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Poems

A Cranefly In September Read Poem

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.

A Woman Unconscious Read Poem

Russia and America circle each other;
Threats nudge an act that were without doubt
A melting of the mould in the mother,
Stones melting about the root.

The quick of the earth burned out:
The toil of all our ages a loss
With leaf and insect.

Yet flitting thought
(Not to be thought ridiculous)
Shies from the world-cancelling black
Of its playing shadow: it has learned
That there's no trusting (trusting to luck)
Dates when the world's due to be burned;
That the future's no calamitous change
But a malingering of now,
Histories, towns, faces that no
Malice or accident much derange.

And though bomb be matched against bomb,
Though all mankind wince out and nothing endure —
Earth gone in an instant flare —
Did a lesser death come
Onto the white hospital bed
Where one, numb beyond her last of sense,
Closed her eyes on the world's evidence
And into pillows sunk her head.

Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days Read Poem

She gives him his eyes, she found them
Among some rubble, among some beetles
He gives her her skin
He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her
She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment
She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wrists
They are amazed at themselves, they go feeling all over her
He has assembled her spine, he cleaned each piece carefully
And sets them in perfect order
A superhuman puzzle but he is inspired
She leans back twisting this way and that, using it and laughing
Incredulous
Now she has brought his feet, she is connecting them
So that his whole body lights up
And he has fashioned her new hips
With all fittings complete and with newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled
He is polishing every part, he himself can hardly believe it
They keep taking each other to the sun, they find they can easily
To test each new thing at each new step
And now she smoothes over him the plates of his skull
So that the joints are invisible
And now he connects her throat, her breasts and the pit of her stomach
With a single wire
She gives him his teeth, tying the the roots to the centrepin of his body
He sets the little circlets on her fingertips
She stitches his body here and there with steely purple silk
He oils the delicate cogs of her mouth
She inlays with deep cut scrolls the nape of his neck
He sinks into place the inside of her thighs
So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment
Like two gods of mud
Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care
They bring each other to perfection.

Crow's Fall Read Poem

When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.

He decided it glared much too whitely.

He decided to attack it and defeat it.

He got his strength up flush and in full glitter.

He clawed and fluffed his rage up.

He aimed his beak direct at the sun's centre.

He laughed himself to the centre of himself
And attacked.

At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.

But the sun brightened—
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.

He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.

"Up there," he managed,
"Where white is black and black is white, I won.

"

Crow's Nerve Fails Read Poem

Crow, feeling his brain slip,
Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder.

Who murdered all these?

These living dead, that root in his nerves and his blood
Till he is visibly black?

How can he fly from his feathers?

And why have they homed on him?

Is he the archive of their accusations?

Or their ghostly purpose, their pining vengeance?

Or their unforgiven prisoner?

He cannot be forgiven.

His prison is the earth.

Clothed in his conviction,
Trying to remember his crimes
Heavily he flies.

Earth-Moon Read Poem

Once upon a time there was a person
He was walking along
He met the full burning moon
Rolling slowly twoards him
Crushing the stones and houses by the wayside.

She shut his eyes from the glare.

He drew his dagger
And stabbed and stabbed and stabbed.

The cry that quit the moon's wounds
Circled the earth.

The moon shrank, like a punctured airship,
Shrank, shrank, smaller, smaller,
Till it was nothing
But a silk handkerchief, torn,
And wet as tears.

The person picked it up.

He walked on
Into moonless night
Carrying his strange trophy.

Examination at the Womb-Door Read Poem

Who owns those scrawny little feet?

Death.

Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face?

Death.

Who owns these still-working lungs?

Death.

Who owns this utility coat of muscles?

Death.

Who owns these unspeakable guts?

Death.

Who owns these questionable brains?

Death.

All this messy blood?

Death.

These minimum-efficiency eyes?

Death.

This wicked little tongue?

Death.

This occasional wakefulness?

Death.

Given, stolen, or held pending trial?

Held.

Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth?

Death.

Who owns all of space?

Death.

Who is stronger than hope?

Death.

Who is stronger than the will?

Death.

Stronger than love?

Death.

Stronger than life?

Death.

But who is stronger than Death?

Me, evidently.

Pass, Crow.

