A Ted Hughes Bestiary Read online

  A mess of offal, muddled as an afterbirth.

  His each wingbeat – a convict’s release.

  What he carries will be plenty.

  He slips behind the world’s brow

  As music escapes its skull, its clock and its skyline.

  Under his sudden shadow, flames cry out among thickets.

  When he soars, his shape

  Is a cross, eaten by light,

  On the Creator’s face.

  He shifts world weirdly as sunspots

  Emerge as earthquakes.

  A burning unconsumed,

  A whirling tree –

  Where he alights

  A skin sloughs from a leafless apocalypse.

  On his lens

  Each atom engraves with a diamond.

  In the wind-fondled crucible of his splendour

  The dirt becomes God.

  But when will he land

  On a man’s wrist.

  And the Falcon came

  The gunmetal feathers

  Of would not be put aside, would not falter.

  The wing-knuckles

  Of dividing the mountain, of hurling the world away behind him.

  With the bullet-brow

  Of burying himself head-first and ahead

  Of his delicate bones, into the target

  Collision.

  The talons

  Of a first, last, single blow

  Of grasping complete the crux of rays.

  With the tooled bill

  Of plucking out the ghost

  And feeding it to his eye-flame

  Of stripping down the loose, hot flutter of earth

  To its component parts

  For the reconstitution of Falcon.

  With the eye

  Of explosion of Falcon.

  The Skylark came

  With its effort hooked to the sun, a swinging ladder

  With its song

  A labour of its whole body

  Thatching the sun with bird-joy

  To keep off the rains of weariness

  The snows of extinction

  With its labour

  Of a useless excess, lifting what can only fall

  With its crest

  Which it intends to put on the sun

  Which it meanwhile wears itself

  So earth can be crested

  With its song

  Erected between dark and dark

  The lark that lives and dies

  In the service of its crest.

  The Wild Duck

  got up with a cry

  Shook off her Arctic swaddling

  Pitched from the tower of the North Wind

  And came spanking across water

  The wild duck, fracturing egg-zero,

  Left her mother the snow in her shawl of stars

  Abandoned her father the black wind in his beard of stars

  Got up out of the ooze before dawn

  Now hangs her whispering arrival

  Between earth-glitter and heaven-glitter

  Calling softly to the fixed lakes

  As earth gets up in the frosty dark, at the back of the Pole Star

  And flies into dew

  Through the precarious crack of light

  Quacking Wake Wake

  The Swift comes the swift

  Casts aside the two-arm two-leg article –

  The pain instrument

  Flesh and soft entrails and nerves, and is off.

  Hurls itself as if again beyond where it fell among roofs

  Out through the lightning-split in the great oak of light

  One wing below mineral limit

  One wing above dream and number

  Shears between life and death

  Whiskery snarl-gape already gone ahead

  The eyes in possession ahead

  Screams guess its trajectory

  Meteorite puncturing the veils of worlds

  Whipcrack, the ear’s glimpse

  Is the smudge it leaves

  Hunting the winged mote of death into the sun’s retina

  Picking the nymph of life

  Off the mirror of the lake of atoms

  Till the Swift

  Who falls out of the blindness, swims up

  From the molten, rejoins itself

  Shadow to shadow – resumes proof, nests

  Papery ashes

  Of the uncontainable burning.

  The Unknown Wren

  Hidden in Wren, sings only Wren. He sings

  World-proof Wren

  In thunderlight, at wrestling daybreak. Wren unalterable

  In the wind-buffed wood.

  Wren is here, but nearly out of control –

  A blur of throbbings –

  Electrocution by the god of wrens –

  A battle-frenzy, a transfiguration –

  Wren is singing in the wet bush.

  His song sings him, every feather is a tongue

  He is a song-ball of tongues –

  The head squatted back, the pin-beak stretching to swallow the sky

  And the wings quiver-lifting, as in death-rapture

  Every feather a wing beating,

  Wren is singing Wren – Wren of Wrens!

  While his feet knot to a twig.

  Imminent death only makes the wren more Wren-like

  As harder sunlight, and realler earth-light.

  Wren reigns! Wren is in power!

  Under his upstart tail.

  And when Wren sleeps even the star-drape heavens are a dream

  Earth is just a bowl of ideas.

  But now the lifted sun and the drenched woods rejoice with trembling –

  WREN OF WRENS!

  And Owl

  Floats, a masked soul listening for death.

  Death listening for a soul.

  Small mouths and their incriminations are suspended.

  Only the centre moves.

  Constellations stand in awe. And the trees very still, the fields very still

  As the Owl becalms deeper

  To stillness.

  Two eyes, fixed in the heart of heaven.

  Nothing is neglected, in the Owl’s stare.

  The womb opens and the cry comes

  And the shadow of the creature

  Circumscribes its fate. And the Owl

  Screams, again ripping the bandages off

  Because of the shape of its throat, as if it were a torture

  Because of the shape of its face, as if it were a prison

  Because of the shape of its talons, as if they were inescapable.

  Heaven screams. Earth screams. Heaven eats. Earth is eaten.

  And earth eats and heaven is eaten.

  The Dove Came

  Her breast big with rainbows

  She was knocked down

  The dove came, her wings clapped lightning

  That scattered like twigs

  She was knocked down

  The dove came, her voice of thunder

  A piling heaven of silver and violet

  She was knocked down

  She gave the flesh of her breast, and they ate her

  She gave the milk of her blood, they drank her

  The dove came again, a sun-blinding

  And ear could no longer hear

  Mouth was a disembowelled bird

  Where the tongue tried to stir like a heart

  And the dove alit

  In the body of thorns.

  Now deep in the dense body of thorns

  A soft thunder

  Nests her rainbows.

