Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  At Mrs Tyson’s farmhouse, the electricity is pumped

  Off her beck-borne wooden wheel outside.

  Greased, steady, it spins within

  A white torrent, that stretches up the rocks.

  At night its force bounds down

  And shakes the lighted rooms, shakes the light;

  The mountain’s force comes towering down to us.

  High near its summit the brink is hitched

  To an overflowing squally tarn.

  It trembles with stored storms

  That pulse across the rim to us, as light.

  On a gusty day like this the force

  Lashes its tail, the sky abounds

  With wind-stuffed rinds of cloud that sprout

  Clear force, throbbing in squalls off the sea

  Where the sun stands poring down at itself

  And makes the air grow tall in spurts

  Whose crests turn over in the night-wind, foaming. We spin

  Like a loose wheel, and throbbing shakes our light

  Into winter, and torrents dangle. Sun

  Pulls up the air in fountains, green shoots, forests

  Flinching up at it in spray of branches,

  Sends down clear water and the loosened torrent

  Down into Mrs Tyson’s farmhouse backyard,

  That pumps white beams off its crest,

  In a stiff breeze lashes its tail down the rocks.

  I SEE

  I see a man and that man is myself

  Standing in the trees in a downpour cloudy with rush

  Who penetrates the soft swarming element with his senses alive.

  He is aware of the wet apples,

  They snag like a rosy mist in their orchards;

  He is aware of the spray of the rain running like sharp white mist

  Across running white mist, which is the spray of the grasses seeding;

  He watches the crows stepping within a white bubble of watershed, a dome,

  How they fletch the sopping mud deeply as they step forward, which closes again;

  (The look of them sounds of wet grain creaking deep in crammed bowels;)

  He stoops easily and notices a bug embracing a grass-bole:

  It peers through the green gloss at the heavy sap-veins stiff with their flow,

  He sees its mouth-awls working with excitement for the plunge,

  And he sees it fuss back again stout with its eggs; (a water-load shatters nearby and the green mother starts to stillness;)

  Now I feel manly and that man is myself

  Digesting his dinner in his study after dinner

  Digesting my drinking and my senses are confirmable and shut

  With purple wine-drapes more magnificent than the rags at my window,

  And I have the small hard globe of dinner warm under my clasped hands

  And I ask myself without impatience (for impatience is an outdoor thing)

  Who is that man who can stand in the rain and get his feet wet

  And spit a cherrystone out into a weed-clump believing it will spring

  Of his mouth, having warmed it and started the small germ moving,

  And who is that man I ask no who is that boy who is he

  A good dinner hurt nobody and drink is nutritious and wears off,

  And I resolve to begin my exercises again after breakfast

  As those tight-bellied crows are all fluttering underground

  And in my belly tug and flutter as though picked to and fro by the wheat-roots.

  THE HOUSE IN THE ACORN13

  Ah, I thought just as he opened the door

  That we all turned, for an instant, and looked away,

  Checked ourselves suddenly, then he spoke:

  ‘You’re very good to come,’ then,

  Just for a moment his air thickened,

  And he could not breathe, just for the moment.

  ‘My son would have been glad that you came,’

  He extended his thick hand, ‘Here, all together –’

  We are not ourselves or at our ease,

  I thought, as we raised our glasses, sipped;

  ‘Help yourselves, please. Please …’

  ‘If anyone would care …’ He stood by the table

  Rapping his heavy nails in its polished glare,

  ‘My son is upstairs, at the back of the house,

  The nursery, if anyone …’ I studied

  Stocky hair-avenues along my hand-backs,

  Wandered through grained plots dappled and sunlit;

  ‘My son … sometimes I think they glimpse

  Perhaps for a while through sealed lids a few faces

  Bending in friendship before it all fades …’ I nodded,

  Slipped out, face averted,

  And entered oak aisles; oaken treads

  Mounted me up along oaken shafts, lifting me past

  Tall silent room upon tall silent room:

  Grained centuries of sunlight toppled to twilight

  By chopping and fitting: time turned to timber

  And the last oak enclosure with claws of bent oak

  Where his white wisp cradled, instantaneous,

  Hardly held by his home in its polished housetops.

  A breath would have blown him; I held my breath

  As I dipped to kiss …

  Now the instant of this house rolls in my palm

  And the company spins in its polished globe

  And the drawing-room reels and the house recedes

  (Pattering dome-grained out of the oak)

  While, ah, as I open the door I hear their close laughter,

  Cool earrings swing to the gliding whisper,

  More apple-cup chugs from the stouted ewer.

  THE FERNS14

  The ferns, they dip and spread their fronds

  With moisture easy through the stems,

  Green moisture, that interior wash

  Of living sugars. Spores dehisce.

