Ted Hughes — Wolfwatching

Woolly-bear white, the old wolf Is listening to London. His eyes, withered in Under the white wool, black peepers, While he makes nudging, sniffing offers At the horizon of noise, the blue-cold April Invitation of airs. The lump of meat Is his confinement. He has probably had all his life Behind wires, fraying his eye-efforts On the criss-cross embargo. He yawns Peevishly like an old man and the yawn goes Right back into Kensington and there stops Floored with glaze. Eyes Have worn him away. Children's gazings Have tattered him to a lumpish Comfort of woolly play-wolf. He's weary. He curls on the cooling stone That gets heavier. Then again the burden Of a new curiosity, a new testing Of new noises, new people with new colours Are coming in at the gate. He lifts The useless weight and lets it sink back, Stirring and settling in a ball of unease. All his power is a tangle of old ends, A jumble of leftover scraps and bits of energy And bitten-off impulses and dismantled intuitions. He can't settle. He's ruffling And re-organizing his position all day Like a sleepless half-sleep of growing agonies In a freezing car. The day won't pass. The night will be worse. He's waiting For the anaesthetic to work That has already taken his strength, his beauty And his life. He levers his stiffness erect And angles a few tottering steps Into his habits. He goes down to water And drinks. Age is thirsty. Water Just might help and ease. what else Is there to do? He tries to find again That warm position he had. He cowers His hind legs to curl under him. Subsides In a trembling of wolf-pelt he no longer Knows how to live up to. And here Is a young wolf, still intact. He knows how to lie, with his head, The Asiatic eyes, the gunsights Aligned effortless in the beam of his power. He closes his pale eyes and is easy, Bored easy. His big limbs Are full of easy time. He's waiting For the chance to live, then he'll be off. Meanwhile the fence, and the shadow-flutter Of moving people, and the roller coaster Roar of London surrounding, are temporary, And cost him nothing, and he can afford To prick his ears to all that and find nothing As to forest. He still has the starlings To amuse him. The scorched ancestries, Grizzled into his back, are his royalty. The rufous ears and neck are always ready. He flops his heavy running paws, resplays them On pebbles, and rests the huge engine Of his purring head. A wolf Dropping perfect on pebbles. For eyes To put on a pedestal. A product without a market. But all the time The awful thing is happening: the iron inheritance, The incredible rich will, torn up In neurotic boredom and eaten, Now indigestible. All that restlessness And lifting of ears, and aiming, and re-aiming Of nose, is like a trembling Of nervous breakdown, afflicted by voices. Is he hearing the deer? Is he listening To gossip of non-existent forest? Pestered By the hour-glass panic of lemmings Dwindling out of reach? He's run a long way Now to find nothing and be patient. Patience is suffocating in all those folds Of deep fur. The fairy tales Grow stale all around him And go back into pebbles. His eyes Keep telling him all this is real And that he's a wolf--of all things To be in the middle of London, of all Futile, hopeless things. Do Arctics Whisper on their wave-lengths--fantasy-draughts Of escape and freedom? His feet, The power-tools, lie in front of him-- He doesn't know how to use them. Sudden Dramatic lift and re-alignment Of his purposeful body-- the Keeper Has come to freshen the water. And the prodigious journeys Are thrown down again in his Loose heaps of rope. The future's snapped and coiled back Into a tangled lump, a whacking blow That's damaged his brain. Quiet, Amiable in his dogginess, Disillusioned--all that preparation Souring in his skin. His every yawn Is another dose of poison. His every frolic Releases a whole flood Of new hopelessness which he then Has to burn up in sleep. A million miles Knotted in his paws. Ten million years Broken between his teeth. A world Stinking on the bone, pecked by sparrows. He's hanging Upside down on the wire Of non-participation. He's a tarot-card, and he knows it. He can howl all night And dawn will pick up the same card And see him painted on it, with eyes Like doorframes in a desert Between nothing and nothing.