A Ted Hughes Bestiary

by Ted Hughes

  At Easter, searching so fearful-careful,

  So hopeless-careless, rag-wings, ragged trousers.

  Too low-born for the peregrine’s trapeze, too dopey

  For the sparrowhawk’s jet controls –

  Where’s the high dream when you rode circles

  Mewing near the sun

  Into your mirror-self – something unearthly

  Lowering from heaven towards you?

  Buzzard sits in mid-field, in mild sunlight,

  Listening to tangled tales, by mole and by bee,

  And by soft-headed dandelion.

  When he treads, by chance, on a baby rabbit

  He looks like an old woman

  Trying to get her knickers off.

  In the end he lumbers away

  To find some other buzzard, maybe older,

  To show him how.

  Snipe

  You are soaked with the cold rain –

  Like a pelt in tanning liquor.

  The moor’s swollen waterbelly

  Swags and quivers, ready to burst at a step.

  Suddenly

  Some scrap of dried fabric rips

  Itself up

  From the marsh-quake, scattering. A soft

  Explosion of twilight

  In the eyes, with a spinning fragment

  Somewhere. Nearly lost, wing-flash

  Stab-trying escape routes, wincing

  From each, ducking under

  And flinging up over –

  Bowed head, jockey shoulders

  Climbing headlong

  As if hurled downwards –

  A mote in the watery eye of the moor –

  Hits cloud and

  Skis down the far rain wall

  Slashes a wet rent

  In the rain-dusk

  Twisting out sideways –

  rushes his alarm

  Back to the ice-age.

  The downpour helmet

  Tightens on your skull, riddling the pools,

  Washing the standing stones and fallen shales

  With empty nightfall.

  The Hen

  The Hen

  Worships the dust. She finds God everywhere.

  Everywhere she finds his jewels.

  And she does not care

  What the cabbage thinks.

  She has forgotten flight

  Because she has interpreted happily

  Her recurrent dream

  Of clashing cleavers, of hot ovens,

  And of the little pen-knife blade

  Splitting her palate.

  She flaps her wings, like shallow egg-baskets,

  To show her contempt

  For those who live on escape

  And a future of empty sky.

  She rakes, with noble, tireless foot,

  The treasury of the dirt,

  And clucks with the mechanical alarm clock

  She chose instead of song

  When the Creator

  Separated the Workers and the Singers.

  With her eye on reward

  She tilts her head religiously

  At the most practical angle

  Which reveals to her

  That the fox is a country superstition,

  That her eggs have made man her slave

  And that the heavens, for all their threatening,

  Have not yet fallen.

  And she is stern. Her eye is fierce – blood

  (That weakness) is punished instantly.

  She is a hard bronze of uprightness.

  And indulges herself in nothing

  Except to swoon a little, a delicious slight swoon,

  One eye closed, just before sleep,

  Conjuring the odour of tarragon.

  Mallard

  Gloom-glossy wind

  Ransacking summer’s end.

  Crammed, churned leaf-mass.

  The river’s shutters clatter.

  Myself mixed with it – gusty skeleton,

  Scarecrow blown

  Inside out, clinging to my straws –

  Horizons rolling up. A space-witch

  Mussel-blue, in a fling of foul skirts

  Gapes a light-streak –

  I squint up and vertigo

  Has unbalanced the clouds, slithering everything

  Into a sack.

  As a dark horse – sudden

  Little elf-horse – bolts for freedom.

  Gallops out of the river

  Flashes white chevrons, climbs

  The avalanche of leaves, flickering pennons,

  Whinnies overhead –

  and is

  Snatched away by a huge hand.

  Evening Thrush

  Beyond a twilight of limes and willows

  The church craftsman is still busy –

  Switing idols,

  Rough pre-Goidelic gods and goddesses,

  Out of old bits of churchyard yew.

  Suddenly flinging

  Everything off, head-up, flame-naked,

  Plunges shuddering into the creator –

  Then comes plodding back, with a limp, over cobbles.

  That was a virtuoso’s joke.

  Now, serious, stretched full height, he aims

  At the zenith. He situates a note

  Right on the source of light.

  Sews a seamless garment, simultaneously

  Hurls javelins of dew

  Three in air together, catches them.

  Explains a studied theorem of sober practicality.

  Cool-eyed,

  Gossips in a mundane code of splutters

  With Venus and Jupiter.

  Listens –

  Motionless, intent astronomer.

  Suddenly launches a soul –

  The first roses hang in a yoke stupor.

  Globe after globe rolls out

  Through his fluteful of dew –

  The tree-stacks ride out on the widening arc.

  Alone and darkening

  At the altar of a star

  With his sword through his throat

  The thrush of clay goes on arguing

  Over the graves.

  O thrush,

  If that really is you, behind the leaf-screen,

  Who is this –

  Worn-headed, on the lawn’s grass, after sunset,

  Humped, voiceless, turdus, imprisoned

  As a long-distance lorry-driver, dazed

  With the pop and static and unending

  Of worms and wife and kids?

