Paris Review, Spring 1995, #134 (Ted Hughes)

I spent the first years of my life in a valley
                    sitting in woods muttering the occult business of little folktales;
                                        madness sometimes works

amid the machines, kept running elegiacally by large sets of hands
                    sweeping populations of crow from each momentary wholeness.
                                       I spent the first years of my life in a valley

enchanted by the noise of complex human emotion: it was
                    big trouble in tweed jackets, the very wide landscapes of modern man
                                        and this is why madness sometimes works

(a tradition with its own gods/holograms).
                    In a wilderness of anthropological models inside the encyclopedias of children
                                        I spent the first years of my life in a valley

conscious as animals inside hotelroom dreams, with
                    TV screens jamming on runaway wars crackling away; maybe this
                                        is why madness sometimes works

like a flash of ancient feeling telepathed from an unseen, watching mind
                    (there’s an infinite number of possibilities if
                                        you concentrate like a good bird). So: I spent the first years of my life in a valley
                                        where madness sometimes worked.

[Image credit: Eric Soons]