Feeding Out – Wintering Cattle at Twilight Read Poem

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 cows
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 porage 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.

Full Moon and Little Frieda Read Poem

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -
And you listening.

A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.

A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath -
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.

'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon!  Moon!'
The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

Hawk Roosting Read Poem

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.

Hay Read Poem

The grass is happy
To run like the sea, to be glossed like a mink’s fur
By polishing wind.

Her heart is the weather.

She loves nobody
Least of all the farmer who leans on the gate.

The grass is happy
When the June sun roasts the foxgloves in the hedges.

She comes into her flower.

She lifts her skirts.

It does not concern her
The pondering farmer has begun to hope.

The grass is happy to open her scents, like a dress, through the county,
Drugging light hearts
To heavy betrothals
And next April’s fools,
While pensioners puzzle where life went so airily.

The grass is happy
When the spinner tumbles her, she silvers and she sweetens
Plain as a castle.

The hare looks for home
And the dusty farmer
For a hand-shaped cloud and a yellow evening.

Happy the grass
To be wooed by the farmer, who wins her and brings her to church in her beauty,
Bride of the Island.

Luckless the long-drawn
Aeons of Eden
Before he came to mow.

How To Paint A Water Lily Read Poem

To Paint a Water Lily
A green level of lily leaves
Roofs the pond's chamber and paves
The flies' furious arena: study
These, the two minds of this lady.

First observe the air's dragonfly
That eats meat, that bullets by
Or stands in space to take aim;
Others as dangerous comb the hum
Under the trees.

There are battle-shouts
And death-cries everywhere hereabouts
But inaudible, so the eyes praise
To see the colours of these flies
Rainbow their arcs, spark, or settle
Cooling like beads of molten metal
Through the spectrum.

Think what worse
is the pond-bed's matter of course;
Prehistoric bedragoned times
Crawl that darkness with Latin names,
Have evolved no improvements there,
Jaws for heads, the set stare,
Ignorant of age as of hour—
Now paint the long-necked lily-flower
Which, deep in both worlds, can be still
As a painting, trembling hardly at all
Though the dragonfly alight,
Whatever horror nudge her root.

Last Load Read Poem

Baled hay out in a field
Five miles from home.

Barometer falling.

A muffler of still cloud padding the stillness.

The day after day of blue scorch up to yesterday,
The heavens of dazzling iron, that seemed unalterable,
Hard now to remember.

Now, tractor bounding along lanes, among echoes,
The trailer bouncing, all its iron shouting
Under sag-heavy leaves
That seem ready to drip with stillness.

Cheek in the air alert for the first speck.

You feel sure the rain's already started---
But for the tractor's din you'd hear it hushing
In all the leaves.

But still not one drop
On your face or arm.

You can't believe it.

Then hoicking bales, as if at a contest.

Leaping
On and off the tractor as at a rodeo.

Hurling the bales higher.

The loader on top
Dodging like a monkey.

The fifth layer full
Then a teetering sixth.

Then for a seventh
A row down the middle.

And if a bale topples
You feel you've lost those seconds forever.

Then roping it all tight, like a hard loaf.

Then fast as you dare, watching the sky
And watching the load, and feeling the air darken
With wet electricity,
The load foaming through leaves, and wallowing
Like a tug-boat meeting the open sea---
The tractor's front wheels rearing up, as you race,
And pawing the air.

Then all hands
Pitching the bales off, in under a roof,
Anyhow, then back for the last load.

And now as you dash through the green light
You see between dark trees
On all the little emerald hills
The desperate loading, under the blue cloud.

Your sweat tracks through your dust, your shirt flaps chill,
And bales multiply out of each other
All down the shorn field ahead.

The faster you fling them up, the more there are of them---
Till suddenly the field's grey empty.

It's finished.

And a tobacco reek breaks in your nostrils
As the rain begins
Softly and vertically silver, the whole sky softly
Falling into the stubble all round you
The trees shake out their masses, joyful,
Drinking the downpour.

The hills pearled, the whole distance drinking
And the earth-smell warm and thick as smoke
And you go, and over the whole land
Like singing heard across evening water
The tall loads are swaying towards their barns
Down the deep lanes.

Light Read Poem

Eased eyes open, showed leaves.

