A coming and going music

                             by Ted Hughes

IN THE DARK VIOLIN OF THE VALLEY

All night a music

Like a needle sewing body

And soul together, and sewing soul

And sky together and sky and earth

Together and sewing the river to the sea.

In the dark skull of the valley
A lancing, fathoming music

Searching the bones, engraving

On the draughty limits of ghost

In an entanglement of stars.

In the dark belly of the valley

A coming and going music

Cutting the bed-rock deeper

To earth-nerve, a scalpel of music

The valley dark rapt

Hunched over its river, the night attentive

Bowed over its valley, the river

Crying a violin in a grave

All the dead singing in the river

The river throbbing, the river the aorta

And the hills unconscious with listening.

WHITENESS

Walks the river at dawn.

The thorn-tree hiding its thorns

With too much and too fleshy perfume.

Thin water. Uneasy ghost.

Whorls clotted with petals.

Trout, like a hidden man's cough,

Slash under dripping roots.

Heron. Clang

Coiling its snake in heavy hurry

Hoists away, yanked away

Ceases to ponder the cuneiform

Under glass

Huge owl-lump of dawn

With wrong fittings, a parasol broken

Tumbles up into strong sky

Banks precariously, risks a look

A writhing unmade bedstead

Sets the blade between its shoulders

and hang-falls

Down a long aim

Dangles its reed

Till it can seen its own pale eyes

Suddenly shakes off cumbersome cloud

To anchor, tall,

An open question.

Now only the river nags to be elsewhere.

from Ted Hughes, River: New Poems, 1983.