The Apotheosis of Ted Hughes

If you have form'd a circle to go into,
Go into it yourself, and see how you would do. - William Blake

I.

Oakenden Stones on Crow Hill,
nine in all, perfect.
Seeded like dragon's teeth, they have grown
from the ground up, gripped by the North Wind;
stumps of pure sound.

Stormclouds and voicings; tentative roots
Fretting at the heart of the soil and all that.
These are beginnings, enough for now,
But nothing to crow about.

II.

Stone ring: parabola of song.
Rooted in this sodden realm,
I grew up, one eye to the keyhole
Of Mother Earth. I knew the wind's kiss
Was fatal and had screwed a girl's imagination.

Emily Bronte's body lies a-mouldering in the grave.

Silent.
Stillborn.
Beyond the all the parodies
Of blood and self-dramatisation.
Call me Hamlet,
Musing on the death of Catherine Earnshaw!

III.

Each man has his ghost
Stalking the circle within him.
Mine is the shadow of a pagan
Turning phrases like a ploughshare
Across the dumb uncultured land.

The verb to dance.
Ecstasy.
The rising up of things
In the gorge of poetry. Transformation and curlew cry.
Crow and lapwing; God bleating
Through the eye-holes of a sheep skull.

IV.

Rooting the dirt for a world
Beyond economics, I fell upon the prow
Of a Viking longboat splayed like fish bones
Among the chapel graves.
Dark voices drew me
Beyond the babble of moss into the ear
Of a most usable past. My stone heart grew
The shape of a fist,
mill-shaped,
farm-shaped,
Shape of one whose tongue swelled like a glacier
And carved the draughty absence of a valley.

V.

You broke my heart
And then my neck; caulked me in mill-soot and loam,
Held me close in the circle of your hands
And called me goddess.
You old charmer,
You could sing the sap from the tree, the yolk
From the egg, the marrow from the very bone.

Lost in the fakes and fables of this land,
I became the eternal spring, Anna Livia Calderdale,
Go on big man, do it again, tell me what I'm thinking. . .

VI.

You made me sweat, restless: tar-stained fingers
Pushing deeper into the abdomen of goats.
Word
Buggerer.
Christ seer.
Sky hoarder and god slaughterer.

Today the thorn is earth's antenna: all rise for hymn
No. 134, O Love divine, what has thou done!

How can you compete with that? Eh, Lady Lazarus?

We'll go, then, you and I and outvoice the agony of things;
The complicity of blood and soil,
And the sun's infatuation with horseflies.

VII.

Empires of memory!
You who sat in the choir stalls
At the coronation of Queen Bee and the bog-cotton King,
Waiting for the parson's touch.
You who royally shook the living
Daylights out of the hawthorn and elder.
War correspondent,
Eagerly the people awaited your dispatches from the wild
To the urbane centre. You who taught us how to live
Out there among the drystone walls and sheep droppings.

In 1963 a gun went off in my father's head and I awoke
From a dream of rising too early and the faint smell of mustard gas.

VIII.

I curled like an ampersand on the cobbles of Main Street,
Waiting for the conjunction between Mercury & Mars, greeting
Pilgrims with false grace and a brooding adolescent smile.

The Americans loved my faux-naive haunted look
And gave me five dollars a pop to show them the stile
Heathcliffe cleared on his way to ruin the Lintons. Fuck

Me, Crow said, I wish I'd thought of that, and donated
His beak to the National Trust.
On Forth Pond I set a stone
Skimming across the water.
A whole world grew.
It's spinning still.

IX. CODA (Farewell to Haworth)

In 1938 the Hamburger, Max Dehn, was forced to leave his homeland.
In 1940 he arrived in the USA and became the only math professor
At Black Mountain College. There, among the art students and poets
He would hold court in the Rathskellar, beer stein in hand,
To talk about the word problem and the isomorphism problem, before
Declaiming the classics in Greek. An expert in Group Presentation,
He would break off, mid-sentence, and voice concerns about passing
His citizenship examinations.
1983. Hamburg. A stiff wind cuts my face
From the Binnen Alster. New beginnings? Or just the sense of an ending?
Listening to Brahms,
I take a book from the shelf:
Du mußt dein Leben ändern.


Haworth - Hamburg - Haworth
1989 - 2002


*First published in The Rue Bella

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