A Ted Hughes Bestiary Read online

  I sing his scorched sweetness.

  While others sing the mackerel’s demise

  His ultimatum to be cooked instantly

  And the shock of his decay announcement

  I sing how he makes the rich summer seas

  A million times richer

  With the gift of his millions.

  Work and Play

  The swallow of summer, she toils all summer,

  A blue-dark knot of glittering voltage,

  A whiplash swimmer, a fish of the air.

  But the serpent of cars that crawls through the dust

  In shimmering exhaust

  Searching to slake

  Its fever in ocean

  Will play and be idle or else it will bust.

  The swallow of summer, the barbed harpoon,

  She flings from the furnace, a rainbow of purples,

  Dips her glow in the pond and is perfect.

  But the serpent of cars that collapsed at the beach

  Disgorges its organs

  A scamper of colours

  Which roll like tomatoes

  Nude as tomatoes

  With sand in their creases

  To cringe in the sparkle of rollers and screech.

  The swallow of summer, the seamstress of summer,

  She scissors the blue into shapes and she sews it,

  She draws a long thread and she knots it at corners.

  But the holiday people

  Are laid out like wounded

  Flat as in ovens

  Roasting and basting

  With faces of torment as space burns them blue

  Their heads are transistors

  Their teeth grit on sand grains

  Their lost kids are squalling

  While man-eating flies

  Jab electric shock needles but what can they do?

  They can climb in their cars with raw bodies, raw faces

  And start up the serpent

  And headache it homeward

  A car full of squabbles

  And sobbing and stickiness

  With sand in their crannies

  Inhaling petroleum

  That pours from the foxgloves

  While the evening swallow

  The swallow of summer, cartwheeling through crimson,

  Touches the honey-slow river and turning

  Returns to the hand stretched from under the eaves –

  A boomerang of rejoicing shadow.

  A Cranefly in September

  She is struggling through grass-mesh – not flying,

  Her wide-winged, stiff, weightless basket-work of limbs

  Rocking, like an antique wain, a top-heavy ceremonial cart

  Across mountain summits

  (Not planing over water, dipping her tail)

  But blundering with long strides, long reachings, reelings

  And ginger-glistening wings

  From collision to collision.

  Aimless in no particular direction,

  Just exerting her last to escape out of the overwhelming

  Of whatever it is, legs, grass,

  The garden, the county, the country, the world –

  Sometimes she rests long minutes in the grass forest

  Like a fairytale hero, only a marvel can help her.

  She cannot fathom the mystery of this forest

  In which, for instance, this giant watches –

  The giant who knows she cannot be helped in any way.

  Her jointed bamboo fuselage,

  Her lobster shoulders, and her face

  Like a pinhead dragon, with its tender moustache,

  And the simple colourless church windows of her wings

  Will come to an end, in mid-search, quite soon.

  Everything about her, every perfected vestment

  Is already superfluous.

  The monstrous excess of her legs and curly feet

  Are a problem beyond her.

  The calculus of glucose and chitin inadequate

  To plot her through the infinities of the stems.

  The frayed apple leaves, the grunting raven, the defunct tractor

  Sunk in nettles, wait with their multiplications

  Like other galaxies.

  The sky’s Northward September procession, the vast soft armistice,

  Like an Empire on the move,

  Abandons her, tinily embattled

  With her cumbering limbs and cumbered brain.

  The Stag

  While the rain fell on the November woodland shoulder of Exmoor

  While the traffic jam along the road honked and shouted

  Because the farmers were parking wherever they could

  And scrambling to the bank-top to stare through the tree-fringe

  Which was leafless,

  The stag ran through his private forest.

  While the rain drummed on the roofs of the parked cars

  And the kids inside cried and daubed their chocolate and fought

  And mothers and aunts and grandmothers

  Were a tangle of undoing sandwiches and screwed-round gossiping heads

  Steaming up the windows,

  The stag loped through his favourite valley.

  While the blue horsemen down in the boggy meadow

  Sodden nearly black, on sodden horses,

  Spaced as at a military parade,

  Moved a few paces to the right and a few to the left and felt rather foolish

  Looking at the brown impassable river,

  The stag came over the last hill of Exmoor.

  While everybody high-kneed it to the bank-top all along the road

  Where steady men in oilskins were stationed at binoculars,

  And the horsemen by the river galloped anxiously this way and that

  And the cry of hounds came tumbling invisibly with their echoes down through the draggle of trees,

  Swinging across the wall of dark woodland,

  The stag dropped into a strange country.

  And turned at the river

  Hearing the hound-pack smash the undergrowth, hearing the bell-note

  Of the voice that carried all the others,

  Then while his limbs all cried different directions to his lungs, which only wanted to rest,

  The blue horsemen on the bank opposite

  Pulled aside the camouflage of their terrible planet.

