The Earthenware Head

imagem roubada aqui.

Who modelled the head of terracotta?
An American friend. Life-size, the lips half-pursed,
Raw-edged with crusty tooling – a naturalistic attempt
At a likeness that just failed. You did not like it.
I did not like it. Comments magnetised it
For a perverse ritual. What possessed us
To take it with us, in your red bucket-bag?
November fendamp haze, the river unfurling
Dark whorls, ferrying slender willow yellows.
The pollard willows wore comfortless antlers,
Leafless switch-horns. Just past where the field
Broadens and the path strays up to the right
To lose the river, and puzzle for Grantchester,
A chosen willow leaned towards the water.
Above head-height, a twiggy crotch, the socket
Of a healed bole-wound, nearly an owl’s porch,
Made a mythic shrine for your double.
I fitted it firm. And a willow tree
Was a Herm, with your head, watching East
Through those tool-stabbed pupils. We left it
To live the world’s life and weather forever.

You ransacked Thesaurus in your poem about it,
Veiling its mirror, rhyming yourself into safety
From its orphaned fate. But it
Would not leave you. Weeks later
We could not seem to hit on the tree. We did not
Look too hard – just in passing. Already
We did not want to fear, if it had gone,
What witchcraft might nurse it. You never
Said much about it.

What happened?
Maybe nothing happened. Perhaps it’s still
Representing you to the sunrise, happy
In its cold pastoral, lips pursed slightly
As if my touch had only just left it.
Or did boys find it? (And shatter it?) Or
Did the tree too kneel finally?

Surely the river got it. Surely
The river is its chapel. And keeps it. Surely
Your head, made in a furnace, kisses God –
Mudded at the bottom of the Cam,
Beyond recognition or rescue,
All our fears washed from it, and perfect,
Under the stained mournful flow, saluted
Only in summer briefly by the slender
Punt-loads of shadows flitting towards their honey
And the stopped clock.

Evil.
That was what you called the head. Evil.

Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters 

Faber & Faber, Londres: 1998.

A Pink Wool Knitted Dress

In your pink wool knitted dress
Before anything had smudged anything
You stood at the altar. Bloomsday. 

Rain—so that a just-bought umbrella
Was the only furnishing about me
Newer than three years inured.
My tie—sole, drab, veteran RAF black—
Was the used-up symbol of a tie.
My cord jacket—thrice-dyed black, exhausted,
Just hanging onto itself.

I was a post-war, utility son-in-law!
Not quite the Frog Prince. Maybe the Swineherd
Stealing this daughter’s pedigree dreams
From under her watchtowered searchlit future.
No ceremony could conscript me
Out of my uniform. I wore my whole wardrobe—
Except for the odd, spare, identical item.
My wedding, like Nature, wanted to hide. [cf. Heraclito DK B123]
However—if we were going to be married
It had better be Westminster Abbey. Why not?
The Dean told us why not. That is how
I learned that I had a Parish Church.
St George of the Chimney Sweeps.
So we squeezed into marriage finally.
Your mother, brave even in this
US Foreign Affairs gamble,
Acted all bridesmaids and all guests,
Even—magnanimity—represented
My family
Who had heard nothing about it.
I had invited only their ancestors.
I had not even confided my theft of you
To a closest friend. For Best Man—my squire
To hold the meanwhile rings—
We requisitioned the sexton. Twist of the outrage:
He was packing children into a bus,
Taking them to the Zoo—in that downpour!
All the prison animals had to be patient
While we married.

You were transfigured.
So slender and new and naked,
A nodding spray of wet lilac.
You shook, you sobbed with joy, you were ocean depth
Brimming with God.
You said you saw the heavens open
And how riches, ready to drop upon us.
Levitated beside you, I stood subjected
To a strange tense: the spellbound future.

In that echo-gaunt, weekday chancel
I see you
Wrestling to contain your flames
In your pink wool knitted dress
And in your eye-pupils—great cut jewels
Jostling their tear-flames, truly like big jewels
Shaken in a dice-cup and held up to me.

Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

Faber & Faber, Londres: 1998.