New and Selected Poems (18 page)

Read New and Selected Poems Online

Authors: Ted Hughes

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BOOK: New and Selected Poems
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Moors
 
 

Are a stage

For the performance of heaven.

Any audience is incidental.

 

A chess-world of top-heavy Kings and Queens

Circling in stilted majesty

Tremble the bog-cotton

Under the sweep of their robes.

 

Fools in sunny motley tumble across,

A laughter – fading in full view

To grass-tips tapping at stones.

 

The witch-brew boiling in the sky-vat

Spins electrical terrors

In the eyes of sheep.

 

Fleeing wraith-lovers twist and collapse

In death-pact languor

To bedew harebells

On the spoil-heaps of quarries.

 

Wounded champions lurch out of sunset

To gurgle their last gleams into potholes.

 

Shattered, bowed armies, huddling leaderless

Escape from a world

Where snipe work late.

 
Chinese History of Colden Water
 
 

A fallen immortal found this valley –

Leafy conch of whispers

On the shore of heaven. He brought to his ear

The mad singing in the hills,

The prophetic mouth of the rain –

 

These hushings lulled him. So he missed

The goblins toiling up the brook.

The clink of fairy hammers forged his slumber

To a migraine of headscarves and clatter

Of clog-irons and looms and gutter water

And clog-irons and biblical texts.

 

Till he woke in a terror, tore free, lay panting.

The dream streamed from him. He blinked away

The bloody matter of the Cross

And the death’s-head after-image of ‘Poor’.

 

Chapels, chimneys, roofs in the mist – scattered.

 

Hills with raised wings were standing on hills.

They rode the waves of light

That rocked the conch of whispers

 

And washed and washed at his eye.

                                                     Washed from his ear

 

All but the laughter of foxes.

 
Rhododendrons
 
 

Dripped a chill virulence

Into my nape –

Rubberized prison-wear of suppression!

 

Guarding and guarded by

The Council’s black

Forbidding forbidden stones.

 

The policeman’s protected leaf!

 

Detestable evergreen sterility!

Over dead acid gardens

Where blue widows, shrined in Sunday, shrank

 

To arthritic clockwork,

Yapped like terriers and shook sticks from doorways

Vast and black and proper as museums.

 

Cenotaphs and the moor-silence!

Rhododendrons and rain!

It is all one. It is over.

 

Evergloom of official titivation –

Uniform at the reservoir, and the chapel,

And the graveyard park,

 

Ugly as a brass-band in India.

 
Sunstruck
 
 

The freedom of Saturday afternoons

Starched to cricket dazzle, nagged at a theorem –

Shaggy valley parapets

Pending like thunder, narrowing the spin-bowler’s angle.

 

The click, disconnected, might have escaped –

A six! And the ball slammed flat!

And the bat in flinders! The heart soaring!

And everybody jumping up and running –

 

Fleeing after the ball, stampeding

Through the sudden hole in Saturday – but

Already clapped into hands and the trap-shout

The ball jerked back to the stumper on its elastic.

 

Everything collapsed that bit deeper

Towards Monday.

 

Misery of the brassy sycamores!

Misery of the swans and the hard ripple!

 

Then again Yes Yes a wild YES –

The bat flashed round the neck in a tight coil,

 

The stretched shout snatching for the North Sea –

But it fell far short, even of Midgley.

 

And the legs running for dear life, twinkling white

In the cage of wickets

Were cornered again by the ball, pinned to the crease,

Blocked by the green and white pavilion.

 

Cross-eyed, mid-stump, sun-descending headache!

Brain sewn into the ball’s hide

Hammering at four corners of abstraction

And caught and flung back, and caught, and again caught

 

To be bounced on baked earth, to be clubbed

Toward the wage-mirage sparkle of mills

Toward Lord Savile’s heather

Toward the veto of the poisonous Calder

 

Till the eyes, glad of anything, dropped

From the bails

Into the bottom of a teacup,

To sandwich crusts for the canal cygnets.

 

The bowler had flogged himself to a dishclout.

And the burned batsmen returned, with changed faces,

‘Like men returned from a far journey’,

Under the long glare walls of evening

 

To the cool sheet and the black slot of home.

 
Curlews
 
 
I
 

They lift

Out of the maternal watery blue lines

 

Stripped of all but their cry

Some twists of near-inedible sinew

 

They slough off

The robes of bilberry blue

The cloud-stained bogland

 

They veer up and eddy away over

The stone horns

 

They trail a long, dangling, falling aim

Across water

 

Lancing their voices

Through the skin of this light

 

Drinking the nameless and naked

Through trembling bills.

 
II
 

Curlews in April

Hang their harps over the misty valleys

 

A wobbling water-call

A wet-footed god of the horizons

 

New moons sink into the heather

And full golden moons

 

Bulge over spent walls.

