A Ted Hughes Bestiary Read online

  Without developing a preference –

  Prompt, with a splash, to whatever I offer.

  It ruffles in its wallow, or lies sunning,

  Digesting old senseless bicycles

  And a few shoes. The fish down there

  Do not know they have been swallowed

  Any more than the girl out there, who over the stern of a rowboat

  Tests its depth with her reflection.

  Yet how the outlet fears it!

  – dragging it out,

  Black and yellow, a maniac eel,

  Battering it to death with sticks and stones.

  Thistles

  Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men

  Thistles spike the summer air

  Or crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

  Every one a revengeful burst

  Of resurrection, a grasped fistful

  Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

  From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.

  They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.

  Every one manages a plume of blood.

  Then they grow grey, like men.

  Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,

  Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

  Ghost Crabs

  At nightfall, as the sea darkens,

  A depth darkness thickens, mustering from the gulfs and the submarine badlands,

  To the sea’s edge. To begin with

  It looks like rocks uncovering, mangling their pallor.

  Gradually the labouring of the tide

  Falls back from its productions,

  Its power slips back from glistening nacelles, and they are crabs.

  Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring inland

  Like a packed trench of helmets.

  Ghosts, they are ghost-crabs.

  They emerge

  An invisible disgorging of the sea’s cold

  Over the man who strolls along the sands.

  They spill inland, into the smoking purple

  Of our woods and towns – a bristling surge

  Of tall and staggering spectres

  Gliding like shocks through water.

  Our walls, our bodies, are no problem to them.

  Their hungers are homing elsewhere.

  We cannot see them or turn our minds from them.

  Their bubbling mouths, their eyes

  In a slow mineral fury

  Press through our nothingness where we sprawl on beds,

  Or sit in rooms. Our dreams are ruffled maybe,

  Or we jerk awake to the world of possessions

  With a gasp, in a sweat burst, brains jamming blind

  Into the bulb-light. Sometimes, for minutes, a sliding

  Staring

  Thickness of silence

  Presses between us. These crabs own this world.

  All night, around us or through us,

  They stalk each other, they fasten on to each other,

  They mount each other, they tear each other to pieces,

  They utterly exhaust each other.

  They are the powers of this world.

  We are their bacteria,

  Dying their lives and living their deaths.

  At dawn, they sidle back under the sea’s edge.

  They are the turmoil of history, the convulsion

  In the roots of blood, in the cycles of concurrence.

  To them, our cluttered countries are empty battleground.

  All day they recuperate under the sea.

  Their singing is like a thin sea-wind flexing in the rocks of a headland,

  Where only crabs listen.

  They are God’s only toys.

  Second Glance at a Jaguar

  Skinful of bowls he bowls them,

  The hip going in and out of joint, dropping the spine

  With the urgency of his hurry

  Like a cat going along under thrown stones, under cover,

  Glancing sideways, running

  Under his spine. A terrible, stump-legged waddle

  Like a thick Aztec disemboweller,

  Club-swinging, trying to grind some square

  Socket between his hind legs round,

  Carrying his head like a brazier of spilling embers,

  And the black bit of his mouth, he takes it

  Between his back teeth, he has to wear his skin out,

  He swipes a lap at the water-trough as he turns,

  Swivelling the ball of his heel on the polished spot,

  Showing his belly like a butterfly.

  At every stride he has to turn a corner

  In himself and correct it. His head

  Is like the worn down stump of another whole jaguar,

  His body is just the engine shoving it forward,

  Lifting the air up and shoving on under,

  The weight of his fangs hanging the mouth open,

  Bottom jaw combing the ground. A gorged look,

  Gangster, club-tail lumped along behind gracelessly,

  He’s wearing himself to heavy ovals,

  Muttering some mantra, some drum-song of murder

  To keep his rage brightening, making his skin

  Intolerable, spurred by the rosettes, the Cain-brands,

  Wearing the spots off from the inside,

  Rounding some revenge. Going like a prayer-wheel,

  The head dragging forward, the body keeping up,

  The hind legs lagging. He coils, he flourishes

  The blackjack tail as if looking for a target,

  Hurrying through the underworld, soundless.

  Song of a Rat

  I THE RAT’S DANCE

  The rat is in the trap, it is in the trap,

  And attacking heaven and earth with a mouthful of screeches like torn tin,

  An effective gag.