  Treecreeper

  On the tree-bole a zig-zag upward rivulet

  Is a dodgy bird, a midget ace,

  Busy as a shrew, moth-modest as lichen.

  Inchmeal medical examination

  Of the tree’s skin. Snap-shot micro-scanner

  And a bill of instant hypodermic.

  He’s unzipping the tree-bole

  For deeper scrutiny. It sticks. It jerks.

  No microbe dare be, nor bubble spider.

  All the trees are waiting – pale, undressed –

  So he can’t dawdle. He jabs, dabs, checks essentials,

  Magnet-safe on undersides, then swings

  In a blur of tiny machinery

  To the next patient’s foot, and trickles upward

  Murmuring ‘Good, good!’ and ‘Good, good!’

  Into the huge satisfying mass of work.

  A Dove

  Snaps its twig-tether – mounts –

  Dream-yanked up into vacuum

  Wings snickering.

  Another, in a shatter, hurls dodging away up.

  They career through tree-mazes –

  Nearly uncontrollable love-weights.

  Or now

  Temple-dancers, possessed, and steered

  By solemn powers

  Through insane, stately convulsions.

  Porpoises

  Of dove-lust and blood splendour

  With arcs

  And plungings, and spray-slow explosions.
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  Now violently gone

  Riding the snake of the long love-whip

  Among flarings of mares and stallions

  Now staying

  Coiled on a bough

  Bubbling molten, wobbling top-heavy

  Into one and many.

  Sing the Rat

  Sing the hole’s plume, the rafter’s cockade

  Who melts from the eye-corner, the soft squealer

  Pointed at both ends, who chews through lead

  Sing the scholarly meek face

  Of the penniless rat

  Who studies all night

  To inherit the house

  Sing the riff-raff of the roof-space, who dance till dawn

  Sluts in silk, sharpers with sleek moustaches

  Dancing the cog-roll, the belly-bounce, the trundle

  Sing the tireless hands

  Of the hardworking rat

  Who demolishes the crust, and does not fail

  To sign the spilt flour

  The rat, the rat, the ratatatat

  The house’s poltergeist, shaped like a shuttle

  Who longs to join the family

  Sing his bright face, cross-eyed with eagerness

  His pin-fingers, that seem too small for the job

  Sing his split nose, that looks so sore

  O sing his fearless ears, the listener in the wall

  Let him jump on your head, let him cling there

  Save him from sticks and stones

  Sing the rat so poor he thrives on poison

  Who has nothing to give to the trap, though it gapes for a year

  Except his children

  Who prays only to the ferret

  ‘Forget me’ and to the terrier

  ‘In every thousand of me, spare two’

  Sing him

  Who stuffs his velvet purse, in hurry and fear

  With the memory of the fork,

  The reflections of the spoon, the hope of the knives

  Who woos his wife with caperings, who thinks deep

  Who is the slave of two fangs

  O sing

  The long-tailed grey worry of the night-hours

  Who always watches and waits

  Like a wart on the nose

  Even while you snore

  O sing

  Little Jesus in the wilderness

  Carrying the sins of the house

  Into every dish, the hated one

  O sing

  Scupper-tyke, whip-lobber

  Smutty-guts, pot-goblin

  Garret-whacker, rick-lark

  Sump-swab, cupboard-adder

  Bobby-robin, knacker-knocker

  Sneak-nicker, sprinty-dinty

  Pintle-bum

  Swallows

  What The Schoolmaster Said:

  She flicks past, ahead of her name,

  Twinkling away out over the lake.

  Reaching this way and that way, with her scissors,

  Snipping midges

  Trout are too numb and sunken to stir for.

  Sahara clay ovens, at mirage heat,

  Glazed her blues, and still she is hot.

  She wearied of snatching clegs off the lugs of buffaloes

  And of lassooing the flirt-flags of gazelles.

  They told her the North was one giant snowball

  Rolling South. She did not believe them.

  She exchanged the starry chart of Columbus

  For a beggar’s bowl of mud.

  Did she close her eyes and trust in God?

  No, she saw lighthouses

  Streaming in chaos

  Like sparks from a chymney –

  She had fixed her instruments on home.

  So now, suddenly, into a blanch-tree stillness,

  A silence of celandines,

  A fringing and stupor of frost

  She bursts, weightless –

  and anchors

  On eggs frail as frost.

  There she goes, flung taut on her leash,

  Her eyes at her mouth-corners,

  Water-skiing out across a wind

  That wrecks great flakes against windscreens.

  What The Farmer’s Wife Said:

  It’s the loveliest thing about swallows,

  The moment they come,

  The moment they dip in, and are suddenly there.

  For months you just never thought about them

  Then suddenly you see one swimming maybe out there

  Over our bare tossing orchard, in a slattery April blow,

  Probably among big sloppy snowflakes.