  Under the baking sun, they breathe

  In currents, swirls and soundless gasps

  Though you below here, standing idle,

  Perceive no influence. Sun rifts the clouds,

  Ferns die and breathe, arch and curl,

  Breathe and remake their forms above,

  Are clouds, that spread and dip their fronds,

  Unravel fingers and moisture-banks

  Of filigree bracken. All’s water.

  All stoops and curls with water, gathers, droops

  And doles the ferns their green moisture

  Five miles down there on the baking earth,

  And dunks the ferns in green moisture.

  Spores dehisce. The ferns are breathing.

  Then frost descends, like thronging ferns.

  THE CONTENTMENT OF AN OLD WHITE MAN

  The sky is dead. The sky is dead. The sky is dead.

  I’m an old white man, if that is your opinion I’m content.

  The fat white clouds roll in the old dead sky

  They do me good, for all you say they’re dead.

  They pat my brow. They sweat me a little wet, perchance.

  Just as my dazzling beard parades my cheeks, they give me

  Ornament. I’m an old white man as well …

  Dead indeed! You’re a sack of wet yourself.

  Step on them? Can you support the stroll of a razor?

  They loll over my brow and childer my thoughts,

  Or think I think them, so fond I am – not water-curds,

  Thoughts! and correspondence! Dead skins and scurfs

  And water-curds … but see how fatherly the sunset looks.

  They rain, they pass into the ground, you piss,

  You pass into the ground, I do, I know my kin,

  My great kin, as a microbe is my lesser. Oh,

  Lower a little shower and feel some roots, I say,

  You’ve not slept in a bed at my age till you’ve wet it.

  They pass and snort and snow, I’ll catch my dea
th

  Squatting under a rainshower and pass away

  At 105° all rubicund like a sunset. We’re all kind,

  All water, they’re a little quicker, which means

  Cleverer, sometimes, don’t it? Oh and ah

  The graceful fruity woods, cabby! of the clouds,

  Snow running on snow and bending as it deepens.

  I see I coach among them, my breath sends out;

  These woods on mountains, we send up shapes together

  Ridge upon ridge, offering them, these clouds,

  The only things large enough for God to watch

  And judge from, we’d better get there fast. I’m halfway

  Being an old white man and here the tree-heads straighten

  Slowly and slowly leaf again as

  Flickers of white drop off them and

  Slowly straighten heads hurting with spring

  As their white dreams leave them. Cabby! the clouds rise

  Because the sun wants them. Each cloud is unique.

  THE HEIR

  Now here I am, drinking in the tall old house, alone,

  The wide brown river squandering itself outside,

  And there’s a fine smell of cane chairs and conservatory dust here,

  With the mature thick orchards thriving outside,

  And I am drinking, which is a mixture of dreaming and feeding,

  Watching how the stone walls admit all their square glad answers

  To the sun that is alive and thriving outside,

  And rests folded in a full pot of beer brimming before me now.

  Or it could have been cider, agreed, because of our thriving orchards,

  But it is beer, because of the brewery just down the way

  Sipping at the wide brown river all the year round.

  So I am a feeder and dreamer both

  Of firm thriving apples and of the wide river outside

  And of the sun that arrives and rests gladly, folded in my food.

  And I agreed to that, and to the passing of the days,

  With winged lips of the mist streaming at night, and in the morning

  Thick mists grinding themselves thin, and grinding themselves to nothing,

  For mothers murther us by having us, naturally, and I am glad to be alive,

  Drinking, with the beer squandering itself inside,

  Sun folded in upon me and cider thriving among the trees,

  And as I am a living man, Mother, I bear you no kind of a grudge,

  Not to you, nor to the good kind cider or beer

  Killing me and having me, for you agreed to die, and bear me no grudge

  For being alive and dying, and dying much as you did …

  So I’m glad to sit dreaming and feeding at the wide cane table set

  For a solid meal that never comes, glad to be spending myself

  As the river spends, and the sun pours out, and the ripe fruit splits,

  Smiling juice sweetly to the hacking wasps, and you did as you agreed

  Which was to give me life, and I agree to that too

  For the beer agrees with me as I said, and I undertake

  To go on agreeing so long as there’s passage in my throat.

  DIRECTIVE

  Attend to the outer world.

  See the calm delicate spray of the branches,

  Watch the cool grey spurs of the sky

  Sliding volumes the one over the other,

  Listen, not inwardly to that gravel-crunch

  (Yourself strolling over your nature,) but

  Listen and wait, for,

  Falling over the springy testing boughs,

  The sliding volumes of the clouds and roads,

  Out of the light clear rain shed,

  Out of the open hot throat

  The world attends you

  Like a friendship, in three clear notes

  Out of a bird’s open throat.

  THE ROOM IN THE TREES

  The scent in pulses blowing off her beds,

  The children birds cackling on their seeds;

  The thirsty bee slaps my polished boot

  Its horny snout humming with perception –

  I love his black and honey-swinging club.

  Great swashing heaps of birds struggle over rubbish.

  Like shuffling footsteps now

  The rain breaks, throbbing down the posts.