 
For Billy Holt
 
 

The longships got this far. Then

Anchored in nose and chin.

 

Badlands where outcast and outlaw

Fortified the hill-knowle’s long outlook.

 

A far, veiled gaze of quietly

Homicidal appraisal.

 

A poverty

That cut rock lumps for words.

 

Requisitioned rain, then more rain,

For walls and roof.

 

Enfolding arms of sour hills

For company.

 

Blood in the veins

For amusement.

 

A graveyard

For homeland.

 
When Men Got to the Summit
 
 

Light words forsook them.

They filled with heavy silence.

 

Houses came to support them,

But the hard, foursquare scriptures fractured

And the cracks filled with soft rheumatism.

 

Streets bent to the task

Of holding it all up

Bracing themselves, taking the strain

Till their vertebrae slipped.

 

The hills went on gently

Shaking their sieve.

 

Nevertheless, for some giddy moments

A television

Blinked from the wolf’s lookout.

 
The Canal’s Drowning Black
 
 

Bred wild leopards – among the pale depth fungus.

Loach. Torpid, ginger-bearded, secret

Prehistory of the canal’s masonry,

With little cupid mouths.

 

Five inches huge!

On the slime-brink, over bridge reflections,

I teetered. Then a ringing, skull-jolt stamp

And their beards flowered sudden anemones

 

All down the sunken cliff. A mad-house thrill –

The stonework’s tiny eyes, two feet, three feet,

Four feet down through my reflection

Watched for my next move.

 

Their schooldays were over.

Peeping man was no part of their knowledge.

So when a monkey god, a Martian

Tickled their underchins with his net rim

 

They snaked out and over the net rim easy

Back into the oligocene –

Only restrained by a mesh of kitchen curtain.

Then flopped out of their ocean-shifting aeons

 

Into a two-pound jam-jar

On a windowsill

Blackened with acid rain fall-out

From Manchester’s rotten lung.

 

Next morning, Mount Zion’s

Cowled, Satanic majesty behind me

I lobbed – one by one – high through the air

The stiff, pouting, failed, paled new moons

 

Back into their Paradise and mine.

 
Cock-Crows
 
 

I stood on a dark summit, among dark summits –

Tidal dawn was splitting heaven from earth,

The oyster

Opening to taste gold.

 

And I heard the cock-crows kindling in the valley

Under the mist –

They were sleepy,

Bubbling deep in the valley cauldron.

 

Then one or two tossed clear, like soft rockets

And sank back again dimming.

 

Then soaring harder, brighter, higher

Tearing the mist,

Bubble-glistenings flung up and bursting to light

Brightening the undercloud,

The fire-crests of the cocks – the sickle shouts,

Challenge against challenge, answer to answer,

Hooking higher,

Clambering up the sky as they melted,

Hanging smouldering from the night’s fringes.

 

Till the whole valley brimmed with cock-crows,

A magical soft mixture boiling over,

Spilling and sparkling into other valleys

 

Lobbed-up horse-shoes of glow-swollen metal

From sheds in back-gardens, hen-cotes, farms

Sinking back mistily

 

Till the last spark died, and embers paled

 

And the sun climbed into its wet sack

For the day’s work

 

While the dark rims hardened

Over the smoke of towns, from holes in earth.

 
Mount Zion
 
 

Blackness

Was a building blocking the moon.

Its wall – my first world-direction –

Mount Zion’s gravestone slab.

 

Above the kitchen window, that uplifted mass

Was a deadfall –

Darkening the sun of every day

Right to the eleventh hour.

 

Marched in under, gripped by elders

Like a jibbing calf

I knew what was coming.

The convicting holy eyes, the convulsed Moses mouthings –

Mouths that God had burnt with the breath of Moriah.

They were terrified too.

A mesmerized commissariat,

They terrified me, but they terrified each other.

And Christ was only a naked bleeding worm

Who had given up the ghost.

 

Women bleak as Sunday rose-gardens

Or crumpling to puff-pastry, and cobwebbed with deaths.

Men in their prison-yard, at attention,

Exercising their cowed, shaven souls.

Lips stretching saliva, eyes fixed like the eyes

Of cockerels hung by the legs,

As the bottomless cry

Beat itself numb again against Wesley’s foundation stone.

 

Alarm shouts at dusk!

A cricket had rigged up its music

In a crack of Mount Zion wall.

 

A cricket! The news awful, the shouts awful, at dusk –

Like the bear-alarm, at dusk, among smoky tents –

What was a cricket? How big is a cricket?

 

Long after I’d been smothered in bed

I could hear them

Riving at the religious stonework

With their furious chisels and screwdrivers.

 

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