This week a rather strange and disturbing poem by the American poet Anthony Hecht (1923-2004; see also weeks 345 and 464), apparently inspired by an anecdote of Ted Hughes.

I see the poem as being in the ‘Et in Arcadia, ego’ vein, in which the frailty and transience of human life and love are set against the presence of death and the pitiless indifference of the natural world, here casting their shadows over a romantic weekend getaway. I take the symbolic presence in the last stanza to be an owl, and the scratching in the loft evokes memories of Alan Garner’s ‘The Owl Service’, though there is no suggestion here that our human choice can be benign flowers instead of the predatory and destructive birds.

Of course, it is possible to find unintentionally comic aspects to the poem. Would the narrator really have let himself be distracted by a mere scratching in the roof when he had matters so nearly in hand, so to speak? And then one imagines the perhaps more practically minded woman saying ‘Right, now we’ve established that it’s just an owl that’s caught a mouse, can we get on with it, because I’m standing here freezing’.

But any such irreverent thoughts are overwhelmed by admiration for the sheer skill of the piece: it’s conjuration of shadows, its buildup of erotic tension, and that shaft of moonlight, so stunningly evoked by the unexpected epithet ‘magnesium’.

Quirt: a kind of riding whip.
Lariat: another word for lasso.
Captain Marryat: a Victorian writer of adventure stories.
Dormer: a kind of window positioned directly under a roof, and often found as a way of letting light into attics.

The End of the Weekend

A dying firelight slides along the quirt
Of the cast iron cowboy where he leans
Against my father’s books. The lariat
Whirls into darkness. My girl in skin tight jeans
Fingers a page of Captain Marryat
Inviting insolent shadows to her shirt.

We rise together to the second floor.
Outside, across the lake, an endless wind
Whips against the headstones of the dead and wails
In the trees for all who have and have not sinned.
She rubs against me and I feel her nails.
Although we are alone, I lock the door.

The eventual shapes of all our formless prayers:
This dark, this cabin of loose imaginings,
Wind, lip, lake, everything awaits
The slow unloosening of her underthings
And then the noise. Something is dropped. It grates
Against the attic beams. I climb the stairs
Armed with a belt.

A long magnesium shaft
Of moonlight from the dormer cuts a path
Among the shattered skeletons of mice.
A great black presence beats its wings in wrath.
Above the boneyard burn its golden eyes.
Some small grey fur is pulsing in its grip.

Anthony Hecht