  When it stops screeching, it pants

  And cannot think

  ‘This has no face, it must be God’ or

  ‘No answer is also an answer.’

  Iron jaws, strong as the whole earth

  Are stealing its backbone

  For a crumpling of the Universe with screechings,

  For supplanting every human brain inside its skull with a

  rat-body that knots and unknots,

  A rat that goes on screeching,

  Trying to uproot itself into each escaping screech,

  But its long fangs bar that exit –

  The incisors bared to the night spaces, threatening the constellations,

  The glitterers in the black, to keep off,

  Keep their distance,

  While it works this out.

  The rat understands suddenly. It bows and is still,

  With a little beseeching of blood on its nose-end.

  II THE RAT’S VISION

  The rat hears the wind saying something in the straw

  And the night-fields that have come up to the fence, leaning their silence,

  The widowed land

  With its trees that know how to cry

  The rat sees the farm bulk of beam and stone

  Wobbling like reflection on water.

  The wind is pushing from the gulf

  Through the old barbed wire in through the trenched gateway, past the gates of the ear, deep into the worked design of days,

  Breathes onto the solitary snow crystal

  The rat screeches

  And ‘Do not go’ cry the dandelions, from their heads of folly

  And ‘Do not go’ cry the yard cinders, who have no future, only their infernal aftermath

  And ‘Do not go’ cries the cracked trough by the gate, fatalist of starlight and zero

  ‘Stay’ says the arrangement of stars

  Forcing the rat’s head down into godhead.

  III THE RAT’S FLIGHT

  The heaven shudders, a flame unrolled like a whip,

  And the stars jolt in their s
ockets.

  And the sleep-souls of eggs

  Wince under the shot of shadow –

  That was the Shadow of the Rat

  Crossing into power

  Never to be buried

  The horned Shadow of the Rat

  Casting here by the door

  A bloody gift for the dogs

  While it supplants Hell.

  Skylarks

  I

  The lark begins to go up

  Like a warning

  As if the globe were uneasy –

  Barrel-chested for heights,

  Like an Indian of the high Andes,

  A whippet head, barbed like a hunting arrow,

  But leaden

  With muscle

  For the struggle

  Against

  Earth’s centre.

  And leaden

  For ballast

  In the rocketing storms of the breath.

  Leaden

  Like a bullet

  To supplant

  Life from its centre.

  II

  Crueller than owl or eagle

  A towered bird, shot through the crested head

  With the command, Not die

  But climb

  Climb

  Sing

  Obedient as to death a dead thing.

  III

  I suppose you just gape and let your gaspings

  Rip in and out through your voicebox

  O lark

  And sing inwards as well as outwards

  Like a breaker of ocean milling the shingle

  O lark

  O song, incomprehensibly both ways –

  Joy! Help! Joy! Help!

  O lark

  IV

  You stop to rest, far up, you teeter

  Over the drop

  But not stopping singing

  Resting only for a second

  Dropping just a little

  Then up and up and up

  Like a mouse with drowning fur

  Bobbing and bobbing at the well-wall

  Lamenting, mounting a little –

  But the sun will not take notice

  And the earth’s centre smiles.

  V

  My idleness curdles

  Seeing the lark labour near its cloud

  Scrambling

  In a nightmare difficulty

  Up through the nothing

  Its feathers thrash, its heart must be drumming like a motor,

  As if it were too late, too late

  Dithering in ether

  Its song whirls faster and faster

  And the sun whirls

  The lark is evaporating

  Till my eye’s gossamer snaps

  and my hearing floats back widely to earth

  After which the sky lies blank open

  Without wings, and the earth is a folded clod.

  Only the sun goes silently and endlessly on with the lark’s song.

  VI

  All the dreary Sunday morning

  Heaven is a madhouse

  With the voices and frenzies of the larks,

  Squealing and gibbering and cursing

  Heads flung back, as I see them,

  Wings almost torn off backwards – far up

  Like sacrifices set floating

  The cruel earth’s offerings

  The mad earth’s missionaries.

  VII

  Like those flailing flames

  The lift from the fling of a bonfire

  Claws dangling full of what they feed on

  The larks carry their tongues to the last atom

  Battering and battering their last sparks out at the limit –

  So it’s a relief, a cool breeze

  When they’ve had enough, when they’re burned out

  And the sun’s sucked them empty

  And the earth gives them the O.K.

