A Ted Hughes Bestiary Read online

  A ball to be thrown. These feet, deprived,

  Disdaining all that are caged, or storied, or pictured,

  Through and throughout the true world search

  For their vanished head, for the world

  Vanished with the head, the teeth, the quick eyes –

  Now, lest they choose his head,

  Under severe moons he sits making

  Wolf-masks, mouths clamped well onto the world.

  Esther’s Tomcat

  Daylong this tomcat lies stretched flat

  As an old rough mat, no mouth and no eyes.

  Continual wars and wives are what

  Have tattered his ears and battered his head.

  Like a bundle of old rope and iron

  Sleeps till blue dusk. Then reappear

  His eyes, green as ringstones: he yawns wide red,

  Fangs fine as a lady’s needle and bright.

  A tomcat sprang at a mounted knight,

  Locked round his neck like a trap of hooks

  While the knight rode fighting its clawing and bite.

  After hundreds of years the stain’s there

  On the stone where he fell, dead of the tom:

  That was at Barnborough. The tomcat still

  Grallochs odd dogs on the quiet,

  Will take the head clean off your simple pullet,

  Is unkillable. From the dog’s fury,

  From gunshot fired point-blank he brings

  His skin whole, and whole

  From owlish moons of bekittenings

  Among ashcans. He leaps and lightly

  Walks upon sleep, his mind on the moon.

  Nightly over the round world of men,

  Over the roofs go his eyes and outcry.

  Hawk Roosting

  I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

  Inaction, no falsifying dream

  Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

  Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

  The convenience of the high trees!

  The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray

  Are of advantage to me;

  And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.

  My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

  It took the whole of Creation

  To produce my foot, my each feather:

  Now I hold Creation in my foot

  Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –

  I kill where I please because it is all mine.

  There is no sophistry in my body:

  My manners are tearing off heads –

  The allotment of death.

  For the one path of my flight is direct

  Through the bones of the living.

  No arguments assert my right:

  The sun is behind me.

  Nothing has changed since I began.

  My eye has permitted no change.

  I am going to keep things like this.

  The Bull Moses

  A hoist up and I could lean over

  The upper edge of the high half-door,

  My left foot ledged on the hinge, and look in at the byre’s

  Blaze of darkness: a sudden shut-eyed look

  Backward into the head.

  Blackness is depth

  Beyond star. But the warm weight of his breathing,

  The ammoniac reek of his litter, the hotly-tongued

  Mash of his cud, steamed against me.

  Then, slowly, as onto the mind’s eye –

  The brow like masonry, the deep-keeled neck:

  Something come up there onto the brink of the gulf,

  Hadn’t heard of the world, too deep in itself to be called to,

  Stood in sleep. He would swing his muzzle at a fly

  But the square of sky where I hung, shouting, waving,

  Was nothing to him; nothing of our light

  Found any reflection in him.

  Each dusk the farmer led him

  Down to the pond to drink and smell the air,

  And he took no pace but the farmer

  Led him to take it, as if he knew nothing

  Of the ages and continents of his fathers,

  Shut, while he wombed, to a dark shed

  And steps between his door and the duckpond;

  The weight of the sun and the moon and the world hammered

  To a ring of brass through his nostrils.

  He would raise

  His streaming muzzle and look out over the meadows,

  But the grasses whispered nothing awake, the fetch

  Of the distance drew nothing to momentum

  In the locked black of his powers. He came strolling gently back,

  Paused neither toward the pig-pens on his right,

  Nor toward the cow-byres on his left: something

  Deliberate in his leisure, some beheld future

  Founding in his quiet.

  I kept the door wide,

  Closed it after him and pushed the bolt.

  View of a Pig

  The pig lay on a barrow dead.

  It weighed, they said, as much as three men.

  Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.

  Its trotters stuck straight out.

  Such weight and thick pink bulk

  Set in death seemed not just dead.

  It was less than lifeless, further off.

  It was like a sack of wheat.

  I thumped it without feeling remorse.

  One feels guilty insulting the dead,

  Walking on graves. But this pig

  Did not seem able to accuse.

  It was too dead. Just so much

  A poundage of lard and pork.

  Its last dignity had entirely gone.

  It was not a figure of fun.

  Too dead now to pity.

  To remember its life, din, stronghold

  Of earthly pleasure as it had been,

  Seemed a false effort, and off the point.

  Too deadly factual. Its weight

  Oppressed me – how could it be moved?

  And the trouble of cutting it up!

