The star-touched river

It's not quite August yet; but still going 'backwards' through the Poets Laureate ...

... so, here's Ted Hughes, as taken from the really wonderful '2003 Collected Poems' volume:


August Evening

Blue space burned out. Earth’s bronzes cooling.
September
Edges this evening. Skyline trees hang charred.
The thistles
Survive a biological blaze – burnt splinters,
Skeletal carbons, crowned with ashes. The fuel
Nearly all gone.

And the river
Cools early, star-touched. New moon,
Not new leaf-curl tender, but crisp.

Mist
Breathes on the sliding glass. The river
Still beer-tinted from the barley disaster
Is becoming wintry.

The sea-tribes are here,
They’ve come up for their weddings, their Michaelmas fair,
The carnival on the gravels.

Wet fog midnight,
A sheathing sea-freeze, hardens round my head,
Stiffens my fingers. Oaks and alders
Fume to black blots opposite.
The river lifts to a ghostly trail of smoke.

Too serious to stir, the longships
Of the sea-trout
Secretive under the land’s levels,
Holds crammed with religious purpose,
Cobble the long pod of winter.
They will not play tonight.

Their possession kneels, in God-hush.
Robed in the stilled flow of their Creator
They inhale unending. I share it a little.

Slowly their white pathway shrinks from the world.

The river becomes terrible.
 
Climbing out, I make a silent third
With two owls reassuring each other.

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Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

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