Gaudete by Ted Hughes Page B

mirror
    Is trying to see herself more slender and to look lighter.
    And to make certain once again that her breasts
    Are no fuller than they were.
    Her cat rubs across her bare spine
    As she sits on the bed.
    She rolls back, hoisting the cat, loving the cat,
    Pulls the sheet over her, snuggles to the cat, she dozes.
    A bigger hot body nestles in beside her,
    Overpowers her, muscular and hairy as a giant badger.
    A goblin bald face laughs into hers,
    Lifts her to shriek surprised laughter.
    He is twisting and squeezing the laughter out of her,
    They wrestle in a ball of limbs.
    Her whole body is ticklish inside and out.
    He laughs like an over-excited dog.
    They scramble all over the room,
    They crash the furniture, senseless to their bruises.
    They roll like wrestlers from one corner to another.
    Her shrieks get out of control and abandon her last efforts
                                                                     of laughter.
    Her laughs try to smother her shrieks.
    Banging on the door.
    Betty peers over the sheet. The cat, sprawled on the
                                                                             pillow,
    Stretches his claws and looks into her face through sleepy
                                                                                  slits.
    Her mother peeps in through the open crack of the door.
    Nothing is the matter.
    Only one of her dreams again. Betty
    Makes her face weary-woeful.
    Stop sleeping with that cat.

Garten
    From shrubbery to bungalow wall, next the window,
    Dares full daylight and the watchfulness of many a village
                                                                   bedroom view
    He edges a creeping glimpse, through the window,
    Of stockinged feet on a bed.
    Is silent in the kitchen
    Where a baby breathes in a carry-cot.
    Full-length, at the open door of the bedroom,
    A yard from the mingling breaths and the working
                                                                        mattress,
    He spies through the crack of the door.
    He positions his camera close to the door’s edge.
    He eases into the open and flashes
    What he sees on the bed.
    He is striding across the kitchen.
    Here is the garden corner, now the hedge hides him.
    He whirls in the road.
    He pedals calmly past the front of the blacksmith’s
                                                    bungalow on his bicycle
    Without a look back
    At the blue van parked outside it.
    Exultant, the fuse spluttering in him
    Of what he has in the camera.

Felicity
    At eighteen, is in her second spring of full flower. Three years ago, a drab child, mongrel and spindly. Today, coming and going among the soft hot-house scents, she is the most exotic thing in the nursery. She is aware of it. She performs it a little, self-indulgently, with a flourish, as a leopard performs its frightening grace.
    Her overlong upsweeping nose, her flat calf’s eye, her wide reckless mouth, were her father’s real ugliness. For the time being they compound her enigmatic triangular beauty.
    Gypsy dark skin, intensifying into fierce wire hair. Lusty little moles on her upper lip, and on her cheek.
 
    Slender
    She is sliding boxes of bedding plants into the back of a
                                                                  Range Rover.
    Her dirty heels lift from her sandals.
    A five-cornered cacophony, the sand-haired self-elected young Saxon squire, from the Manor at N., claiming Norman prerogative, directs her.
 
    Flirts a little, to excuse his driving gloves.
    He daunts her
    With