An Otter by Ted Hughes

Underwater eyes, an eel's 
Oil of water body, neither fish nor beast is the otter: 
Four-legged yet water-gifted, to outfish fish; 
With webbed feet and long ruddering tail 
And a round head like an old tomcat. 


Brings the legend of himself 
From before wars or burials, in spite of hounds and vermin-poles; 
Does not take root like the badger. Wanders, cries; 
Gallops along land he no longer belongs to; 
Re-enters the water by melting. 


Of neither water nor land. Seeking 
Some world lost when first he dived, that he cannot come at since, 
Takes his changed body into the holes of lakes; 
As if blind, cleaves the stream's push till he licks 
The pebbles of the source; from sea 


To sea crosses in three nights 
Like a king in hiding. Crying to the old shape of the starlit land, 
Over sunken farms where the bats go round, 
Without answer. Till light and birdsong come 
Walloping up roads with the milk wagon. 


The hunt's lost him. Pads on mud, 
Among sedges, nostrils a surface bead, 
The otter remains, hours. The air, 
Circling the globe, tainted and necessary, 


Mingling tobacco-smoke, hounds and parsley, 
Comes carefully to the sunk lungs. 
So the self under the eye lies, 
Attendant and withdrawn. The otter belongs 


In double robbery and concealment -- 
From water that nourishes and drowns, and from land 
That gave him his length and the mouth of the hound. 
He keeps fat in the limpid integument 


Reflections live on. The heart beats thick, 
Big trout muscle out of the dead cold; 
Blood is the belly of logic; he will lick 
The fishbone bare. And can take stolen hold 


On a bitch otter in a field full 
Of nervous horses, but linger nowhere. 
Yanked above hounds, reverts to nothing at all, 
To this long pelt over the back of a chair.

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