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Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Pike – Ted Hughes









Pike 


by 


Ted Hughes


Pike, three inches long, perfect


Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.


Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged
grin.


They dance on the surface among the flies.





Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,


Over a bed of emerald, silhouette


Of submarine delicacy and horror.


A hundred feet long in their world.





In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-


Gloom of their stillness:


Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching
upwards.


Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds





The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs


Not to be changed at this date:


A life subdued to its instrument;


The gills kneading quietly, and the
pectorals.





Three we kept behind glass,


Jungled in weed: three inches, four,


And four and a half: fed fry to them-


Suddenly there were two. Finally one





With a sag belly and the grin it was born
with.


And indeed they spare nobody.


Two, six pounds each, over two feet long


High and dry and dead in the willow-herb-





One jammed past its gills down the other’s
gullet:


The outside eye stared: as a vice locks-


The same iron in this eye


Though its film shrank in death.





A pond I fished, fifty yards across,


Whose lilies and muscular tench


Had outlasted every visible stone


Of the monastery that planted them-





Stilled legendary depth:


It was as deep as England. It held


Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old


That past nightfall I dared not cast





But silently cast and fished


With the hair frozen on my head


For what might move, for what eye might move.


The still splashes on the dark pond,





Owls hushing the floating woods


Frail on my ear against the dream


Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,


That rose slowly toward me, watching.





Ted Hughes


1930-1998

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