  The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.

  Once I ran at a fair in the noise

  To catch a greased piglet

  That was faster and nimbler than a cat,

  Its squeal was the rending of metal.

  Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.

  Their bite is worse than a horse’s –

  They chop a half-moon clean out.

  They eat cinders, dead cats.

  Distinctions and admirations such

  As this one was long finished with.

  I stared at it a long time. They were going to scald it,

  Scald it and scour it like a doorstep.

  An Otter

  I

  Underwater eyes, an eel’s

  Oil of water body, neither fish nor beast is the otter:

  Four-legged yet water-gifted, to outfish fish;

  With webbed feet and long ruddering tail

  And a round head like an old tomcat.

  Brings the legend of himself

  From before wars or burials, in spite of hounds and vermin-poles;

  Does not take root like the badger. Wanders, cries;

  Gallops along land he no longer belongs to;

  Re-enters the water by melting.

  Of neither water nor land. Seeking

  Some world lost when first he dived, that he cannot come at since,

  Takes his changed body into the holes of lakes;

  As if blind, cleaves the stream’s push till he licks

  The pebbles of the source; from sea

  To sea crosses in three nights

  Like a king in hiding. Crying to the old shape of the starlit land,

  Over sunken farms where the bats go round,

  Without answer. Till light and birdsong come

  Walloping up roads with the milk wagon.

  II

  The
hunt’s lost him. Pads on mud,

  Among sedges, nostrils a surface bead,

  The otter remains, hours. The air,

  Circling the globe, tainted and necessary,

  Mingling tobacco-smoke, hounds and parsley,

  Comes carefully to the sunk lungs.

  So the self under the eye lies,

  Attendant and withdrawn. The otter belongs

  In double robbery and concealment –

  From water that nourishes and drowns, and from land

  That gave him his length and the mouth of the hound.

  He keeps fat in the limpid integument

  Reflections live on. The heart beats thick,

  Big trout muscle out of the dead cold;

  Blood is the belly of logic; he will lick

  The fishbone bare. And can take stolen hold

  On a bitch otter in a field full

  Of nervous horses, but linger nowhere.

  Yanked above hounds, reverts to nothing at all,

  To this long pelt over the back of a chair.

  Thrushes

  Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,

  More coiled steel than living – a poised

  Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs

  Triggered to stirrings beyond sense – with a start, a bounce, a stab

  Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing.

  No indolent procrastinations and no yawning stares.

  No sighs or head-scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab

  And a ravening second.

  Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained

  Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats

  Gives their days this bullet and automatic

  Purpose? Mozart’s brain had it, and the shark’s mouth

  That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own

  Side and devouring of itself: efficiency which

  Strikes too streamlined for any doubt to pluck at it

  Or obstruction deflect.

  With a man it is otherwise. Heroisms on horseback,

  Outstripping his desk-diary at a broad desk,

  Carving at a tiny ivory ornament

  For years: his act worships itself – while for him,

  Though he bends to be blent in the prayer, how loud and above what

  Furious spaces of fire do the distracting devils

  Orgy and hosannah, under what wilderness

  Of black silent waters weep.

  Pike

  Pike, three inches long, perfect

  Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.

  Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.

  They dance on the surface among the flies.

  Or move, stunned by their own grandeur

  Over a bed of emerald, silhouette

  Of submarine delicacy and horror.

  A hundred feet long in their world.

  In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads –

  Gloom of their stillness:

  Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.

  Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

  The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs

  Not to be changed at this date;

  A life subdued to its instrument;

  The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

  Three we kept behind glass,

  Jungled in weed: three inches, four,

  And four and a half: fed fry to them –

  Suddenly there were two. Finally one.

  With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.

  And indeed they spare nobody.

  Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,

  High and dry and dead in the willow-herb –

  One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:

  The outside eye stared: as a vice locks –

  The same iron in this eye

  Though its film shrank in death.

  A pond I fished, fifty yards across,

  Whose lilies and muscular tench

  Had outlasted every visible stone

  Of the monastery that planted them –

  Stilled legendary depth:

  It was as deep as England. It held

  Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old

  That past nightfall I dared not cast

  But silently cast and fished

  With the hair frozen on my head

  For what might move, for what eye might move.

  The still splashes on the dark pond,

  Owls hushing the floating woods

  Frail on my ear against the dream

  Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,

  That rose slowly towards me, watching.

  Stealing Trout on a May Morning

  I park the car half in the ditch and switch off and sit.

