The great door in the air

by Ted Hughes    

            Opus 131        

Opus 131 in C sharp minor

Opened the great door

In the air, and through it

Flooded horror. The door in the hotel room

And the curtain at the window and even

The plain homely daylight blocking the window

Were in the wrong dimension

To shut it out. The counterpoint pinned back

The flaps of the body. Naked, faceless,

The heart panted there, lie a fetus.

Where was the lifeline music? What had happened

To consolation, prayer, transcendence --

To the selective disconnecting

Of the pain center? Dark insects

Fought with their instruments

Scampering through your open body

As if you had already left it. Beethoven

Had broken down. You strained, listening

Maybe for divorce to be resolved

In the arithmetic of vibration

To pure zero, for the wave-particles

To pronounce on the unimportance

Of the menopause. Beethoven

Was trying to repair

The huge constellations of his silence

That flickered and glinted in the wind.

But the notes, with their sharp vaces,

Were already carrying you off,

Each with a different bit, into the corners

Of the universe.

River

Fallen from heaven, lies across

The lap of his mother, broken by world.

But water will go on

Issuing from heaven

In dumbness uttering spirit brightness

Through its broken mouth.

Scattered in a million pieces and buried

Its dry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,

At a rending of veils.

It will rise, in a time after times,

After swallowing death and the pit

It will return stainless

For the delivery of this world

So the river is a god

Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,

Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam

It is a god, and inviolable.

Immortal.  And will wash itself of all deaths.

From River: New Poems, 1983.