by Ted Hughes
And the blackbird
Sleeking from common anything and worm-dirt
Balances a precarious banner
Gold on black, terror and exultation.
The grim badger with armorial mask
Biting spade-steel, teeth and jaw-strake shattered,
Draws that final shuddering battle cry
Out of its backbone.
Me too,
Let me be one of your warriors.
Let your home
Be my home. Your people
My people.
Churches topple
Like the temples before them.
The reverberations of worship
Seem to help
Collapse such erections.
In all that time
The river
Has deepened its defile
Has been its own purification
Between your breasts
Between your thighs
I know well
You are not infallible
I know how your huge your unmanageable
Mass of bronze hair shrank to a twist
As thin as a silk scarf, on your skull,
And how your pony’s eye darkened larger
Holding too lucidly the deep glimpse
After the humane killer
And I had to lift your hand for you
While your chin sank to your chest
With the sheer weariness
Of taking away from everybody
Your envied beauty, your much-desired beauty
Your hardly-used beauty
Of lifting away yourself
From yourself
And weeping with the ache of the effort
The sun, like a cold kiss in the street –
A mere disc token of you.
Moon – a smear
Of your salivas, cold, cooling.
Bite. Again, bite.
Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning,
Like the flushed gossip
With the tale that kills
Sometimes it strengthens very slowly
What is already here –
A tree darkening the house.
The saviour
From these veils of wrinkle and shawls of ache
Like the sun
Which is itself cloudless and leafless
Was always here, is always as she was.
Having first given away pleasure –
Which is hard –
What is there left to give?
There is pain.
Pain is hardest of all.
It cannot really be given.
It can only be paid down
Equal, exactly,
To what can be no part of falsehood.
This payment is that purchase.
Looking for her form
I find only a fern.
Where she should be waiting in the flesh
Stands a sycamore with weeping letters.
I have a memorial too.
Where I lay in space
Is the print of the earth which trampled me
Like a bunch of grapes.
Now I am being drunk
By a singing drunkard.
A man hangs on
To a bare handful of hair.
A woman hangs on
To a bare handful of flesh.
Who is it
Reaches both hands into the drop
Letting flesh and hair
Follow if they can?
When the still-soft eyelid sank again
Over the stare
Still bright as if alive
The chiselled threshold
Without a murmur
Ground the soul’s kernel
Till blood welled.
And your granite –
Anointed –
Woke.
Stirred.
The sea grieves all night long.
The wall is past groaning.
The field has given up –
It can’t care any more.
Even the tree
Waits like an old man
Who has seen his whole family murdered.
Horrible world
Where I let in again –
As if for the first time –
The untouched joy.
Hearing your moan echo, I chill. I shiver.
I know
You can’t stay with those trees.
I know
The river is only fabled to be orphan.
I know
The flowers also look for you, and die looking.
Just as the sun returns every day
As if owned.
Like me
These are neither your brides, nor your grooms.
Each of us is nothing
But the fleeting warm pressure
Of your footfall
As you pace
Your cage of freedom.
Faces lift out of the earth
Moistly-lidded, and gazing unfocussed
Like babies new born.
And with cries like the half-cry
Of a near-fatally wounded person
Not yet fallen, but already unconscious.
And these are the ones
Who are trying to tell
Your name.
From age to age
Nothing bequeathed
But a gagged yell
A clutchful of sod
And libraries
Of convalescence.
I skin the skin
Take the eye from the eye
Extract the entrails from the entrails
I scrape the flesh from the flesh
Pluck the heart
From the heart
Drain away the blood from the blood
Boil the bones till nothing is left
But the bones
I pour away the sludge of brains
Leaving simply the brains
Soak it all
In the crushed-out oil of the life
Eat
Eat
What steel was it the river poured
Horizontally
Into the sky’s evening throat –
Put out the sun.
The steel man, in his fluttering purples,
Is lifted from the mould’s fragments.
I breathe on him
Terrors race over his skin.
He almost lives
Who dare meet you.
Calves harshly parted from their mamas
Stumble through all the hedges in the country
Hither thither crying day and night
Till their throats will only grunt and whistle.
After some days, a stupor sadness
Collects them again in their field.
They will never stray any more.
From now on, they only want each other.
So much for calves.
As for the tiger
He lies still
Like left luggage.
He is roaming the earth light, unseen.
He is safe.
Heaven and hell have both adopted him.
A bang – a burning –
I opened my eyes
In a vale crumbling with echoes.
A solitary dove
Cries in the tree – I cannot bear it.
From this centre
It wearies the compass.
Am I killed?
Or am I searching?
Is this the rainbow silking my body?
Which wings are these?
The dead man lies, marching here and there
In the battle for life, without moving.
He prays he will escape for what comes after.
At least that he’ll escape. So he lies still.
But it arrives
Invisible as a bullet
And the dead man flings up his arms
With a cry
Incomprehensible in every language
And from that moment
>
He never stops trying to dance, trying to sing
And maybe he dances and sings
Because you kissed him.
If you miss him, he stays dead
Among the inescapable facts.
Every day the world gets simply
Bigger and bigger
And smaller and smaller
Every day the world gets more
And more beautiful
And uglier and uglier.
Your comings get closer.
Your goings get worse.
Your tree – your oak
A glare
Of black upward lightning, a wriggling grab
Momentary
Under the crumbling of stars.
A guard, a dancer
At the pure well of leaf.
Agony in the garden. Annunciation
Of clay, water and the sunlight.
They thunder under its roof.
Its agony is its temple.
Waist-deep, the black oak is dancing
And my eyes pause
On the centuries of its instant
As gnats
Try to winter in its wrinkles.
The seas are thirsting
Towards the oak.
The oak is flying
Astride the earth.
Glare out of just crumpled grass –
Blinded, I blink.
Glare out of muddled clouds –
I go in.
Clare out of house-gloom –
I close my eyes.
And the darkness too is aflame.
So you have come and gone again
With my skin.
About the Author
Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber and Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of poetry, Tales from Ovid (1997) and Birthday Letters (1998). He was Poet Laureate from 1984, and in 1998 he was appointed to the Order of Merit.
Copyright
This ebook edition published in 2010
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Ted Hughes, 1977
The right of Ted Hughes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–26298–4
