage old men open
And find useless, at the great moment of need
Error on error
Perfumed
With a ribbon of fury
Trying to be a leaf
In your kingdom
For a moment I am a leaf
And your fulness comes
And I reel back
Into my face and hands
Like the electrocuted man
Banged from his burst straps
I heard the screech, sudden –
Its steel was right inside my skull
It scraped all round, inside it
Like the abortionist’s knife.
My blood lashed and writhed on its knot –
Its skin is so thin, and so blind,
And earth is so huge, so
hard, wild
And so nearly nothing
And so final with its gravity stone –
My legs, though, were already galloping to help
The woman who wore a split lopsided mask –
That was how the comedy began.
Before I got to her – it was ended
And the curtain came down.
But now, suddenly,
Again the curtain goes up.
This is no longer the play.
The mask is off.
Once I said lightly
Even if the worst happens
We can’t fall off the earth.
And again I said
No matter what fire cooks us
We shall be still in the pan together.
And words twice as stupid.
Truly hell heard me.
She fell into the earth
And I was devoured.
Music, that eats people
That transfixes them
On its thorns, like a shrike
To cut up at leisure
Or licks them all over carefully gently
Like a tiger
Before leaving nothing but the hair of the head
And the soles of the feet
Is the maneater
On your leash.
But all it finds of me, when it picks me up
Is what you have
Already
Emptied and rejected.
The rain comes again
A tightening, a prickling in
On the soft-rotten gatepost.
But the stars
Are sunbathing
On the shores
Of the sea whose waves
Pile in from your approach
An unearthly woman wading shorewards
With me in your arms
The grey in my hair.
This is the maneater’s skull.
These brows were the Arc de Triomphe
To the gullet.
The deaf adder of appetite
Coiled under. It spied through these nacelles
Ignorant of death.
And the whole assemblage flowed hungering through the
long ways.
Its cry
Quieted the valleys.
It was looking for me.
I was looking for you.
You were looking for me.
I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp.
Nuptials among prehistoric insects
The tremulous convulsion
The inching hydra strength
Among frilled lizards
Dropping twigs, and acorns, and leaves.
The oak is in bliss
Its roots
Lift arms that are a supplication
Crippled with stigmata
Like the sea-carved cliffs earth lifts
Loaded with dumb, uttering effigies
The oak seems to die and to be dead
In its love-act.
As I lie under it
In a brown leaf nostalgia
An acorn stupor
A perilously frail safety.
She rides the earth
On an ass, on a lion.
She rides the heavens
On a great white bull.
She is an apple.
Whoever plucks her
Nails his heart
To the leafless tree.
The huntsmen, on top of their swaying horse-towers,
Faces raw as butcher’s blocks, are angry.
They have lost their fox.
They have lost most of their hounds.
I can’t help.
The one I hunt
The one
I shall rend to pieces
Whose blood I shall dab on your cheek
Is under my coat.
A primrose petal’s edge
Cuts the vision like laser.
And the eye of a hare
Strips the interrogator naked
Of all but some skin of terror –
A starry frost.
Who is this?
She reveals herself, and is veiled.
Somebody
Something grips by the nape
And bangs the brow, as against a wall
Against the untouchable veils
Of the hole which is bottomless
Till blood drips from the mouth.
Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed,
Waving, weeping, smiling, flushed
It happened
You knocked the world off, like a flower-vase.
It was the third time. And it smashed.
I turned
I bowed
In the morgue I kissed
Your temple’s refrigerated glazed
As rained-on graveyard marble, my
Lips queasy, heart non-existent
And straightened
Into sun-darkness
Like a pillar over Athens
Defunct
In the glaring metropolis of cameras.
I said goodbye to earth
I stepped into the wind
Which entered the tunnel of fire
Beneath the mountain of water
I arrived at light
Where I was shadowless
I saw the snowflake crucified
Upon the nails of nothing
I heard the atoms praying
To enter his kingdom
To be broken like bread
On a dark sill, and to bleed.
The swallow – rebuilding –
Collects the lot
From the sow’s wallow.
But what I did only shifted the dust about.
And what crossed my mind
Crossed into outer space.
And for all rumours of me read obituary.
What there truly remains of me
Is that very thing – my absence.
So how will you gather me?
I saw my keeper
Sitting in the sun –
If you can catch that, you are the falcon of falcons.
The night wind, muscled with rain,
Is going to tug out
The trees like corks –
Just as in the dream –
A voice quaking lit heaven
The stone tower flies.
A night
To scamper naked
To the dry den
Where one who would have devoured me is driven off
By a wolf.
The viper fell from the sun
Jerked and lay in the road’s dust,
Started horribly to move, as I watched it.
A radiant goose dropped from a fire-quake heaven,
Slammed on to earth beside me
So hard, it bounced me off my feet.
Something dazzling crashed on the hill field,
Elk-antlered, golden-limbed, a glowing mass
That started to get up.
I stirred, like a discarded foetus,
Already grey-haired,
In a blowing of bright particles.
A hand out of a hot cloud
Held me its thumb to suck.
Lifted me to the dug that grew
Out of the brow of a lioness.
A doctor extracted
From my blood its tusk
Excavated
The mountain-root from my body
Excised
The seven-seas’ spring from under my eye-tooth
Emptied my skull
Of clouds and stars
Pounded up what was left
Dried it and lit it and read by its flame
A story to his child
About a God
Who ripped his mother’s womb
And entered it, with a sword and a torch
To find a father.
The coffin, spurred by its screws,
Took a wrong turning.
The earth can’t balance its load
Even to start.
&nb
sp; The creaking heavens
Will never get there.
As for me
All I have
For an axle
Is your needle
Through my brains.
The grass-blade is not without
The loyalty that never was beheld.