  Then, through windows from the beds

  And swerving back, the sound,

  A weeping voice that rushes through the room,

  Rains full into the glass and passes through,

  Dashing droplets, and flashing shows the tasks

  Born with me, into my very soul. It drops

  And swings, and sinks into the wood

  As into green foam and spray,

  Dwindles, hooks up to a bush,

  Cool waxy horn of yellow masses,

  And that one flower’s whiteness draws me through the wood.

  All moves past slowly as it drives me in

  Through lurching timber, toothy weeds: it stares

  Full into my eye, my eye poised in that bush.

  My flowering jowls tug heavily at my sight,

  And here I come, head of blossom, swollen, nodding,

  Rain-lensed, frilled and pulpy, flower-betongued,

  It seeks its way for me through my thickening scent.

  I stoop and sink, my mane matting with the mud.

  I lift my dews to what I shall become, and there

  Before me trees stand glories, feeding, feeding,

  Upon convulsive shifting of the sun

  In palpable thick stalks set with shadow-lawn,

  And on the muddy, lily-laden lake

  Reeking of raisins – green wood all around

  That sweats out spring in milky drops and blossom.

  I’m only the wood then. You think you

  Fancy faces in the trees, my rooms;

  I think I only fancy rooms, crowded with faces,

  But I pass through, taking mouths of treetops,

  Jackets of vine, boots of water-topping stones,

  Drubbing long grass like flames to flit my hearths

  Of chimneys in their stout and hollow trunks,

  I wander through my tables of the hawthorn

  Thick-set with seeding food in empty rooms,

  Gust them once again with tugging mouths

  Thick-leaved and parting as I wish, and I lodge

  In bearded boulders, berried heads of moss

  Of mouths cracked wide with flowers from wishing hard.

  SUNDAY AFTERNOONS

  I want a dew-keen scythe –

  Peering or prodding into the puddles

  Outlook reflections or shadows

  I want a power-mower –

  Banging about in all breezes

  Shaggy thick heads without repose

  Lolling about in the rain, doddering in it

  I want shears –

  Joyous colours for suffering in

  And those wet red blooms like sliced tomatoes –

  I want to get in there with a thick insulting stick.

  NOISE

  Suddenly in this dream I was printer’s ink

  Poured through the presses, patterned in every man’s mind,

  Ideas lodged in his farthest recesses were mine,

  Had taken in my angular black, the engrams

  Of my pain under the presses.

  Now I revenge, for when one dies

  I let him see it all clearly, all that he’s learned

  Now in its entirety for the first time known,

  Laid in front of his soul’s eye, painfully learned …

  Then lightly, laughingly, carelessly I withdraw my spirit.

  Letters, sentences, paragraphs shudder and mingle, a little black smear

  Replaces each most delicate printed utterance,

  A little ragged black snigger like a smudge

  That bites like a scorched hole, spreading,<
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  And each book blackens with thick noise

  Full of the cries of the words lost in it.

  And the libraries! They haemorrhage from their stacks.

  So you would do well never again to read books

  Nor to build up your children’s brains on foundations of books

  For it is a bookless pain and it lacks pictures

  And it is an ocean of night-pain and noise.

  REQUIRED OF YOU THIS NIGHT

  A smoky sunset. I dab my eyes.

  It stinks into the black wick of the wood.

  Sparks wriggle, cut. I turn my back.

  And night is at my frosty back.

  I turn again. All stars!

  It’s bedtime.

  There’s no sky in my dreams, I dream none.

  I work for sky, I work by sprinting up,

  Breathing, sprinting up, and one star appears.

  I chase it. It enlarges and I wake.

  Dawn climbs into the sky like black smoke with white nails.

  It’s compact with the day’s sharpness.

  I’ll dry my sopping pillow in it.

  How long’ll that take? I guess till sunset.

  And then it sinks

  All befrogged into that white glare.

  The night is at my back instantly,

  Draughty, and no star at all.

  I weep again. I weep again frankly.

  Sleep is nothing when you do it,

  And nothing but a prim smile,

  Except you’re fighting to pull the sun down

  That may not come unless you fight

  Not for you anyway, Peter.

  THE ARTIST TO HIS BLIND LOVE

  Slut, her muddy fingers leave a track

  She buckles to her waist.

  She stoops. She feels

  With fingers in the turf.

  She touches coarsened snow and gets

  Cool fingers. It almost runs away

  On freshet-fingers scuttling from the sides.

  Watch the excrement!

  Slut, her muddy fingers leave a track

  She buckles to her waist.

  Foodspots patter down her front. I haven’t the heart.

  Her hair swells close around her head.

  It’s not clean. She smiles,

  She scrolled her own mouth this morning, I can see;

  Air lies like thick soil on both eyes, sunbeams

  Fall on top of that like warm twigs.

  I haven’t the heart. Foodspots patter down her front.

  Your eyes have their nightside uppermost,