by kinga on 31 Mar 2010, 15:37
Here it comes. If I could write like this, I definitely would.
Isis
by Ted Hughes
The morning we set out to drive around America
She started with us. She was our lightest
Bit of luggage. And you had dealt with Death.
You had come to an agreement finally:
He could keep your Daddy and you could have a child.
Macabre debate. Yet it had cost you
Two years, desperate days and weepings.
Finally you had stripped the death-dress off,
Burned it on Daddy's grave.
Did it so resolutely, made
Such successful magic of it, Life
Was attracted and swerved down -
Unlikely, like a wild dove, to land on your head.
Day of America's Independence
You set out. And I, not Death,
Drove the car.
Was Death, too part of our luggage?
Unemployed for a while, fellow traveller?
Did he ride on the car top, on the bonnet?
Did he meet us now and again on the road,
Smiling in a café, at a gas station?
Stowaway in ice-box?
Did he run in the wheel's shadow?
Or did he sulk in your papers, back in your bedroom,
Waiting for your habits
To come back and remember him? You had hidden him
From yourself and deceived even Life.
But your blossom had fruited and in England
It ripened. There your midwife,
The orchardist, was a miniature Indian lady
Black and archaic, half-Gond,
With her singing manner and her lucky charm voice,
A priestess of fruits.
Our Black Isis had stepped off the wall
Shaking her sistrum -
Polymorphus Daemon,
Magnae Deorum Matris - with the moon
Between her hip-bones crowned with ears of corn.
The great goddess in person
Had put on your body, waxing full,
Using your strainings
Like a surgical glove, to create with,
Like a soft mask to triumph and be grotesque in
On the bed of birth.
It was not Death
Weeping in you then, when you lay among the bloody cloths
Holding what had come out of you to cry.
It was not poetic death
Lifted you from the blood and set you
straightaway lurching - exultant-
To the phone, to announce to the world
what Life had made of you,
Your whole body borrowed
By immortality and its promise,
Your arms filled
With what had never died, never known Death.