  The Crow came to Adam

  And lifted his eyelid

  And whispered in his ear

  Who has heard the Crow’s love-whisper?

  Or the Crow’s news?

  Adam woke.

  And the Phoenix has come

  Its voice

  Is the blade of the desert, a fighting of light

  Its voice dangles glittering

  In the sof
t valley of dew

  Its voice flies flaming and dripping flame

  Slowly across the dusty sky

  Its voice burns in a rich heap

  Of mountains that seem to melt

  Its feathers shake from the eye

  Its ashes smoke from the breath

  Flesh trembles

  The altar of its death and its birth

  Where it descends

  Where it offers itself up

  And naked the newborn

  Laughs in the blaze

  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.

  The Weasels We Smoked out of the Bank

  Ran along the rowan branch, a whole family,

  Furious with ill-contained lightning

  Over the ferny falls of clattering coolant.

  After the time-long Creation

  Of this hill-sculpture, this prone, horizon-long

  Limb-jumble of near-female

  The wild gentle god of everywhereness

  Worships her, in a lark-rapture silence.

  But the demons who did all the labouring

  Run in and out of her holes

  Crackling with redundant energy.

  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.

  The Long Tunnel Ceiling

  Of the main road canal bridge

  Cradled black stalactite reflections.

  That was the place for dark loach!

  At the far end, the Moderna blanket factory

  And the bushy mask of Hathershelf above it

  Peered in through the cell-window.

  Lorries from Bradford, baled with plump and towering

  Wools and cotton met, above my head,

  Lorries from Rochdale, and ground past each other

  Making that cavern of air and water tremble –

  Suddenly a crash!

  The long gleam-ponderous watery echo shattered.

  And at last it had begun!

  That could only have been a brick from the ceiling!

  The bridge was starting to collapse!

  But the canal swallowed its scare,

  The heavy mirror reglassed itself,

  And the black arch gazed up at the black arch.

  Till a brick

  Rose through its eruption – hung massive

  Then slammed back with a shock and a shattering.

  An ingot!

  Holy of holies! A treasure!

  A trout

  Nearly as long as my arm, solid

  Molten pig of many a bronze loach!

  There he lay – lazy – a free lord,

  Ignoring me. Caressing, dismissing

  The eastward easing traffic of drift,

  Master of the Pennine Pass!

  Found in some thin glitter among mean sandstone,

  High under ferns, high up near sour heather,

  Brought down on a midnight cloudburst

  In a shake-up of heaven and the hills

  When the streams burst with zig-zags and explosions

  A seed

  Of the wild god now flowering for me

  Such a tigerish, dark, breathing lily

  Between the tyres, under the tortured axles.

  Cock-Crows

  I stood on a dark summit, among dark summits –

  Tidal dawn 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.

  Feeding out-wintering cattle at twilight

  The wind is inside the hill.

  The wood is a struggle – like a wood

  Struggling through a wood. A panic

  Only just holds off – every gust

  Breaches the sky-walls and it seems, this time,

  The whole sea of air will pour through,

  The thunder will take deep hold, roots

  Will have to come out, every loose thing

  Will have to lift and go. And the cows, dark lumps of dusk

  Stand waiting, like nails in a tin roof.

  For the crucial moment, taking the strain

  In their stirring stillness. As if their hooves

  Held their field in place, held the hill

  To its trembling shape. Night-thickness

  Purples in the turmoil, making

  Everything more alarming. Unidentifiable, tiny

  Birds go past like elf-bolts.

  Battling the hay-bales from me, the c
ows

  Jostle and crush, like hulls blown from their moorings

  And piling at the jetty. The wind

  Has got inside their wintry buffalo skins,

  Their wild woolly bulk-heads, their fierce, joyful breathings

  And the reckless strength of their necks.

  What do they care, their hooves

  Are knee-deep in porridge of earth –

  The hay blows luminous tatters from their chewings,

  A fiery loss, frittering downwind,

  Snatched away over the near edge

  Where the world becomes water

  Thundering like a flood-river at night.

  They grunt happily, half-dissolved

  On their steep, hurtling brink, as I flounder back

  Towards headlights.

  17 February 1974

  Foxhunt

  Two days after Xmas, near noon, as I listen

  The hounds behind the hill

  Are changing ground, a cloud of excitements,

  Their voices like rusty, reluctant

  Rolling stock being shunted. The hunt

  Has tripped over a fox

  At the threshold of the village. A crow in the fir

  Is inspecting his nesting site, and he expostulates

  At the indecent din. A blackbird

  Starts up its cat-alarm. The grey-cloud mugginess

  Of the year in its pit trying to muster

  Enough energy to start opening again

  Roars distantly. Everything sodden. The fox

  Is flying, taking his first lesson

  From the idiot pack-noise, the puppyish whine-yelps

  Curling up like hounds’ tails, and the gruff military barkers:

  A machine with only two products:

  Dog-shit and dead foxes. Lorry engines

  As usual modulating on the main street hill

  Complicate the air, and the fox runs in a suburb

  Of indifferent civilized noises. Now the yelpings

  Enrich their brocade, thickening closer

  In the maze of wind-currents. The orchards

  And the hedges stand in coma. The pastures

  Have got off so far lightly, are firm, cattle

  Still nose hopefully, as if spring might be here

  Missing out winter. Big lambs

  Are organizing their gangs in gateways. The fox

  Hangs his silver tongue in the world of noise

  Over his spattering paws. Will he run

  Till his muscles suddenly turn to iron,

  Till blood froths his mouth as his lungs tatter,

  Till his feet are raw blood-sticks and his tail

  Trails thin as a rat’s? Or will he

  Make a mistake, jump the wrong way, jump right