Ted Hughes - Birthday Letters

She detested you. She fed snapshots Of you and she did not know what Inflammable celluloid into my silent Insatiable future, my blind-mans-buff Internal torch of search. With my friend, After midnight, I stood in a garden Lobbing soil-clods up at a dark window. Drunk, he was certain it was yours. Half as drunk, I did not know he was wrong. Nor did I know I was being auditioned For the male lead in your drama, Miming through the first easy movements As if with eyes closed, feeling for the role.

As if a puppet were being tried on its strings, Or a dead frogs legs touched by electrodes. I jigged through those gestures watched and judged Only by starry darkness and a shadow. Unknown to you and not knowing you. Aiming to find you, and missing, and again missing. Flinging earth at a glass that could not protect you Because you were not there. Ten years after your death I meet on a page of your journal, as never before, The shock of your joy When you heard of that.

Then the shock Of your prayers. And under those prayers your panic That prayers might not create the miracle, Then, under the panic, the nightmare That came rolling to crush you: Your alternative the unthinkable Old despair and the new agony Melting into one familiar hell. Suddenly I read all this Your actual words, as they floated Out through your throat and tongue and onto your page Just as when your daughter, years ago now, Drifting in, gazing up into my face, Mystified, Where I worked alone In the silent house, asked, suddenly: Daddy, wheres Mummy? The freezing soil Of the garden, as I clawed it. All round me that midnights Giant clock of frost. And somewhere Inside it, wanting to feel nothing, A pulse of fever. Somewhere Inside that numbness of the earth Our future trying to happen.

I look up as if to meet your voice With all its urgent future That has burst in on me. Then look back At the book of the printed words. You are ten years dead. It is only a story. Your story.

I can live Your incredulity, your certainty That this was it. You lost your stirrups. He galloped Straight down the white line of the Barton Road. You lost your reins, you lost your seat It was grab his neck and adore him Or free-fall. You slewed under his neck, An upside-down jockey with nothing Between you and the cataract of macadam, That horribly hard, swift river, But the propeller terrors of his front legs And the clangour of the iron shoes, so far beneath you. Luck was already there.

Did you have a helmet? How did you cling on? Baby monkey Using your arms and legs for clinging steel. What saved you? Maybe your poems Saved themselves, slung under that plunging neck, Hammocked in your body over the switchback road. You saw only blur. And a cyclists shock-mask, Fallen, dragging his bicycle over him, protective. I can feel your bounced and dangling anguish, Hugging what was left of your steerage. How did you hang on? You couldnt have done it.

Something in you not you did it for itself. You clung on, probably nearly unconscious, Till he walked into his stable. That gallop Was practice, but not enough, and quite useless. When I jumped a fence you strangled me One giddy moment, then fell off, Flung yourself off and under my feet to trip me And tripped me and lay dead. Over in a flash.