by Ted Hughes
So I felt it now, my blood
Prickling and thickening, altering
With an ushering-in of chills, a weird onset
As if mountains were pushing mountains higher
Behind me, to crowd over my shoulder –
Then the pool lifted a travelling bulge
And grabbed the tip of my heart-nerve, and crashed,
Trying to wrench it from me, and again
Lifted a flash of arm for leverage
And it was a Gruagach of the Sligachan!
Some Boggart up from a crack in the granite!
A Glaistig out of the skull!
– what was it gave me
Such a supernatural, beautiful fright
And let go, and sank disembodied
Into the eye-pupil darkness?
Only a little salmon.
Salmo salar
The loveliest, left-behind, most-longed-for ogress
Of the Palaeolithic
Watched me through her time-warped judas-hole
In the ruinous castle of Skye
As I faded from the light of reality.
That Morning
We came where the salmon were so many
So steady, so spaced, so far-aimed
On their inner map, England could add
Only the sooty twilight of South Yorkshire
Hung with the drumming drift of Lancasters
Till the world had seemed capsizing slowly.
Solemn to stand there in the pollen light
Waist-deep in wild salmon swaying massed
As from the hand of God. There the body
Separated, golden and imperishable,
From its doubting thought – a spirit-beacon
Lit by the power of the salmon
That came on, came on, and kept on coming
As if we flew slowly, their formations
Lifting us toward some dazzle of blessing
One wrong thought might darken. As if the fallen
World and salmon were over. As if these
Were the imperishable fish
That had let the world pass away –
There, in a mauve light of drifted lupins,
They hung in the cupped hands of mountains
Made of tingling atoms. It had happened.
Then for a sign that we were where we were
Two gold bears came down and swam like men
Beside us. And dived like children.
And stood in deep water as on a throne
Eating pierced salmon off their talons.
So we found the end of our journey.
So we stood, alive in the river of light
Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.
A Rival
The cormorant, commissar of the hard sea,
Has not adjusted to the soft river.
He lifts his pterodactyl head in the drought pool
(Sound-proof cellar of final solutions).
The dinosaur massacre-machine
Hums on in his skull, programme unaltered.
That fossil eye-chip could reduce
All the blood in the world, yet still taste nothing.
At dawn he’s at it, under the sick face –
Cancer in the lymph, uncontrollable.
Level your eye’s aim and he’s off
Knocking things over, out through the window –
An abortion-doctor
Black bag packed with vital organs
Dripping unspeakably.
Then away, heavy, high
Over the sea’s iron curtain –
The pool lies there mutilated,
face averted,
Dumb and ruined.
Performance
Just before the curtain falls in the river
The Damselfly, with offstage, inaudible shriek
Reappears, weightless.
Hover-poised, in her snake-skin leotards,
Her violet-dark elegance.
Eyelash-delicate, a dracula beauty,
In her acetylene jewels.
Her mascara smudged, her veils shimmer-fresh –
Late August. Some sycamore leaves
Already in their museum, eaten to lace.
Robin song bronze-touching the stillness
Over posthumous nettles. The swifts, as one,
Whipcracked, gone. Blackberries.
And now, lightly,
Adder-shock of this dainty assassin
Still in mid-passion –
still in her miracle play:
Masked, archaic, mute, insect mystery
Out of the sun’s crypt.
Everything is forgiven
Such a metamorphosis in love!
Phaedra Titania
Dragon of crazed enamels!
Tragedienne of the ultra-violet,
So sulphurous and so frail,
Stepping so magnetically to her doom!
Lifted out of the river with tweezers
Dripping the sun’s incandescence –
suddenly she
Switches her scene elsewhere.
(Find him later, halfway up a nettle,
A touch-crumple petal of web and dew –
Midget puppet-clown, tranced on his strings,
In the nightfall pall of balsam.)
An Eel
I
The strange part is his head. Her head. The strangely ripened
Domes over the brain, swollen nacelles
For some large containment. Lobed glands
Of some large awareness. Eerie the eel’s head.
This full, plum-sleeked fruit of evolution.
Beneath it, her snout’s a squashed slipper-face,
The mouth grin-long and perfunctory,
Undershot predatory. And the iris, dirty gold
Distilled only enough to be different
From the olive lode of her body,
The grained and woven blacks. And ringed larger
With a vaguer vision, an earlier eye
Behind her eye, paler, blinder,
Inward. Her buffalo hump
Begins the amazement of her progress.