  And the stag doubled back weeping and looking for home up a valley and down a valley

  While the strange trees struck at him and the brambles lashed him,

  And the strange earth came galloping after him carrying the loll–tongued hounds to fling all over him

  And his heart became just a club beating his ribs and his own hooves shouted with hounds’ voices,

  And the crowd on the road got back into their cars

  Wet-through and disappointed.

  from Gaudete

  Calves harshly parted from their mamas

  Stumble through all the hedges in the country

  Hither thither crying day and night

  Till their throats will only grunt and whistle.

  After some days, a stupor sadness

  Collects them again in their field.

  They will never stray any more.

  From now on, they only want each other.

  So much for calves.

  As for the tiger

  He lies still

  Like left luggage

  He is roaming the earth light, unseen.

  He is safe.

  Heaven and hell have both adopted him.

  A Solstice

  Drip-tree stillness. Spring-feeling elation

  Of mid-morning oxygen. There is a yeasty simmering

  Over the land – all compass points are trembling,

  Bristling with starlings, hordes out of Siberia,

  Bubbly and hopeful.

  We stand in the mist-rawness

  Of the sodden earth. Four days to Christmas.

  We ca
n hear the grass seeping.

  Now a wraith-smoke

  Writhes up from a far field, condenses

  On a frieze of goblin hedge-oaks, sizzling

  Like power-pylons in mist.

  We ease our way into this landscape.

  Casual midnightish draughts, in the soaking stillness.

  Itch of starlings is everywhere.

  The gun

  Is old, rust-ugly, single-barrelled, borrowed

  For a taste of English sport. And you have come

  From eighteen years Australian estrangement

  And twelve thousand miles in thin air

  To walk again on the small hills of the West,

  In the ruby and emerald lights, the leaf-wet oils

  Of your memory’s masterpiece.

  Hedge-sparrows

  Needle the bramble-mass undergrowth

  With their weepy warnings.

  You have the gun.

  We harden our eyes. We are alert.

  The gun-muzzle is sniffing. And the broad land

  Tautens into wilder, nervier contrasts

  Of living and unliving. Our eyes feather over it

  As over a touchy detonator.

  Bootprints between the ranks of baby barley

  Heel and toe we go

  Narrowed behind the broad gaze of the gun

  Down the long woodside. I am your dog.

  Now I get into the wood. I push parallel

  And slightly ahead of you – the idea

  Is to flush something for the gun’s amusement.

  I go delicate. I don’t want to panic

  My listeners into a crouch–freeze.

  I want them to keep their initiative

  And slip away, confident, impudent,

  Out across your front.

  Pigeons, too far,

  Burst up from under the touch

  Of our furthest listenings. A bramble

  Claws across my knee, and a blackbird

  Five yards off explodes its booby-trap

  Shattering wetly

  Black and yellow alarm-dazzlings, and a long string

  Of fireworks down the wood. It settles

  To a hacking chatter and that blade-ringing –

  Like a flint on an axe-head.

  I wait.

  That startled me too.

  I know I am a Gulliver now

  Tied by my every slightest move

  To a thousand fears. But I move –

  And a jay, invisibly somewhere safe,

  Starts pretending to tear itself in half

  From the mouth backward. With three screams

  It scares itself to silence.

  The whole wood

  Has hidden in the wood. Its mossy tunnels

  Seem to age as we listen. A raven

  Dabs a single charcoal toad-croak

  Into the finished picture.

  I come out

  To join you in the field. We need a new plan

  To surprise something.

  But as I come over the wire

  You are pointing, silent.

  I look. One hundred yards

  Down the woodside, somebody

  Is watching us.

  A strangely dark fox

  Motionless in his robe of office

  Is watching us. It is a shock.

  Too deep in the magic wood, suddenly

  We meet the magician.

  Then he’s away –

  A slender figurine, dark and witchy,

  A rocking nose-down lollop, and the load of tail

  Floating behind him, over the swell of faint corn

  Into the long arm of woodland opposite.

  The gun does nothing. But we gaze after

  Like men who have been given a secret sign.

  We are studying the changed expression

  Of that straggle of scrub and poor trees

  Which is now the disguise of a fox.

  And the gun is thinking. The gun

  Is working its hunter’s magic.

  It is transforming us, there in the dull mist,

  To two suits of cold armour –

  Empty of all but a strange new humming,

  A mosquito of primaeval excitements.

  And as we start to walk out over the field

  The gun smiles.

  The fox will be under brambles.