Eyes laughing and childish
Ran among flowers of leaves
And looked at light's bridge
Which led from leaf, upward, and back down to leaf.

Eyes uncertain
Tested each semblance
Light seemed to smile.

Eyes ran to the limit
To the last leaf
To the last vein of the least flower-leaf.

Light smiled,
And smiled and smiled
Eyes
Darkened
Afraid suddenly
That this was all there was to it.

Perhaps, Hughes was thinking of Plath a he wrote this.

Lineage Read Poem

In the beginning was Scream
Who begat Blood
Who begat Eye
Who begat Fear
Who begat Wing
Who begat Bone
Who begat Granite
Who begat Violet
Who begat Guitar
Who begat Sweat
Who begat Adam
Who begat Mary
Who begat God
Who begat Nothing
Who begat Never
Never Never Never
Who begat Crow
Screaming for Blood
Grubs, crusts
Anything
Trembling featherless elbows in the nest's filth

Lovesong Read Poem

He loved her and she loved him.

His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains
Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment's brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop
In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage
In the morning they wore each other's face

Macaw and Little Miss Read Poem

In a cage of wire-ribs
The size of a man's head, the macaw bristles in a staring
Combustion, suffers the stoking devils of his eyes.

In the old lady's parlour, where an aspidistra succumbs
To the musk of faded velvet, he hangs in clear flames,
Like a torturer's iron instrument preparing
With dense slow shudderings of greens, yellows, blues,
Crimsoning into the barbs:
Or like the smouldering head that hung
In Killdevil's brass kitchen, in irons, who had been
Volcano swearing to vomit the world away in black ash,
And would, one day; or a fugitive aristocrat
From some thunderous mythological hierarchy, caught
By a little boy with a crust and a bent pin,
Or snare of horsehair set for a song-thrush,
And put in a cage to sing.

The old lady who feeds him seeds
Has a grand-daughter.

The girl calls him 'Poor Polly', pokes fun.

'Jolly Mop.

' But lies under every full moon,
The spun glass of her body bared and so gleam-still
Her brimming eyes do not tremble or spill
The dream where the warrior comes, lightning and iron,
Smashing and burning and rending towards her loin:
Deep into her pillow her silence pleads.

All day he stares at his furnace
With eyes red-raw, but when she comes they close.

'Polly.

Pretty Poll', she cajoles, and rocks him gently.

She caresses, whispers kisses.

The blue lids stay shut.

She strikes the cage in a tantrum and swirls out:
Instantly beak, wings, talons crash
The bars in conflagration and frenzy,
And his shriek shakes the house.

Old Age Gets Up Read Poem

Stirs its ashes and embers, its burnt sticks
An eye powdered over, half melted and solid again
Ponders
Ideas that collapse
At the first touch of attention
The light at the window, so square and so same
So full-strong as ever, the window frame
A scaffold in space, for eyes to lean on
Supporting the body, shaped to its old work
Making small movements in gray air
Numbed from the blurred accident
Of having lived, the fatal, real injury
Under the amnesia
Something tries to save itself-searches
For defenses-but words evade
Like flies with their own notions
Old age slowly gets dressed
Heavily dosed with death's night
Sits on the bed's edge
Pulls its pieces together
Loosely tucks in its shirt

Relic Read Poem

I found this jawbone at the sea's edge:
There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed
To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust
Continue the beginning.

The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold.

Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.

And the jaws,
Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose
Slacken, go down jaws; go gnawn bare.

Jaws
Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach:
This is the sea's achievement; with shells,
Verterbrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.

Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these
Indigestibles, the spars of purposes
That failed far from the surface.

None grow rich
In the sea.

This curved jawbone did not laugh
But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.

September Read Poem

We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.

When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.

It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.

We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.

No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads
Like an unfortunate King's and his Queen's
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.

Surprise Read Poem

Looking at cows in their high-roofy roomy
Windy home, mid-afternoon idling,
Late winter, near spring, the fields not greening,
The wind North-East and sickening, the hay
Shrinking, the year growing.

The parapets
Of toppled hay, the broken walls of hay,
The debris of hay.

The peace of cattle
Mid-afternoon, cud-munching, eyelids lowered.

