the rag rug

The Rag Rug by Ted Hughes

Somebody had made one. You admired it.

So you began to make your rag rug.

You needed to do it. Played on by lightnings

You needed an earth. Maybe. Or needed

To pull something out of yourself -

Some tapeworm of the psyche. I was simply

Happy to watch your scissors being fearless

As you sliced your old wool dresses,

Your cast-offs, once so costly,

Into bandages. Dark venous blood,

Daffodil yellow. You plaited them

Into a rope. You massaged them

Into the new life of a motley viper

That writhed out of the grave

Of your wardrobe. Like the buried wrapping

Of old mummy non-selves. You bowed

Like a potter

Over the turning hub of your rich rag rug

That widened its wheel,

Searching out the perimeter of a music-

The tongues of the loose ends flickering in air.

Issuing like a fugue out of the whorls

Of your fingertips. It calmed you,

Creating the serpent that coiled

Into a carpet. And the carpet

Lifted us, as it turned and returned,

Out of that crimson room of our cardiac days.

It freed me. It freed you

To do something that seemed almost nothing.

Whenever you worked at your carpet I felt happy.

Then I could read Conrad's novels to you.

I could cradle your freed mind in my voice,

Chapter by chapter, sentence by sentence,

Word by word: The Heart of Darkness,

The Secret Sharer. The same, I could feel

Your fingers caressing my reading, hour after hour,

Fitting together the serpent's jumbled rainbow.

I was like the snake-charmer - my voice

Swaying you over your heaped coils. While you

Unearthed something deeper than our verses.

A knowledge like the halves of a broken magnet.

I remember

Those long, crimson-shadowed evenings of ours

More like the breath-held camera moments

Of reaching to touch a falcon that does not fly off.

As if I held your hand to stroke a falcon

With your hand.

Later (not much later)

Your diary confided to whoever

What furies you bled into that rug.

As if you had dragged, like your own entrails,

Out through your navel.

Was I the child or the mother? Did you braid it,

That umbilicus between us,

To free yourself from my contraction or was it

Pushing me out and away? Did you coil it,

Your emergency magic operation,

To draw off the tangle of numb distance

Secreting itself between us? Or was it

A drooled curse

From some old bitter woman's rusty mouth

That stays awake when she sleeps - her malediction

Spellbinding tiered labyrinths of confusion

Into the breadth of a hearth-rug? The coils,

Impassable, became a mamba, fatal.

Its gentle tap, when you trod on it for finality,

Would alter your blood. When I stepped over it

Would alter my nerves and brain.

I dreamed of our house

Before we ever found it. A great snake

Lifted its head from a well in the middle of the house

Exactly where the well is, beneath a slab,

In the middle of the house.

A golden serpent, thick as a child's body,

Eased from the opened well. And poured out

Through the back door, a length that seemed unending–

Till its tail tapered over the threshold,

The deep-worn, cracked threshold, soon to be ours.

That was after the whole house, in my dream,

Had capsized. And a perfect replica

Double of the house–the well-world's own

Upside-down reflection duplicate–

Had swung uppermost, and locked upright

Under its different stars, with an earthquake jolt,

Shaking the snake awake.

The rag rug

That had heaped out onto your lap

Slid to the floor. There it lay, coiled

Between us. However it came,

And wherever it found its tongue, its fang, its meaning,

It survived our Eden.