  He has set up all his antennae,

  His dials are glowing and quivering,

  Every hair adjusts itself

  To our coming.

  Will he wait in the copse

  Till we’ve made our move, as if this were a game

  He is interested to play?

  Or has he gone through and away over further fields,

  Or down and into the blueish mass and secrecy

  Of the main wood?

  Under a fat oak, where the sparse copse

  Joins the main wood, you lean in ambush.

  Well out in the field, talking to air

  Like quiet cogs, I stroll to the top of the strip –

  Then pierce it, clumsy as a bullock, a careless trampling

  Like purposeless machinery, towards you,

  Noisy enough for you to know

  Where not to point your blind gun.

  Somewhere between us

  The fox is inspecting me, magnified.

  And now I tangle all his fears with a silence,

  Then a sudden abrupt advance, then again silence,

  Then a random change of direction –

  And almost immediately –

  Almost before I’ve decided we are serious –

  The blast wall hits me, the gun bang bursts

  Like a paper bag in my face,

  The whole day bursts like a paper bag –

  But a new world is created instantly

  With no visible change.

  I pause. I call. You do not answer.

  Everything is just as it had been.

  The corroded blackberry leaves,

  The crooked naked trees, fingering sky

  Are all the usual careful shapes

  Of the usual silence.

  I go forward. And now I see you,

  As if you had missed,

  Leaning against your tree, casual.

  But between us, on the tussocky ground,

  Somebody is struggling with something.

  An elegant gentleman, beautifully dressed,

  Is struggling there, tangled with something,

  And biting at something

  With his flashing mouth. It is himself

  He is tangled with. I come close

  As if I might be of help.

  But there is no way out.

  It is himself he is biting,

  Bending his head far back, and trying

  To bite his shoulder. He has no time for me.

  Blood beneath him is spoiling

  The magnificent sooted russet

  Of his overcoat, and the flawless laundering

  Of his shirt. He is desperate

  To get himself up on his feet,

  And if he could catch the broken pain

  In his teeth, and pull it out of his shoulder,

  He still has some hope, because

  The long brown grass is the same

  As it was before, and the trees

  Have not changed in any way,

  And the sky continues the same –

  It is doing the impossible deliberately

  To set the gun-muzzle at his chest

  And funnel that sky-bursting bang

  Through a sudden blue pit in his fur

  Into the earth beneath him.

  He cannot believe it has happened.

  His chin sinks forward, and he half-closes his mouth

  In a smile

  Of ultimate bitterness,

  And half closes his eyes

  In a fineness beyond pain –

  And it is a dead fox in the dank woodland.

  And you stand ove
r him

  Meeting your first real Ancient Briton

  In eighteen years.

  And I stand awake – as one wakes

  From what feels like a cracking blow on the head.

  That second shot has ruined his skin.

  We chop his tail off

  Thick and long as a forearm, and black.

  Then bundle him and his velvet legs

  His bag of useless jewels,

  The phenomenal technology inside his head,

  Into a hole, under a bulldozed stump,

  Like picnic rubbish. There the memory ends.

  We must have walked away.

  from Orts

  The white shark

  With its strength of madness

  The mutt-faced hyena

  Trailing its half-dance

  The rat

  With its file

  The gull, vomiting its laughter

  And gulping it in again

  Like intestines hanging from the mouth

  – the thorn

  With its petals.

  Only a Little Sleep, a Little Slumber

  And suddenly you

  Have not a word to say for yourself.

  Only a little knife, a small incision,

  A snickety nick in the brain

  And you drop off, like a polyp.

  Only a crumb of fungus,

  A pulp of mouldy tinder

  And you flare, fluttering, black out like a firework.

  Who are you, in the nest among the bones?

  You are the shyest bird among birds.

  ‘I am the last of my kind.’

  The Owl Flower

  Big terror descends.

  A drumming glare, a flickering face of flames.

  Something writhes apart into a signal,

  Fiendish, a filament of incandescence.

  As it were a hair.

  In the maelstrom’s eye,

  In the core of the brimming heaven-blossom,

  Under the tightening whorl of plumes, a mote

  Scalds in dews.

  A leaf of the earth

  Applies to it, a cooling health.

  A coffin spins in the torque.

  Wounds flush with sap, headful of pollen,

  Wet with nectar

  The dead one stirs.

  A mummy grain is cracking its grimace

  In the cauldron of tongues.

  The ship of flowers

  Nudges the wharf of skin.

  The egg-stone

  Bursts among broody petals –

  And a staggering thing

  Fired with rainbows, raw with cringing heat,

  Blinks at the source.

  The Risen

  He stands, filling the doorway

  In the shell of earth.

  He lifts wings, he leaves the remains of something,