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 nowAnd 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.
Ted Hughes
Crow and the Sea
He tried ignoring the sea But it was bigger than death, just as it was bigger than life.
He tried talking to the sea But his brain shuttered and his eyes winced from it as from open flame.
He tried sympathy for the sea But it shouldered him off - as a dead thing shoulders you off.
He tried hating the sea But instantly felt like a scrutty dry rabbit-dropping on the windy cliff.
He tried just being in the same world as the sea But his lungs were not deep enough
And his cheery blood banged off it Like a water-drop off a hot stove.
Finally
He turned his back and he marched away from the sea
As a crucified man cannot move.
Ted Hughes
Preludes
I
The winter evening settles downWith smell of steaks in passageways.Six o'clock.The burnt-out ends of smoky days.And now a gusty shower wrapsThe grimy scrapsOf withered leaves about your feetAnd newspapers from vacant lots;The showers beatOn broken blinds and chimney-pots,And at the corner of the streetA lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousnessOf faint stale smells of beerFrom the sawdust-trampled streetWith all its muddy feet that pressTo early coffee-stands.
With the other masqueradesThat time resumes,One thinks of all the handsThat are raising dingy shadesIn a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,You lay upon your back, and waited;You dozed, and watched the night revealingThe thousand sordid imagesOf which your soul was constituted;They flickered against the ceiling.And when all the world came backAnd the light crept up between the shutters,And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,You had such a vision of the streetAs the street hardly understands;Sitting along the bed's edge, whereYou curled the papers from your hair,Or clasped the yellow soles of feetIn the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skiesThat fade behind a city block,Or trampled by insistent feetAt four and five and six o'clock;And short square fingers stuffing pipes,And evening newspapers, and eyesAssured of certain certainties,The conscience of a blackened streetImpatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curledAround these images, and cling:The notion of some infinitely gentleInfinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;The worlds revolve like ancient womenGathering fuel in vacant lots. T.S.Eliot
yes wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh
wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh
and don't read dead white poets in the middle of the afternoon of a day that's already been sucky.
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