New and Selected Poems by Ted Hughes

years.
     

    IV
     
    When the Elm was full
    When it heaved and all its tautnesses drummed
    Like a full-sail ship
     
    It was just how I felt.
    Waist-deep, I ploughed through the lands,
    I leaned at horizons, I bore down on strange harbours.
     
    As the sea is a sail-ship’s root
    So the globe was mine.
    When the swell lifted the crow from the Elm-top
    Both Poles were my home, they rocked me and supplied me.
     
    But now the Elm is still
    All its frame bare
    Its leaves are a carpet for the cabbages
     
    And it stands engulfed in the peculiar golden light
    With which Eternity’s flash
    Photographed the sudden cock pheasant –
     
    Engine whinneying, the fire-ball bird clatters up,
    Shuddering full-throttle
    Its three-tongued tail-tip writhing
     
    And the Elm stands, astonished, wet with light,
     
    And I stand, dazzled to my bones, blinded.
     
    V
     
    Through all the orchard’s boughs
    A honey-colour stillness, a hurrying stealth,
    A quiet migration of all that can escape now.
     
    Under ripe apples, a snapshot album is smouldering.

    With a bare twig,
    Glow-dazed, I coax its stubborn feathers.
    A gold furred flame. A blue tremor of the air.
     
    The fleshless faces dissolve, one by one,
    As they peel open. Blackenings shrivel
    To grey flutter. The clump’s core hardens. Everything
     
    Has to be gone through. Every corpuscle
    And its gleam. Everything must go.
    My heels squeeze wet mulch, and my crouch aches.
     
    A wind-swell lifts through the oak.
    Scorch-scathed, crisping, a fleeing bonfire
    Hisses in invisible flames – and the flame-roar.
     
    An alarmed blackbird, lean, alert, scolds
    The everywhere slow exposure – flees, returns.
     
    VI
     
    Water-wobbling blue-sky-puddled October.
    The distance microscopic, the ditches brilliant.
    Flowers so low-powered and fractional
    They are not in any book.
     
    I walk on high fields feeling the bustle
    Of the million earth-folk at their fair.
    Fieldfares early, exciting foreigners.
    A woodpigeon pressing over, important as a policeman.
     
    A far Bang! Then Bang! and a litter of echoes –
    Country pleasures. The farmer’s guest,
    In U.S. combat green, will be trampling brambles,
    Waving his gun like a paddle.
     
    I thought I’d brushed with a neighbour –
    Fox-reek, a warm web, rich as creosote,
    Draping the last watery blackberries –
    But it was the funeral service.
     

    Two nights he has lain, patient in his position,
    Puckered under the first dews of being earth,
    Crumpled like dead bracken. His reek will cling
    To his remains till spring.
     
    Then I shall steal his fangs, and wear them, and honour them.
     

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