  And there it is – the first swallow,

  Flung and frail, like a midge caught in the waterskin

  On the weir’s brink – and straightaway you lose it.

  You just got a glimpse of whisker and frailty

  Then there’s nothing but jostled daffodils, like the girls running in from a downpour

  Shrieking and giggling and shivering

  And the puckered primrose posies, and the wet grit.

  It’s only a moment, only a flicker, easy to miss –

  That first swallow just swinging in your eye-corner

  Like a mote in the wind-smart,

  A swallow pinned on a roller of air that roars and snatches it away

  Out of sight, and booms in the bare wood

  And you know there’ll be colder nights yet

  And worse days and you think

  ‘If he’s here, there must be flies for him’

  And you think of the flies and their thin limbs in that cold.

  What The Vicar Said:

  I agree

  There’s nothing verminous, or pestilential, about swallows.

  Swallows are the aristocrats

  The thoroughbreds of summer.

  Still, there is something sinister about them.

  I think it’s their futuristic design.

  The whole evolution of aircraft

  Has been to resemble swallows more and more closely.

  None of that propellor-blur, ponderous, biplane business

  Of partridges and pheasants,

  Or even the spitfire heroics of hawks.

  When I was a boy I remember

  Their shapes always alarmed me, slightly,

  With the thought of the wars to come,

  The speed beyond sound, the molten forms.

  You might say

  They have a chirruppy, chicken-sweet expression

  With goo-goo starlet wide-apart eyes,

  And their bills seem tiny, almost retroussé cute –

  In fact, the whole face opens

  Like a jet engine.

  And before this, they solved the problem, did they not,

  Of the harpoon.

  Under the Hill of Centurions

  The river is in a resurrection fever.

  Now at Easter you find them

  Up in the pool’s throat, and in the very jugular

  Where the stickle pulses under grasses –

  Cock minnows!

  They have abandoned contemplation and prayer in the pool’s crypt.

  There they are, packed all together,

  In an inch of seething light.

  A stag-party, all bridegrooms, all in their panoply –

  Red-breasted as if they bled, their Roman

  Bottle-glass greened bodies silked with black

  In the clatter of the light loom of water

  All singing and

  Toiling together,

  Wreathing their metals

  Into the warp and weft of the lit water –

  I imagine their song,

  Deep-chested, striving, solemn.

  A wrestling tress of kingfisher colour,

  Steely jostlings, a washed mass of brilliants

  Labouring at earth

  In the wheel of light –

  Ghostly rinsings

  A struggle of spirits.

  Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan

  for Hilary and S
imon

  ‘Up in the pools,’ they’d said, and ‘Two miles upstream.’

  Something sinister about bogland rivers.

  And a shock –

  after the two miles of tumblequag, of Ice-Age hairiness, crusty, quaking cadaver and me lurching over it in elation like a daddy-long-legs –

  after crooked little clatterbrook and again clatterbrook (a hurry of shallow grey light so distilled it looked like acid) –

  and after the wobbly levels of a razor-edged, blood-smeared grass, the flood-sucked swabs of bog-cotton, the dusty calico rip-up of snipe –

  under those petrified scapulae, vertebrae, horn-skulls the Cuillins (asylum of eagles) that were blue-silvered like wrinkled baking foil in the blue noon that day, and tremulous –

  early August, in a hot lateness (only three hours before my boat), a glimpse of my watch and suddenly

  up to my hip in a suck-hole then on again teetering over the broken-necked heath-bobs a good half-hour and me melting in my combined fuel of toil and clobber suddenly

  The shock.

  The sheer cavern of current piling silence

  Under my feet.

  So lonely-drowning deep, so drowned-hair silent

  So clear

  Cleansing the body cavity of the underbog.

  Such a brilliant cut-glass interior

  Sliding under me

  And I felt a little bit giddy

  Ghostly

  As I fished the long pool-tail

  Peering into that superabundance of spirit.

  And now where were they, my fellow aliens from prehistory?

  Those peculiar eyes

  So like mine, but fixed at zero,

  Pressing in from outer darkness

  Eyes of aimed sperm and of egg on their errand,

  Looking for immortality

  In the lap of a broken volcano, in the furrow of a lost glacier,

  Those shuttles of love-shadow?

  Only humbler beings waved at me –

  Weeds grazing the bottom, idling their tails.

  Till the last pool –

  A broad, coiling whorl, a deep ear

  Of pondering amber,

  Greenish and precious like a preservative,

  With a ram’s skull sunk there – magnified, a Medusa,

  Funereal, phosphorescent, a lamp

  Ten feet under the whisky.

  I heard this pool whisper a warning.

  I tickled its leading edges with temptation.

  I stroked its throat with a whisker.

  I licked the moulded hollows

  Of its collarbones

  Where the depth, now underbank opposite,

  Pulsed up from contained excitements –

  Eerie how you know when it’s coming –