::poetry by ted hughes::
R e d
Red
was your colour.
If not red, then white. But red
Was what you wrapped around you.
Blood-red. Was it blood?
Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead?
Haematite to make immortal
The precious heirloom bones, the family bones.
When you had your way finally
Our room was red. A judgement chamber.
Shut casket for gems. The carpet of blood
Patterned with darkenings, congealments.
The curtains -- ruby corduroy blood,
Sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.
The cushions the same. The same
Raw carmine along the window-seat.
A throbbing cell. Aztec altar -- temple.
Only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness.
And outside the window
Poppies thin and wrinkle-frail
As the skin on blood,
Salvias, that your father named you after,
Like blood lobbing from the gash,
And roses, the heart's last gouts,
Catastrophic, arterial, doomed.
Your velvet long full skirt, a swathe of blood,
A lavish burgandy.
Your lips a dipped, deep crimson.
You revelled in red.
I felt it raw -- like crisp gauze edges
Of a stiffening wound. I could touch
The open vein in it, the crusted gleam.
Everything you painted you painted white
Then splashed it with roses, defeated it,
Leaned over it, dripping roses,
Weeping roses, and more roses,
Then sometimes, among them, a little blue
bird.
Blue was better for you. Blue was wings.
Kingfisher blue silks from San Francisco
Folded your pregnancy
In crucible caresses.
Blue was your kindly spirit -- not a ghoul
But electrified, a guardian, thoughtful.
In the pit of red
You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness.
But the jewel you lost was blue.
~
T h e T e n d e r P l a c e
Your temples, where the hair crowded in,
Were the tender place. Once to check
I dropped a file across the electrodes
Of a twelve-volt battery -- it exploded
Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up
Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed
The thunderbolt into your skull.
In their bleached coats, with bleached faces,
They hovered again
To see how you were, in your straps.
Whether your teeth were still whole.
The hand on the calibrated lever
Again feeling nothing
Except feeling nothing pushed to feel
Some squirm of sensation. Terror
Was the cloud of you
Waiting for these lightenings. I saw
An oak limb sheared at a bang.
You your Daddy's leg. How many seizures
Did you suffer this god to grab you
By the roots of the hair? The reports
Escaped back into clouds. What went up
Vaporized? Where lightning rods wept copper
And the nerve threw off its skin
Like a burning child
Scampering out of the bomb-flash. They dropped you
A rigid bent bit of wire
Across the Boston City grid. The lights
In the Senate House dipped
As your voice dived inwards
Right through the bolt-hole basement.
Came up, years later.
Over-exposed, like an X-ray--
Brain-map still dark-patched
With the scorched-earth scars
Of your retreat. And your words,
Faces reversed from the light,
Holding in their entrails.
~
T h e M a c h i n e
The dark ate at you. And the fear
Of being crushed. 'A huge dark machine,'
'The grinding indifferent
Millstone of circumstance.' After
Watching the orange sunset, these were the words
You put on a page. They had come to you
When I did not. When you tried
To will me up the stair, this terror
Arrived instead. While I
Most likely was just sitting,
Maybe with Lucas, no more purpose in me
Than in my own dog
That I did not have. A real dog
Might have stared at nothing
Hair on end
While the grotesque mask of your Mummy-Daddy
Half-quarry, half-hospital, whole
Juggernaut, stuffed with your unwritten poems,
Ground invisibly without a ripple
Towards me through the unstirred willows,
Through the wall of The Anchor,
Drained my Guinness at a gulp,
Blackly yawned at me
Into its otherworld interior
Where I would find my home. My children. And my life
Forever trying to climb the steps now stone
Towards the door now red
Which you, in your own likeness, would open
With still time to talk.
~
All poems taken from Birthday Letters, © 1998 by Ted Hughes.
p o e m s b y s y l v i a p l a th
Last updated: 06.22.03