Her mid-shoulder pectoral fin – concession
To fish-life – secretes itself
Flush with her concealing suit: under it
The skin’s a pale exposure of deepest eel
As her belly is, a dulled pearl.
Strangest, the thumb-print skin, the rubberised weave
Of her insulation. Her whole body
Damascened with identity. This is she
Suspends the Sargasso
In her inmost hope. Her life is a cell
Sealed from event, her patience
Global and furthered with love
By the bending stars as if she
Were earth’s sole initiate. Alone
In her millions, the moon’s pilgrim,
The nun of water.
II
Where does the river come from?
And the eel, the night-mind of water –
The river within the river and opposite –
The night-nerve of water?
Not from the earth’s remembering mire
Not from the air’s whim
Not from the brimming sun. Where from?
From the bottom of the nothing pool
Sargasso of God
Out of the empty spiral of stars
A glimmering person
October Salmon
He’s lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety,
Maybe only two feet under the no-protection of an outleaning small oak,
Half under a tangle of brambles.
After his two thousand miles, he rests,
Breathing in that lap of easy current
In his graveyard pool.
About six pounds weight,
Four years old at most, and hardly a winter at sea –
But already a veteran,
Already a death-patched h
ero. So quickly it’s over!
So briefly he roamed the gallery of marvels!
Such sweet months, so richly embroidered into earth’s beauty-dress,
Her life-robe –
Now worn out with her tirelessness, her insatiable quest,
Hangs in the flow, a frayed scarf –
An autumnal pod of his flower,
The mere hull of his prime, shrunk at shoulder and flank,
With the sea-going Aurora Borealis
Of his April power –
The primrose and violet of that first upfling in the estuary –
Ripened to muddy dregs,
The river reclaiming his sea-metals.
In the October light
He hangs there, patched with leper-cloths.
Death has already dressed him
In her clownish regimentals, her badges and decorations,
Mapping the completion of his service,
His face a ghoul-mask, a dinosaur of senility, and his whole body
A fungoid anemone of canker –
Can the caress of water ease him?
The flow will not let up for a minute.
What a change! from that covenant of polar light
To this shroud in a gutter!
What a death-in-life – to be his own spectre!
His living body become death’s puppet,
Dolled by death in her crude paints and drapes
He haunts his own staring vigil
And suffers the subjection, and the dumbness,
And the humiliation of the role!
And that is how it is,
That is what is going on there, under the scrubby oak tree, hour after hour,
That is what the splendour of the sea has come down to,
And the eye of ravenous joy – king of infinite liberty
In the flashing expanse, the bloom of sea-life,
On the surge-ride of energy, weightless,
Body simply the armature of energy
In that earliest sea-freedom, the savage amazement of life,
The salt mouthful of actual existence
With strength like light –
Yet this was always with him. This was inscribed in his egg.
This chamber of horrors is also home.
He was probably hatched in this very pool.
And this was the only mother he ever had, this uneasy channel of minnows
Under the mill-wall, with bicycle wheels, car-tyres, bottles
And sunk sheets of corrugated iron.
People walking their dogs trail their evening shadows across him.
If boys see him they will try to kill him.
All this, too, is stitched into the torn richness,
The epic poise
That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient
In the machinery of heaven.
Visitation
All night the river’s twists
Bit each other’s tails, in happy play.
Suddenly a dark other
Twisted among them.
And a cry, half sky, half bird,
Slithered over roots.
A star
Fleetingly etched it.
Dawn
Puzzles a sunk branch under deep tremblings.
Nettles will not tell.
Who shall say
That the river
Crawled out of the river, and whistled,
And was answered by another river?
A strange tree
Is the water of life –
Sheds these pad-clusters on mud-margins
One dawn in a year, her eeriest flower.
The Hare
I
That Elf
Riding his awkward pair of haunchy legs
That weird long-eared Elf
Wobbling down the highway
Don’t overtake him, don’t try to drive past him,
He’s scatty, he’s all over the road,
He can’t keep his steering, in his ramshackle go-cart,
His big loose wheels, buckled and rusty,
Nearly wobbling off
And all the screws in his head wobbling and loose
And his eyes wobbling
II
The Hare is a very fragile thing.
The life in the hare is a glassy goblet, and her yellow-fringed frost-flake belly says: Fragile.
The hare’s bones are light glass. And the hare’s face –
Who lifted her face to the Lord?