The deep platform of dung.

Looking at cows
Sharing their trance, it was an anomalous
Blue plastic apron I noticed
Hitched under the tail of one cow
That went on munching, with angling ears.

A glistening
Hanging sheet of blue-black.

I thought
Of aprons over ewes' back-ends
To keep the ram out till it's timely.

I thought
Of surgical aprons to keep cleanliness
Under the shit-fall.

Crazily far thoughts
Proposed themselves as natural, and I almost
Looked away.

Suddenly
The apron slithered, and a whole calf's
Buttocks and hind-legs---whose head and forefeet
Had been hidden from me by another cow---
Toppled out of its mother, and collapsed on the ground.

Leisurely, as she might be leisurely curious,
She turned, pulling her streamers of blood-tissue
Away from this lumpish jetsam.

She nosed it
Where it lay like a still-birth in its tissues.

She began to nibble and lick.

The jelly
Shook its head and nosed the air.

She gave it
The short small swallowed moo-grunts hungry cows
Give when they stand suddenly among plenty.

The Harvest Moon Read Poem

The flame-red moon, the harvest moon,
Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,
A vast balloon,
Till it takes off, and sinks upward
To lie on the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon.

The harvest moon has come,
Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon.

And the earth replies all night, like a deep drum.

So people can't sleep,
So they go out where elms and oak trees keep
A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.

The harvest moon has come!
And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep
Stare up at her petrified, while she swells
Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer and closer like the end of the world.

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry `We are ripe, reap us!' and the rivers
Sweat from the melting hills.

The Minotaur Read Poem

The mahogany table-top you smashed
Had been the broad plank top
Of my mother's heirloom sideboard-
Mapped with the scars of my whole life.

That came under the hammer.

That high stool you swung that day
Demented by my being
Twenty minutes late for baby-minding.

'Marvellous!' I shouted, 'Go on,
Smash it into kindling.

That's the stuff you're keeping out of your poems!'
And later, considered and calmer,
'Get that shoulder under your stanzas
And we'll be away.

' Deep in the cave of your ear
The goblin snapped his fingers.

So what had I given him?

The bloody end of the skein
That unravelled your marriage,
Left your children echoing
Like tunnels in a labyrinth.

Left your mother a dead-end,
Brought you to the horned, bellowing
Grave of your risen father
And your own corpse in it.

The Owl Read Poem

I saw my world again through your eyes
As I would see it again through your children's eyes.

Through your eyes it was foreign.

Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens,
A mystery of peculiar lore and doings.

Anything wild, on legs, in your eyes
Emerged at a point of exclamation
As if it had appeared to dinner guests
In the middle of the table.

Common mallards
Were artefacts of some unearthliness,
Their wooings were a hypnagogic film
Unreeled by the river.

Impossible
To comprehend the comfort of their feet
In the freezing water.

You were a camera
Recording reflections you could not fathom.

I made my world perform its utmost for you.

You took it all in with an incredulous joy
Like a mother handed her new baby
By the midwife.

Your frenzy made me giddy.

It woke up my dumb, ecstatic boyhood
Of fifteen years before.

My masterpiece
Came that black night on the Grantchester road.

I sucked the throaty thin woe of a rabbit
Out of my wetted knuckle, by a copse
Where a tawny owl was enquiring.

Suddenly it swooped up, splaying its pinions
Into my face, taking me for a post.

The Thought-Fox Read Poem

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

The Warm and the Cold Read Poem

Freezing dusk is closing
Like a slow trap of steel
On trees and roads and hills and all
That can no longer feel.

But the carp is in its depth
Like a planet in its heaven.

And the badger in its bedding
Like a loaf in the oven.

And the butterfly in its mummy
Like a viol in its case.

And the owl in its feathers
Like a doll in its lace.

Freezing dusk has tightened
Like a nut screwed tight
On the starry aeroplane
Of the soaring night.

But the trout is in its hole
Like a chuckle in a sleeper.

The hare strays down the highway
Like a root going deeper.

The snail is dry in the outhouse
Like a seed in a sunflower.

The owl is pale on the gatepost
Like a clock on its tower.

Moonlight freezes the shaggy world
Like a mammoth of ice -
The past and the future
Are the jaws of a steel vice.

