Ariel

  Each poem is put into perspective by the knowledge that in time, the life and observations the poems were written about would have changed, evolved, and moved on as my mother would have done. They build upon all the other writings over the years in my mother's life, and best demonstrate the many complex layers of her inner being.

  When she died leaving Ariel as her last book, she was caught in the act of revenge, in a voice that had been honed and practised for years, latterly with the help of my father. Though he became a victim of it, ultimately he did not shy away from its mastery.

  This new, restored edition is my mother in that moment. It is the basis for the published Ariel, edited by my father. Each version has its own significance though the two histories are one.

  Frieda Hughes

  Ariel and other poems

  For

  Frieda and Nicholas

  Morning Song

  Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

  The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.

  Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

  I'm no more your mother

  Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind's hand.

  All night your moth-breath

  Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear.

  One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral In my Victorian nightgown.

  Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

  Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try Your handful of notes;

  The clear vowels rise like balloons.

  The Couriers

  The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf?

  It is not mine. Do not accept it.

  Acetic acid in a sealed tin?

  Do not accept it. It is not genuine.

  A ring of gold with the sun in it?

  Lies. Lies and a grief.

  Frost on a leaf, the immaculate Cauldron, talking and crackling

  All to itself on the top of each Of nine black Alps,

  A disturbance in mirrors, The sea shattering its grey one----

  Love, love, my season.

  The Rabbit Catcher

  It was a place of force----

  The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair, Tearing off my voice, and the sea Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.

  I tasted the malignity of the gorse, Its black spikes,

  The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers.

  They had an efficiency, a great beauty, And were extravagant, like torture.

  There was only one place to get to.

  Simmering, perfumed,

  The paths narrowed into the hollow.

  And the snares almost effaced themselves----

  Zeroes, shutting on nothing,

  Set close, like birth pangs.

  The absence of shrieks

  Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy.

  The glassy light was a clear wall, The thickets quiet.

  I felt a still busyness, an intent.

  I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt, Ringing the white china.

  How they awaited him, those little deaths!

  They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.

  And we, too, had a relationship----

  Tight wires between us,

  Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring Sliding shut on some quick thing, The constriction killing me also.

  Thalidomide

  O half moon----

  Half-brain, luminosity----

  Negro, masked like a white,

  Your dark

  Amputations crawl and appal----

  Spidery, unsafe.

  What glove

  What leatheriness Has protected

  Me from that shadow----

  The indelible buds,

  Knuckles at shoulder-blades, the Faces that

  Shove into being, dragging The lopped

  Blood-caul of absences.

  All night I carpenter

  A space for the thing I am given, A love

  Of two wet eyes and a screech.

  White spit

  Of indifference!

  The dark fruits revolve and fall.

  The glass cracks across, The image

  Flees and aborts like dropped mercury

  The Applicant

  First, are you our sort of person?

  Do you wear

  A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook,

  Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

  Stitches to show somethings missing? No, no? Then How can we give you a thing?

  Stop crying.

  Open your hand.

  Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

  To fill it and willing To bring teacups and roll away headaches And do whatever you tell it.

  Will you marry it?

  It is guaranteed

  To thumb shut your eyes at the end And dissolve of sorrow.

  We make new stock from the salt.

  I notice you are stark naked.

  How about this suit

  Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.

  Will you marry it?

  It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof Against fire and bombs through the roof.

  Believe me, theyll bury you in it.

  Now your head, excuse me, is empty.

  I have the ticket for that.

  Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.

  Well, what do you think of that?

  Naked as paper to start

  But in twenty-five years shell be silver, In fifty, gold.

  A living doll, everywhere you look.

  It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk.

  It works, there is nothing wrong with it.

  You have a hole, its a poultice.

  You have an eye, its an image.

  My boy, its your last resort.

  Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

  Barren Woman

  Empty, I echo to the least footfall, Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas.

  In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself, Nun-hearted and blind to the world. Marble lilies Exhale their pallor like scent.

  I imagine myself with a great public, Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos.

  Instead, the dead injure me with attentions, and nothing can happen.

  The moon lays a hand on my forehead, Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.

  Lady Lazarus

  I have done it again.

