poem, poetry, history, Manchester, Ted Hughes

TED

…as if the stone’s mind came feeling
A fantasy of directions

                            “Pibroch”)


it is a Winter truth:
every
    library is
a mausoleum

every poem
a tomb

I think it must have been,
if memory serves, in
an old revamped cotton
trade building
that I sat amidst a throng
of hopelessly
eager Mancunians

devouring your every
brooding, grizzled,
Yorkshire syllable

seemingly homespun, yet
distinctly Oxbridge academic,
web of
sturdy twine

each thick, visceral, seed-
spilling phrase
falling like iron
parables
on every kind of ground

Mozart, shark,
hawk from a handsaw,
you were
obviously speaking
of yourself

as we all do
(be do)

metal scraping white ceramic

outside
I am released into the gravel air

pause
for a moment to think of Sylvia

****

old stone
older even than
the cathedrals of conquest
my ancestors
built everywhere

petrified
as to what I might find

I too fish for archetypes
rustic rivers, industrial canals

stuff down there for sure
with more
skewed history than
sets of pram wheels

dull green-gray these waters
of artifice
nothing gurgling yet
we
were no doubt told
means to
our emancipation

***

my grandfather buried here
think he
might have cultivated
a bit of interest
in the craft you
were here espousing

my boys
were the poets of his war

the ones
who died writing, or
returned
to ditch their medals
at the river bottom

common trade
common seam

painful
perpetual

clear as the first sharp
thought in the mind of a stone.