But the cod is in the tide-rip
Like a key in a purse.

The deer are on the bare-blown hill
Like smiles on a nurse.

The flies are behind the plaster
Like the lost score of a jig.

Sparrows are in the ivy-clump
Like money in a pig.

Such a frost
The flimsy moon
Has lost her wits.

A star falls.

The sweating farmers
Turn in their sleep
Like oxen on spits.

Theology Read Poem

No, the serpent did not
Seduce Eve to the apple.

All that's simply
Corruption of the facts.

Adam ate the apple.

Eve ate Adam.

The serpent ate Eve.

This is the dark intestine.

The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise —
Smiling to hear
God's querulous calling.

Thistles Read Poem

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And 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.

Thrushes Read Poem

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 states,
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.

Tractor Read Poem

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 defied 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 starting 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.

Wind Read Poem

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door.

Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,
The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly.

The house
Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it.

Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,
Or each other.

We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Wodwo Read Poem

What am I?

Nosing here, turning leaves over
Following a faint stain on the air to the river's edge
I enter water.

Who 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

Work and Play Read Poem

The swallow of summer, she toils all the 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 on 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 the 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.

The Horses Read Poem

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.

Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird,—
A world cast in frost.

I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.

But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline—blackening dregs of the brightening grey—
Halved the sky ahead.

And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey—ten together—
Megalith-still.

They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.

Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.

The curlew's tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness.

Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging—
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.

There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires.

But still they made no sound.

Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys, in the red levelling rays—


In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

Erysichthon Read Poem

Some are transformed just once
And live their whole lives after in that shape.

Others have a facility
For changing themselves as they please.

ProteusProteusA shape-shifting sea deity most famous for his role in Book 4 of Homer’sOdyssey.

, who haunts the shadowy seas
That scarf this earthThat scarf this earthDoes “scarf” here mean that the sea enwraps the earth or gulps it down?

The Latin is clearer:complexi“embracing.

” But later in this poem, the voracious sea is described as draining the continents.

, is glimpsed as a young man
Who becomes of a sudden a lion
That becomes a wild boar ripping the ground,

Yet flows forward, hidden, through grass, without sound
As a serpent, that emerges
As a towering bull under down-bent horns,
Or hides, among stones, a simple stone.

Or stands as a tree alone.

Or liquefies, and collapses, shapeless,
Into water, a pouring river.

Sometimes
He is the river’s opposite––firefireHughes and Ovid both end their introductions to the tale with this word (ignisin Ovid’s Latin), which hints at an alternative name for Erysichthon in Greek myth: Aethon (“Burning, Blazing”).

Another with a similar power
Was Erysichthon’sdaughterdaughterNeither Ovid nor Hughes names her, though elsewhere she goes by Mestra.

,
The wife ofAutolycusAutolycusA notorious thief and trickster of Greek myth and the maternal grandfather of Odysseus who was a strategist and survivor of the Trojan War celebrated in theOdyssey, as a master of deception.

Her father
Gave to the gods nothing but mockery.

Without a qualm he cut down every tree
In the sacred grove ofCeresCeresThe goddess of agriculture, who when pleased provides food in abundance.

––
An ancient wood that had never, before that day,
Jumped to the axe’s stroke.

Among those trees
One prodigious oak was all to itself
A tangled forest.

Its boughs were bedecked with wreaths
And votive tributes––each for a prayer

Ceres had sometime granted.

DryadsDryadsMinor female tree deities, who some believed lived and died with their respective trees.

there
Danced a holy circle around its bole
Or joined hands to embrace it––
A circumference of twenty paces.

Erysichthon ignores all this as
He assesses the volume of its timber,
Then orders his men to fell it.

Seeing their reluctance, he roars:

“If this tree were your deity, that every clown adores,
And not merely a tree you think she favours,
Nevertheless, those twigs away there at the top
Would have to come down now, as the rest falls.

”

He snatches an axe––and hauls
The weight of the broad head up and back.

But in that moment, as the blade hangs
Poised for the first downstroke, shudderings

Swarm through the whole tree, to its outermost twigs
And a groan bursts from the deep grain.

At the same time
Every bough goes grey––every leaf

Whitens, and every acorn whitens.

