Free New and Selected Poems by Ted Hughes Page A

glaring furnace clinkers
    The pulsing blue tongues and the red and the yellow
    The green lickings of the conflagration
     
    Limpid and black –
     
    Crow’s eye-pupil, in the tower of its scorched fort.
     

Fragment of an Ancient Tablet
     
     
    Above – the well-known lips, delicately downed.
    Below – beard between thighs.
     
    Above – her brow, the notable casket of gems.
    Below – the belly with its blood-knot.
     
    Above – many a painful frown.
    Below – the ticking bomb of the future.
     
    Above – her perfect teeth, with the hint of a fang at the corner.
    Below – the millstones of two worlds.
     
    Above – a word and a sigh.
    Below – gouts of blood and babies.
     
    Above – the face, shaped like a perfect heart.
    Below – the heart’s torn face.
     

Lovesong
     
     
    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
    Her 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
     

Notes for a Little Play
     
     
    First – the sun coming closer, growing by the minute.
    Next – clothes torn off.
    Without a goodbye
    Faces and eyes evaporate.
    Brains evaporate.
    Hands arms legs feet head and neck
    Chest and belly vanish
    With all the rubbish of the earth.
     
    And the flame fills all space.
    The demolition is total
    Except for two strange items remaining in the flames –
    Two survivors, moving in the flames blindly.
     
    Mutations – at home in the nuclear glare.
     
    Horrors – hairy and slobbery, glossy and raw.
     
    They sniff towards each other in the emptiness.
     
    They fasten together. They seem to be eating each other.
     
    But they are not eating each other.
     
    They do not know what else to do.
     
    They have begun to dance a strange dance.
     
    And this is the marriage of these simple creatures –
    Celebrated here, in the darkness of the sun,
     
    Without guest or God.
     

The Lovepet
     
     
    Was it an animal was it a bird?
    She stroked it. He spoke to it softly.
    She made her voice its happy forest.
    He brought it out with sugarlump smiles.
    Soon it was licking their kisses.
     
    She gave it the strings of her voice which it swallowed
    He gave it the blood of his face it grew eager
    She gave it the liquorice of her mouth it began to thrive
    He opened the aniseed of his future
    And it bit and gulped, grew