New and Selected Poems (20 page)

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Authors: Ted Hughes

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BOOK: New and Selected Poems
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Tractor
 
 

The tractor stands frozen – an agony

To think of. All night

Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale,

A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,

Pours into its steel.

At white heat of numbness it stands

In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness.

 

It defies flesh and won’t start.

Hands are like wounds already

Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable

As if the toe-nails were all just torn off.

I stare at it in hatred. Beyond it

The copse hisses – capitulates miserably

In the fleeing, failing light. Starlings,

A dirtier sleetier snow, blow smokily, unendingly, over

Towards plantations eastward.

All the time the tractor is sinking

Through the degrees, deepening

Into its hell of ice.

 

The starter lever

Cracks its action, like a snapping knuckle.

The battery is alive – but like a lamb

Trying to nudge its solid-frozen mother –

While the seat claims my buttock-bones, bites

With the space-cold of earth, which it has joined

In one solid lump.

 

I squirt commercial sure-fire

Down the black throat – it just coughs.

It ridicules me – a trap of iron stupidity

I’ve stepped into. I drive the battery

As if I were hammering and hammering

The frozen arrangement to pieces with a hammer

And it jabbers laughing pain-crying mockingly

Into happy life.

 

And stands

Shuddering itself full of heat, seeming to enlarge slowly

Like a demon demonstrating

A more-than-usually-complete materialization –

Suddenly it jerks from its solidarity

With the concrete, and lurches towards a stanchion

Bursting with superhuman well-being and abandon

Shouting Where Where?

 

Worse iron is waiting. Power-lift kneels,

Levers awake imprisoned deadweight,

Shackle-pins bedded in cast-iron cow-shit.

The blind and vibrating condemned obedience

Of iron to the cruelty of iron,

Wheels screeched out of their night-locks –

 

Fingers

Among the tormented

Tonnage and burning of iron

 

Eyes

Weeping in the wind of chloroform

 

And the tractor, streaming with sweat,

Raging and trembling and rejoicing.

 

31 January 1976

Roe-Deer
 
 

In the dawn-dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year

Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.

 

They had happened into my dimension

The moment I was arriving just there.

 

They planted their two or three years of secret deerhood

Clear on my snow-screen vision of the abnormal

 

And hesitated in the all-way disintegration

And stared at me. And so for some lasting seconds

 

I could think the deer were waiting for me

To remember the password and sign

 

That the curtain had blown aside for a moment

And there where the trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road

 

The deer had come for me.

 

Then they ducked through the hedge, and upright they rode their legs

Away downhill over a snow-lonely field

 

Towards tree dark – finally

Seeming to eddy and glide and fly away up

 

Into the boil of big flakes.

The snow took them and soon their nearby hoofprints as well

 

Revising its dawn inspiration

Back to the ordinary.

 

13 February 1973

Sketching a Thatcher
 
 

Bird-bones is on the roof. Seventy-eight

And still a ladder squirrel,

Three or four nitches at a time, up forty rungs,

Then crabbing out across the traverse,

Cock-crows of insulting banter, liberated

Into his old age, like a royal fool

But still tortured with energy. Thatching

Must be the sinless job. Weathered

Like a weathercock, face bright as a ploughshare,

Skinny forearms of steely cable, batting

The reeds flush, crawling, cliff-hanging,

Lizard-silk of his lizard-skinny hands,

Hands never still, twist of body never still –

Bounds in for a cup of tea, ‘Caught you all asleep!’

Markets all the gossip – cynical old goblin

Cackling with wicked joy. Bounds out –

Trips and goes full length, bounces back upright,

‘Haven’t got the weight to get hurt with!’ Cheers

Every departure – ‘Off for a drink?’ and ‘Off

To see his fancy woman again!’ – leans from the sky,

Sun-burned-out pale eyes, eyes bleached

As old thatch, in the worn tool of his face,

In his haggard pants and his tired-out shirt –

They can’t keep up with him. He just can’t

Stop working. ‘I don’t want the money!’ He’d

Prefer a few years. ‘Have to sell the house to pay me!’

Alertness built into the bird-stare,

The hook of his nose, bill-hook of his face.

Suns have worn him, like an old sun-tool

Of the day-making, an old shoe-tongue

Of the travelling weathers, the hand-palm, ageless,

Of all winds on all roofs. He lams the roof

And the house quakes. Was everybody

Once like him? He’s squirmed through

Some tight cranny of natural selection.

The nut-stick yealm-twisťs got into his soul,

He didn’t break. He’s proof

As his crusty roofs. He ladder-dances

His blood light as spirit. His muscles

Must be clean as horn.

And the whole house

Is more pleased with itself, him on it,

Cresting it, and grooming it, and slapping it

Than if an eagle rested there. Sitting

Drinking his tea, he looks like a tatty old eagle,

And his yelping laugh of derision

Is just like a tatty old eagle’s.

 
Ravens
 
 

As we came through the gate to look at the few new lambs

On the skyline of lawn smoothness,

A raven bundled itself into air from midfield

And slid away under hard glistenings, low and guilty.

Sheep nibbling, kneeling to nibble the reluctant nibbled grass.

Sheep staring, their jaws pausing to think, then chewing again,

Then pausing. Over there a new lamb

Just getting up, bumping its mother’s nose

As she nibbles the sugar coating off it

While the tattered banners of her triumph swing and drip from her rear-end.

She sneezes and a glim of water flashes from her rear-end.