Then the bladebitesbitesThe biting imagery is Hughes’s addition, looking ahead to the tale’s theme of hunger.

The Latin (literally translated): “his impious hand made a wound in the trunk.

”and the blood leaps
As from the neck of a great bull when it drops
Under the axe at the altar.

Everybody stares paralysed.

Only one man protests.

TheThessalianThessalianErysichthon is king of Thessaly, an especially fertile region of the ancient Greek mainland.

Erysichthon turns with eyes stretched
Incredulous.

“Your pious cares,” he bellows,

“Are misplaced.

” And he follows
That first swing at the oak with another
At the protester’s neck, whose head
Spins through the air and bounces.

Then the oak, as he turns back to it, pronounces,
In a clear voice, these words:
“I live in this tree.

I am anymphnymphAny of a variety of minor Greek deities closely tied to natural features such as trees (like the dryad speaking here), mountains, or bodies of water.

,
Beloved by Ceres, the goddess.

“With my last breath, I curse you.

As this oak
Falls on the earth, your punishment
Will come down on you with all its weight.

That is my consolation.

And your fate.

”

Erysichthon ignored her.

He just kept going,
Undercutting the huge trunk, till ropes
Brought the whole mass down, jolting the earth,
Devastating the underbrush around it.

All the nymphs of the sacred grove mourned it.

Dressed in black, they came to Ceres,
Crying for the criminal to be punished,
Bewailing the desecration.

The goddess listened.

Then the summer farms, the orchards, the vineyards,
The whole flushed, ripening harvest, shivered
As she pondered how to make his death
A parable of her anger.

If his cruelty, greed, arrogance
Had left him a single drop of human feeling
What the goddess did now
Would have drained mankind of its pity.

She condemned him
To Hunger––
But infinite, insatiable Hunger,
The agony of Hunger as a frenzy.

Destiny has separated Hunger
So far from the goddess of abundance
They can never meet; therefore Ceres
Commissioned a mountain spirit, anoreadoreadCeres ventures outside her divine agricultural sphere in calling on a mountain nymph because the destination of this mission will prove to be a mountain.

“Hear what I say and do not be afraid.

Far away to the north ofScythiaScythiaA region extending across the north of the Black Sea, exaggerated in Greek myth as a frozen wasteland at the edge of the earth.

This description of Scythia bears striking resemblance to Ovid’s depictions elsewhere of Tomis, the town on the Black Sea to which the Roman emperor Augustus exiled him.

Lies a barren country, leafless, dreadful:
Ice permanent as iron, air that aches.

“A howling land of rocks, gales and snow.

There mad Hunger staggers.

Go.

Bid Hunger
Take possession of Erysichthon’s belly.

Tell her she has power over all my powers

“To nourish Erysichthon.

Let all I pour
Or push down this fool’s gullet only deepen
His emptiness.

Go.

My dragon-drawn chariot
Will make the terrific journey seem slight.

”

The nymph climbed away and her first halt
Was the top ofCaucasusCaucasusA prominent mountain on the northeast shore of the Black Sea, in the extreme east of Scythia.

She soon found Hunger raking with her nails
To bare the root of a tiny rock-wort

Till her teeth could catch and tear it.

In shape and colour her face was a skull, blueish.

Her lips a stretched hole of frayed leather
Over bleeding teeth.

Her skin

So glossy and so thin
You could see the internal organs through it.

Her pelvic bone was like a bare bone.

The stump wings of her hip bones splayed open.

As she bowed, her rib-cage swung from her backbone
In a varnish of tissue.

Her ankle joints
And her knee joints were huge bulbs, ponderous, grotesque,
On her spindly shanks.

The oread

Knew danger when she saw it.

She proclaimed
The command of the goddess from a safe distance.

The whole speech only took a minute or so––
Yet a swoon of hunger left her trembling.

She got away fast.

All the way back to Thessaly
She gave the dragons their headShe gave the dragons their headA rider pulls a horse’s reins to slow or stop the animal, so the opposite, “giving horses their head,” means relaxing the reins to achieve a full gallop.

Now hear me.

Though Hunger lives only in opposition
To Ceres, yet she obeys her.

