Birthday Letters

Me and poetry have never been friends. It'd be all "Fancy words, triple entendre and incomplete sentences!" and I'd be like "No! Speak English you fool, I can't understand a word you're saying!"

Then I discovered Ted Hughes. His writing makes me swoon. I am envious of his ability to find the perfect phrase, expressing what he means with the fewest of words. 

Birthday Letters was published the year that he died and explores his relationship with Sylvia Plath. Here is one of my favourites from the book.

Fingers

Who will remember your fingers?

Their winged life? They flew

With the light in your look.

At the piano, stomping out hits from the forties,

They performed an incidental clowning

Routine of their own, deadpan puppets.

You were only concerned to get them to the keys.

But as you talked, as your eyes signalled

The strobes of your elation,

They flared, flicked balletic acrobatics.

I thought of birds in some tropical sexual

Play of display, leaping and somersaulting,

Doing strange things in the air, and dropping to the dust.

Those dangers of your excess!

With such deft, practical touches - so accurate.

Thinking their own thoughts caressed like lightning

The lipstick into your mouth corners.

Trim conductors of your expertise,

Cavorting at your typewriter,

Possessed by infant spirit, puckish,

Who, whatever they did, danced or mimed it

In weightless largesse of espressivo.

I remember your fingers. And your daughter's

Fingers remember your fingers

In everything they do.

Her fingers obey and honour your fingers,

The lares and Penates of our house.