Ariel: The Restored Edition, Page 2

  Representing my mother’s vision and experience at a particular time in her life during great emotional turmoil, these Ariel poems—this harnessing of her own inner forces by my mother herself—speak for themselves.

  My mother’s poems cannot be crammed into the mouths of actors in any filmic reinvention of her story in the expectation that they can breathe life into her again, any more than literary fictionalization of my mother’s life—as if writing straight fiction would not get the writer enough notice (or any notice at all)—achieves any purpose other than to parody the life she actually lived. Since she died my mother has been dissected, analyzed, reinterpreted, reinvented, fictionalized, and in some cases completely fabricated. It comes down to this: her own words describe her best, her ever-changing moods defining the way she viewed her world and the manner in which she pinned down her subjects with a merciless eye.

  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 seve
ral 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 shut

  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.