Her new-budded nostrils and lips,
For the daintiest pencillings, the last eyelash touches
Delicate as the down of a moth,
And the breath of awe
Which fixed the mad beauty-light
In her look
As if her retina
Were a moon perpetually at full.
Who is it, at midnight on the A30,
The Druid soul,
The night-streaker, the sudden lumpy goblin
That thumps your car under the belly
Then cries with human pain
And becomes a human baby on the road
That you dare hardly pick up?
Or leaps, like a long bat with little headlights,
Straight out of darkness
Into the driver’s nerves
With a jangle of cries
As if the car had crashed into a flying harp
So that the driver’s nerves flail and cry
Like a burst harp.
III
Uneasy she nears
As if she were being lured, but fearful,
Nearer.
Like a large egg toppling itself – mysterious!
Then she’ll stretch, tall, on her hind feet,
And lean on the air,
Taut – like a stilled yacht waiting on the air –
And what does the hunter see? A fairy woman?
A dream beast?
A kangaroo of the March corn?
The loveliest face listening,
Her black-tipped ears hearing the bud of the blackthorn
Opening its lips,
Her black-tipped hairs hearing tomorrow’s weather
Combing the mare’s tails,
Her snow-fluff belly feeling for the first breath,
Her orange nape, foxy with its dreams of the fox –
Witch-maiden
Heavy with trembling blood – astounding
How much blood there is in her body!
She is a moony pond of quaking blood
Twitched with spells, her gold-ringed eye spellbound –
Carrying herself so gently, balancing
Herself with the gentlest touches
As if her eyes brimmed –
Two Tortoiseshell Butterflies
Mid-May – after May frosts that killed the Camellias,
After May snow. After a winter
Worst in human memory, a freeze
Killing the hundred-year-old Bay Tree,
And the ten-year-old Bay Tree – suddenly
A warm limpness. A blue heaven just veiled
With the sweatings of earth
And with the sweatings-out of winter
Feverish under the piled
Maywear of the lawn.
Now two
Tortoiseshell butterflies, finding themselves alive,
She drunk with the earth-sweat, and he
Drunk with her, float in eddies
Over the Daisies’ quilt. She prefers Dandelions,
Settling to nod her long spring tongue down
Into the nestling pleats, into the flower’s
Thick-folded throat, her wings high-folded.
He settling behind her, among plain glistenings
Of the new grass, edging and twitching
To nearly touch – pulsing and convulsing
Wings wide open to tight-closed to flat open
Quivering to keep her so near, almost reaching
To stroke her abdomen with his antennae –
Then she’s up and away, and he startlingly
Swallowlike overtaking, crowding her, heading her
Off any escape. She turns that
To her purpose, and veers down
Onto another Dandelion, attaching
Her weightless yacht to its crest.
Wobbles to stronger hold, to deeper, sweeter
Penetration, her wings tight shut above her,
A sealed book, absorbed in itself.
She ignores him
Where he edges to left and to right, flitting
His wings open, titillating her fur
With his perfumed draughts, spasming his patterns,
His tropical, pheasant appeals of folk-art,
Venturing closer, grass-blade by grass-blade,
Trembling with inhibition, nearly touching –
And again she’s away, dithering blackly. He swoops
On an elastic to settle accurately
Under her tail again as she clamps to
This time a Daisy. She’s been chosen,
Courtship has claimed her. And he’s been conscripted
To what’s required
Of the splitting bud, of the talented robin
That performs piercings
Out of the still-bare ash,
The whole air just like him, just breathing
Over the still-turned-inward earth, the first
Caresses of the wedding coming, the earth
Opening its petals, the whole sky
Opening a flower
Of unfathomably-patterned pollen.
In the Likeness of a Grasshopper
A trap
Waits on the field path.
A wicker contraption, with working parts,
Its spring tensed and set.
So flimsily made, out of grass
(Out of the stems, the joints, the raspy-dry flags).
Baited with a fur-soft caterpillar,
A belly of amorous life, pulsing signals.
Along comes a love-sick, perfume-footed
Music of the wild earth.
The trap, touched by a breath,
Jars into action, its parts blur –
And music cries out.
A sinewy violin
Has caught its violinist.
Cloud-fingered summer, the beautiful trapper,
Picks up the singing cage
And takes out the Song, adds it to the Songs
With which she robes herself, which are her wealth,
Sets her trap again, a yard further on.
A Sparrow Hawk
Slips from your eye-corner – overtaking
Your first thought.
Through your mulling gaze over haphazard earth
The sun’s cooled carbon wing
Whets the eyebeam.