  The hot astonishment of my engine’s arrival

  Sinks through 5 a.m. silence and frost.

  At the end of a long gash

  An atrocity through the lace of first light

  I sit with the reeking instrument.

  I am on delicate business.

  I want the steel to be cold instantly

  And myself secreted three fields away

  And the farms, back under their blankets, supposing a plane passed.

  Because this is no wilderness you can just rip into.

  Every leaf is plump and well-married,

  Every grain of soil of known lineage, well-connected.

  And the gardens are like brides fallen asleep

  Before their weddings have properly begun.

  The orchards are the hushed maids, fresh from convent …

  It is too hushed, something improper is going to happen.

  It is too ghostly proper, all sorts of liveried listenings

  Tiptoe along the lanes and peer over hedges.

  I listen for the eyes jerked open on pillows,

  Their dreams washed with sudden ugly petroleum.

  They need only look out at a sheep.

  Every sheep within two miles

  Is nailing me accurately down

  With its hellishly-shaven starved-priest expression.

  I emerge. The air, after all, has forgotten everything.

  The sugared spindles and wings of grass

  Are etched on great goblets. A pigeon falls into space.

  The earth is coming quietly and darkly up from a great depth,

  Still under the surface. I am unknown,

  But nothing is surprised. The tarmac of the road

  Is velvet with sleep, the hills are out cold.

  A new earth still in its wrappers

  Of gauze and cellophane,

  The frost from the storage still on its edges,

  My privilege to poke and sniff.

  The sheep are not much more than the primroses.

  And the river there, amazed with itself,

  Flexing and trying its lights

  And unused fish, that are rising

  And sinking for the sheer novelty

  As the sun melts the hill’s spine and the spilled light

  Flows through their gills …

  My mind sinks, rising and sinking.

  And the opening arms of the sky forget me

  Into the buried tunnel of hazels. There

  My boot dangles down, till a thing black and sudden

  Savages it, and the river is heaping under,

  Alive and malevolent,

  A coiling glider of shock, the space-black

  Draining off the night-moor, under the hazels …

  But I drop and stand square in it, against it,

  Then it is river again, washing its soul,

  Its stones, its weeds, its fish, its gravels

  And the rooty mouths of the hazels clear

  Of the discolourings bled in

  Off ploughlands and lanes …

  At first, I can hardly look at it –

  The riding tables, the corr
ugated

  Shanty roofs tightening

  To braids, boilings where boulders throw up

  Gestures of explosion, black splitting everywhere

  To drowning skirts of whiteness, a slither of mirrors

  Under the wading hazels. Here it is shallow,

  Ropes my knees, lobbing fake boomerangs,

  A drowned woman loving each ankle,

  But I’m heavier and I wade with them upstream,

  Flashing my blue minnow

  Up the open throats of water

  And across through the side of the rush

  Of alligator escaping along there

  Under the beards of the hazels, and I slice

  The wild nape-hair off the bald bulges,

  Till the tightrope of my first footholds

  Tangles away downstream

  And my bootsoles move as to magnets.

  Soon I deepen. And now I meet the piling mob

  Of voices and hurriers coming towards me

  And tumbling past me. I press through a panic …

  This headlong river is a rout

  Of tumbrils and gun-carriages, rags and metal,

  All the funeral woe-drag of some overnight disaster

  Mixed with planets, electrical storms and darkness

  On a mapless moorland of granite,

  Trailing past me with all its frights, its eyes

  With what they have seen and still see,

  They drag the flag off my head, a dark insistence

  Tearing the spirits from my mind’s edge and from under …

  To yank me clear takes the sudden, strong spine

  Of one of the river’s real members –

  Thoroughly made of dew, lightning and granite

  Very slowly over four years. A trout, a foot long,

  Lifting its head in a shawl of water,

  Fins banked stiff like a trireme

  It forces the final curve wide, getting

  A long look at me. So much for the horror

  It has changed places.

  Now I am a man in a painting

  (Under the mangy, stuffed head of a fox)

  Painted about 1905

  Where the river steams and the frost relaxes

  On the pear-blossoms. The brassy wood-pigeons

  Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun

  Rises upon a world well-tried and old.

  The Lake

  Better disguised than the leaf-insect,

  A sort of subtler armadillo,

  The lake turns with me as I walk.

  Snuffles at my feet for what I might drop or kick up,

  Sucks and slobbers the stones, snorts through its lips

  Into broken glass, smacks its chops.

  It has eaten several my size