TED HUGHES 43

A knock at the door, you open the door And you step back From a sheltering bulk. A tumblesky wet January Mid-morning. Close, tall, in-leaning Darkness of person, hairiness of a creature -

A bristling of wet-rotten woods, mould-neglect, night-weather, A hurt wildness stands there for help And is saying something. Wild lumpy coat, Greasy face folds and sly eyes and a bandit abruptness, Speech nearly not speech Ducking under speech, asking for money As if not asking. Huge storm-sky strangeness

And desperation. He knows he stands In a shatter of your expectations. He waits for you To feel through to his being alive. He wants to flee. His cornered wildness Dodges about in his eyes That try to hide inside themselves, and his head jerks up Trying to fit back together odd pieces of dignity, And he goes on, muttering, nodding, signalling OK OK

Till you register. Money.

You give him bread, plastered with butter and piled with marmalade, And stand watching him cram it into his mouth - A mouth wet and red and agde In the swollen collapsed face. His grimed forefinger cocked.

A black column of frayed coat, belted with string, Has surfaced for help. Stares into the house-depth past you Stranger than a snow-covered starving stag.

Munches, wipes his fingers on his coat, and wipes his mouth With the black-creased red palm. A smile works his rubbery face Like a hand working into a big glove. His eyes wobble at you Then an assault of launched eloquence

44 Critical Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 3

Like a sudden flooding of gratitude - But you can’t decode it. He is extricating from his ponderous coat a topless bean-can. spot o tea in this ere, SUIT, if it’s possible - A prayer to be invisible, Eyes flickering towards the road as if casually, He dips his face to the hot can’s edge and sucks Coolingly, hurriedly, And now it comes again (the tossed-empty can back in his pocket) In a slither of thanks and salutes and shoulder-squarings And sparring feinting dagger-stab glances From the dissolved blue eyes And the cornered mouse panic trying to slip into the house past you - Money.

Anaesthetic for the big body, Its glistening full veins, its pumping organs, Its great nerves to the eyes, Unmanageable parcel of baggy pain With its dry-sore brains, its tied rawness - You give him your pocketful and he buries it without a glance And he’s gone Under his shoulder hunch, with hiding hands Under spattering and sneezing trees, over glistening cobbles

To fall within two hundred yards Dead-drunk in the dark church, to lie Blowing, as if in post-operational shock, Abandoned to space, A lolling polyp of sweaty life wrapped in its Guy Fawkes rags, Nobody’s, humped where gravity glues it, Bristling face-patch awry.