Like a bundle of old rope and iron Sleeps till blue dusk. Then reappear His eyes, green as ringstones: he yawns wide red, Fangs fine as a lady's needle and bright. A tomcat sprang at a mounted knight, Locked round his neck like a trap of hooks While the knight rode fighting its clawing and bite. After hundreds of years the stain's there On the stone where he fell, dead of the tom: That was at Barnborough. The tomcat still Grallochs odd dogs on the quiet, Will take the head clean off your simple pullet. Is unkillable. From the dog's fury, From gunshot fired point-blank he brings His skin whole, and whole From owlish moons of bekittenings ashcans. He leaps and lightly Walks upon sleep, his mind on the moon Nightly over the round world of men Over the roofs go his eyes and outcry. Hawk Roosting I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat. The convenience of the high trees! The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray Are of advantage to me; And the earth's face upward for my inspection. My feet are locked upon the rough bark. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly - I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads - The allotment of death. For the one path of my flight is direct Through the bones of the living. No arguments assert my right:
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: red 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. Her Husband
Like an Indian of the high Andes, A whippet head, barbed like a hunting arrow, But leaden With muscle For the struggle Against Earth’s centre And leaden For ballast In the rocketing storms of the breath. Leaden Like a bullet To supplant Life from its centre. II Crueller than owl or eagle A towered bird, shot through the crested head With the command, Not die But climb Climb Sing Obedient as to death a dead thing. III I suppose you just gape and let your gaspings Rip in and out through your voicebox O lark And sing inwards as well as outwards Like a breaker of rolling the shingle O lark O song, incomprehensibly both ways – Joy! Help! Joy! Help! O lark IV You stop to rest, far up, you teeter Over the drop. But not stopping singing Resting only for a second Dropping just a little Then up and up and up Like a with drowning fur Bobbing and bobbing at the well-wall Lamenting, mounting a little – But the sun will not take notice And the earth’s centre smiles. V My idleness curdles Seeing the lark labour near its cloud Scrambling In a nightmare difficulty Up through the nothing Its feathers thrash, its heart must be drumming like a motor, As if it were too late, too late. Dithering in ether Its song whirls faster and faster And the sun whirls The lark is evaporating Till my eye’s gossamer snaps and my hearing floats back widely to earth. After which the sky lies blank open Without wings, and the earth is a folded clod. Only the sun goes silently and endlessly on with the lark’s song.