  And they relax, drifting with changed notes

  Dip and float, not quite sure if they may

  Then they are sure and they stoop

  And maybe the whole agony was for this

  The plummeting dead drop

  With long cutting screams buckling like razors

  But just before they plunge into the earth

  They flare and glide off low over grass, then up

  To land on a wall-top, crest up,

  Weightless,

  Paid-up,

  Alert,

  Conscience perfect.

  VIII

  Manacled with blood,

  Cuchulain listened bowed,

  Strapped to his pillar (not to die prone)

  Hearing the far crow

  Guiding the near lark nearer

  With its blind song

  ‘That some sorry little wight more feeble and misguided than thyself

  Take thy head

  Thine ear

  And thy life’s career from thee.’

  The Howling of Wolves

  Is without world.

  What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound

  That dissolve in the mid-air silence?

  Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,

  Brings the wolves running.

  Tuning of a viola, in this forest delicate as an owl’s ear,

  Brings the wolves running – brings the steel traps clashing and slavering,

  The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,

  The eyes that never learn how it has come about

  That they must live like this,

  That they must live

  Innocence crept into minerals.

  The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.

  It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.

  The earth is under its tongue,

  A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.

  The wolf is living for the earth.

  But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.

  It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly.

  It must feed its fur.

  The night snows stars and the earth creaks.

  Gnat-Psalm

  When the gnats dance at evening

  Scribbling on the air, sparring sparely,

  Scrambling their crazy lexicon,

  Shuffling their dumb Cabala,

  Under leaf shadow

  Leaves only leaves

  Between them and the broad swipes of the sun

  Leaves muffling the dusty stabs of the late sun

  From their frail eyes and crepuscular temperaments

  Dancing

  Dancing

  Writing on the air, rubbing out everything they write

  Jerking their letters into knots, into tangles

  Everybody everybody else’s yoyo

  Immense magnets fighting around a centre

  Not writing and not fighting but singing

  That the cycles of this Universe are no matter

  That they are not afraid of the sun

  That the one sun is too near

  It blasts their song, which is of all the suns

  That they are their own sun

  Their own brimming over

  At large in the nothing

  Their wings blurring the blaze

  Singing

  That they are the nails

  In the dancing hands and feet of the gnat-god

  That they hear the wind suffering

  Through the grass

  And the evening tree suffering

  The wind bowing with long cat-gut cries

  And the long roads of dust

  Dancing in the wind

  The wind’s dance, the death-dance, entering the mountain

  And the cow dung villages huddling to dust

  But not the gnats, their agility

  Has outleaped that threshold

  And hangs them a little above the claws of the grass

  Dancing

  Danci
ng

  In the glove shadows of the sycamore

  A dance never to be altered

  A dance giving their bodies to be burned

  And their mummy faces will never be used

  Their little bearded faces

  Weaving and bobbing on the nothing

  Shaken in the air, shaken, shaken

  And their feet dangling like the feet of victims

  O little Hasids

  Ridden to death by your own bodies

  Riding your bodies to death

  You are the angels of the only heaven!

  And God is an Almighty Gnat!

  You are the greatest of all the galaxies!

  My hands fly in the air, they are follies

  My tongue hangs up in the leaves

  My thoughts have crept into crannies

  Your dancing

  Your dancing

  Rolls my staring skull slowly away into outer space.

  Wodwo

  What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over

  Following a faint stain on the air to the river’s edge

  I enter water. What am I to split

  The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed

  Of the river above me upside down very clear

  What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find

  this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret

  interior and make it my own? Do these weeds

  know me and name me to each other have they

  seen me before, do I fit in their world? I seem

  separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped

  out of nothing casually I’ve no threads

  fastening me to anything I can go anywhere

  I seem to have been given the freedom

  of this place what am I then? And picking

  bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me

  no pleasure and it’s no use so why do I do it

  me and doing that have coincided very queerly

  But what shall I be called am I the first

  have I an owner what shape am I what

  shape am I am I huge if I go

  to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees

  till I get tired that’s touching one wall of me

  for the moment if I sit still how everything

  stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre

  but there’s all this what is it roots

  roots roots roots and here’s the water

  again very queer but I’ll go on looking

  That Moment

  When the pistol muzzle oozing blue vapour

  Was lifted away

  Like a cigarette lifted from an ashtray

  And the only face left in the world

  Lay broken

  Between hands that relaxed, being too late

  And the trees closed forever