She sneezes again and again, till she’s emptied.

She carries on investigating her new present and seeing how it works.

Over here is something else. But you are still interested

In that new one, and its new spark of voice,

And its tininess.

Now over here, where the raven was,

Is what interests you next. Born dead,

Twisted like a scarf, a lamb of an hour or two,

Its insides, the various jellies and crimsons and transparencies

And threads and tissues pulled out

In straight lines, like tent ropes

From its upward belly opened like a lamb-wool slipper,

The fine anatomy of silvery ribs on display and the cavity,

The head also emptied through the eye-sockets,

The woolly limbs swathed in birth-yolk and impossible

To tell now which in all this field of quietly nibbling sheep

Was its mother. I explain

That it died being born. We should have been here, to help it.

So it died being born. ‘And did it cry?’ you cry.

I pick up the dangling greasy weight by the hooves soft as dogs’ pads

That had trodden only womb-water

And its raven-drawn strings dangle and trail,

Its loose head joggles, and ‘Did it cry?’ you cry again.

Its two-fingered feet splay in their skin between the pressures

Of my fingers and thumb. And there is another,

Just born, all black, splaying its tripod, inching its new points

Towards its mother, and testing the note

It finds in its mouth. But you have eyes now

Only for the tattered bundle of throwaway lamb.

‘Did it cry?’ you keep asking, in a three-year-old field-wide

Piercing persistence. ‘Oh yes’ I say ‘it cried.’

 

Though this one was lucky insofar

As it made the attempt into a warm wind

And its first day of death was blue and warm

The magpies gone quiet with domestic happiness

And skylarks not worrying about anything

And the blackthorn budding confidently

And the skyline of hills, after millions of hard years,

Sitting soft.

 

15 April 1974

February 17th
 
 

A lamb could not get born. Ice wind

Out of a downpour dishclout sunrise. The mother

Lay on the mudded slope. Harried, she got up

And the blackish lump bobbed at her back-end

Under her tail. After some hard galloping,

Some manoeuvring, much flapping of the backward

Lump head of the lamb looking out,

I caught her with a rope. Laid her, head uphill

And examined the lamb. A blood-ball swollen

Tight in its black felt, its mouth gap

Squashed crooked, tongue stuck out, black-purple,

Strangled by its mother. I felt inside,

Past the noose of mother-flesh, into the slippery

Muscled tunnel, fingering for a hoof,

Right back to the port-hole of the pelvis.

But there was no hoof. He had stuck his head out too early

And his feet could not follow. He should have

Felt his way, tip-toe, his toes

Tucked up under his nose

For a safe landing. So I kneeled wrestling

With her groans. No hand could squeeze past

The lamb’s neck into her interior

To hook a knee. I roped that baby head

And hauled till she cried out and tried

To get up and I saw it was useless. I went

Two miles for the injection and a razor.

Sliced the lamb’s throat-strings, levered with a knife

Between the vertebrae and brought the head off

To stare at its mother, its pipes sitting in the mud

With all earth for a body. Then pushed

The neck-stump right back in, and as I pushed

She pushed. She pushed crying and I pushed gasping.

And the strength

Of the birth push and the push of my thumb

Against that wobbly vertebra were deadlock,

A to-fro futility. Till I forced

A hand past and got a knee. Then like

Pulling myself to the ceiling with one finger

Hooked in a loop, timing my effort

To her birth push groans, I pulled against

The corpse that would not come. Till it came.

And after it the long, sudden, yolk-yellow

Parcel of life

In a smoking slither of oils and soups and syrups –

And the body lay born, beside the hacked-off head.

 

17 February 1974

Birth of Rainbow
 
 

This morning blue vast clarity of March sky

But a blustery violence of air, and a soaked overnight

Newpainted look to the world. The wind coming

Off the snowed moor in the South, razorish

Heavy-bladed and head-cutting, off snow-powdered ridges.

Flooded ruts shook. Hoof-puddles flashed. A daisy

Mud-plastered unmixed its head from the mud.

The black and white cow, on the highest crest of the round ridge,

Stood under the end of a rainbow.

Head down licking something, full in the painful wind

That the pouring haze of the rainbow ignored.

She was licking her gawky black calf

Collapsed wet-fresh from the womb, blinking his eyes

In the low morning dazzling washed sun.

Black, wet as a collie from a river, as she licked him,

Finding his smells, learning his particularity.

A flag of bloody tissue hung from her back-end

Spreading and shining, pink-fleshed and raw, it flapped and coiled

In the unsparing wind. She positioned herself, uneasy

As we approached, nervous small footwork

On the hoof-ploughed drowned sod of the ruined field.

She made uneasy low noises, and her calf too

With his staring whites, mooed the full clear calf-note

Pure as woodwind, and tried to get up,

Tried to get his cantilever front legs

In operation, lifted his shoulders, hoisted to his knees,

Then hoisted his back-end and lurched forward

On his knees and crumpling ankles, sliding in the mud

And collapsing plastered. She went on licking him.

She started eating the banner of thin raw flesh that

Spinnakered from her rear. We left her to it.

Blobbed antiseptic on to the sodden blood-dangle

Of his muddy birth-cord, and left her

Inspecting the new smell. The whole South West

Was black as nightfall.

Trailing squall-smokes hung over the moor leaning

And whitening towards us, then the world blurred

And disappeared in forty-five degree hail

And a gate-jerking blast. We got to cover.

Left to God the calf and his mother.

 

19 March 1974

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