  One year in every ten I manage it----

  A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot

  A paperweight,

  My face a featureless, fine Jew linen.

  Peel off the napkin O my enemy.

  Do I terrify?----

  The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

  The sour breath

  Will vanish in a day.

  Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me

  And I a smiling woman.

  I am only thirty.

  And like the cat I have nine times to die.

  This is Number Three.

  What a trash

  To annihilate each decade.

  What a million filaments.

  The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see

  Them unwrap me hand and foot----

  The big strip tease.

  Gentlemen, ladies

  These are my hands My knees.

  I may be skin and bone,

  Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

  The first time it happened I was ten.

  It was an accident.

  The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all.

  I rocked sh
ut

  As a seashell.

  They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

  Dying

  Is an art, like everything else.

  I do it exceptionally well.

  I do it so it feels like hell.

  I do it so it feels real.

  I guess you could say I've a call.

  It's easy enough to do it in a cell.

  It's easy enough to do it and stay put.

  It's the theatrical

  Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout:

  'A miracle!'

  That knocks me out.

  There is a charge

  For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart----

  It really goes.

  And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood

  Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

  So, so, Herr Doktor.

  So, Herr Enemy.

  I am your opus,

  I am your valuable, The pure gold baby

  That melts to a shriek.

  I turn and burn.

  Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

  Ash, ash----

  You poke and stir.

  Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

  A cake of soap,

  A wedding ring,

  A gold filling.

  Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware

  Beware.

  Out of the ash

  I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.

  Tulips

  The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.

  Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.

  I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.

  I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

  I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

  They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.

  Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

  The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps, Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another, So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

  My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.

  They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.

  Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage----

  My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox, My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

  I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

  They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.

  Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.

  I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

  I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted

  To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

  How free it is, you have no idea how free----

  The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

  And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

  It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

  The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

  Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.

  Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

  They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

  Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.

  The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.

  The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

  Before they came the air was calm enough,

  Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.

  Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

  Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.

  They concentrate my attention, that was happy

  Playing and resting without committing itself.

  The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.

  The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat, And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

  The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health.

  A Secret

  A secret! A secret!

  How superior.

  You are blue and huge, a traffic policeman, Holding up one palm----

  A difference between us?

  I have one eye, you have two.

  The secret is stamped on you, Faint, undulant watermark.

  Will it show in the black detector?

  Will it come out

  Wavery, indelible, true Through the African giraffe in its Edeny greenery,

  The Moroccan hippopotamus?

  They stare from a square, stiff frill.

  They are for export,

  One a fool, the other a fool.

  A secret! An extra amber Brandy finger

  Roosting and cooing 'You, you'

  Behind two eyes in which nothing is reflected but monkeys.

  A knife that can be taken out To pare nails,

  To lever the dirt.

  'It won't hurt.'

  An illegitimate baby----

  That big blue head!

  How it breathes in the bureau drawer.

  'Is that lingerie, pet?

  'It smells of salt cod, you had better Stab a few cloves in an apple, Make a sachet or

  Do away with the bastard.

  Do away with it altogether.'

  'No, no, it is happy there.'

  'But it wants to get out!

  Look, look! It is wanting to crawl.'

  My god, there goes the stopper!

  The cars in the Place de la Concorde----

  Watch out!

  A stampede, a stampede----

  Horns twirling, and jungle gutterals.

  An exploded bottle of stout, Slack foam in the lap.

  You stumble out,

  Dwarf baby,

  The knife in your back.

  'I feel weak.'

  The secret is out.

  The Jailor

  My night sweats grease his breakfast plate.

  The same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position With the same trees and headstones.

  Is that all he can come up with, The rattler of keys?

  I have been drugged and raped.

  Seven hours knocked out of my right mind Into a black sack

  Where I relax, foetus or cat, Lever of his wet dreams.

  Something is gone.

  My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin Drops me from a terrible altitude.

  Carapace smashed,

  I spread to the beaks of birds.

  O little gimlets----

  What holes this papery day is already full of!

  He has been burning me with cigarettes, Pretending I am a negress with pink paws.

  I am myself. That is not enough.

  The fever trickles and stiffens in my hair.