She soars through darkness
Across the earth, to the house of Erysichthon
And bends above the pillow where his face

Snores with open mouth.

Her skeletal embrace goes around him.

Her shrunk mouth clamps over his mouth
And she breathes

Into every channel of his body
A hurricane of starvation.

The job done, she vanishes,
She hurtles away, out of the lands of plenty,

As if sucked back
Into the vacuum––
Deprivation’s hollow territories
That belong to her, and that she belongs to.

Erysichthon snores on––
But in spite of the god of sleep’s efforts
To comfort him, he dreams he sits at a banquet
Where the food tastes of nothing.

A nightmare.

He grinds his molars on air, with a dry creaking,
Dreaming that he grinds between his molars
A feast of nothing, food that is like air.

At last he writhes awake in convulsive

Cramps of hunger.

His jaws
Seem to have their own life, snapping at air
With uncontrollable eagerness to be biting
Into food and swallowing––like a cat

Staring at a bird out of reach.

His stomach feels like a fist
Gripping and wringing out
The mere idea of food.

He calls for food.

Everything edible
Out of the sea and earth.

When it comes
Dearth is all he sees where tables bend
Under the spilling plenty.

Emptying

Bowls of heaped food, all he craves for
Is bigger bowls heaped higher.

Food
For a whole city cannot sate him.

Food
For a whole nation leaves him faint with hunger.

As every river on earth
Pours its wealth towards ocean
That is always sweeping for more,
Draining the continents,

And as fire grows hungrier
The more fuel it finds,
So, famished by food,
The gullet of Erysichthon, gulping down

Whatever its diameter can manage
Through every waking moment,
Spares a mouthful
Only to shout for more.

This voracity, this bottomless belly,
As if his throat opened
Into the void of stars,
Engulfed his entire wealth.

His every possession was converted
To what he could devour
Till nothing remained except a daughter.

This only child deserved a better father.

His last chattelHis last chattelWhy do you suppose Hughes calls Erysichthon’s daughter “chattel” (personal property), a term that has no parallel in Ovid’s version?

, he cashed her in for food.

He sold her, at the market.

But she was far too spirited
To stay as a bought slave.

Stretching her arms towards the sea, she cried:
“You whoravished my maidenheadravished my maidenheadThis alludes to the daughter’s previous rape by Neptune, the god of the sea.

Greek myth offers many examples of mortal rape by a god or goddess, who would often, as here, also grant a special favor to their victim.

, save me.

”
Neptune knew the voice of his pretty victim
And granted the prayer.

Her new owner,

Who minutes ago was admiring the girl he had bought,
Now saw only Neptune’s art––featured
And clothed like a fisherman.

Perplexed,
He spoke to this stranger directly.

“You with your fishing tackle, hiding your barbs
In tiny gobbets of bait––may you have good weather
And plenty of silly fish that never notice
The hook till it's caught them!––can you tell me

“Where is the girl who was here a moment ago?

Her hair loose, and dressed in the cheapest things,
She was standing right here where her footprints––
Look––stop, and go no further.

Where is she?

”

The girl guessed what the god had done for her.

She smiled to hear herself asked where she might be.

Then to the man parted from his money:
“I’m sorry, my attention has been fixed

“On the fish in this hole.

But I promise you,
By all the help I pray for from Neptune,
Nobody has come along this beach
For quite a while––and certainly no woman.

”

The buyer had to believe her.

He went off, baffled.

The girl took one step and was back
In her own shape.

Next thing,
She was telling her father.

And he,

Elated, saw business.

After that
On every market he sold her in some new shape.

A trader bought a horse,
Paid for it and found the halter empty

Where a girl sat selling mushrooms.

A costly parrot escaped its purchaser
Into an orchard––where a girl picked figs.

One bought an ox that vanished from its pasture

Where a girl gathered cowslips.

So Erysichthon’s daughter plied her talent
For taking any shape to cheat a buyer––
Straight and crooked alike.

All to feed the famine in her father.

But none of it was enough.

Whatever he ate
Maddened and tormented that hunger
To angrier, uglier life.

The life

Of a monster no longer a man.

And so,
At last, the inevitable.

He began to savage his own limbs.

And there, at a final feast, devoured himself.