Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  Or it hovers

  Too restless

  To untie the human knot.

  It is the last trumpet

  And the first trumpet.

  It fashioned Glastonbury Tor

  With helical fingermarks.

  The burglar by night bears

  Ten small tough patterns of it

  Through the polished house,

  Each one speaks his name.

  It is a kind of walking cliff

  And a walking well.

  The fossil shell and the empty penis

  Alike await this wakener.

  The Master comes!

  He shuts his blue snuff-box

  And the wind stops.

  He knows how to wind it

  With a certain key

  That makes the whole home disappear

  Inside-out up the chimney;

  Knee-deep knee-deep beware

  Croaks the frog far inside it.

  Its vomited bees float

  Coiling down the hillside.

  It has much in common

  With the round-dance and cyclotron;

  It will hover

  Over the winding dance on the sand-beach

  It will suddenly reverse

  The people vanish and all that is left is a shell.

  The Master says, learn from this power,

  It is strapped to your wrist like an oyster

  And allow it to descend into your mouth

  And suck you dry

  And let it pluck out your eyes

  So they can ride on the storm.

  Is the shaft weary?

  If this shaft is not tired

  There is no tiredness anywhere;

  If this shaft is tired

  Wait for the new world.

  Subdue it if you dare.

  My master did.

  The long thin one enters

  The open lid of his cranium,

  Screws down his spine,

  Sets with a click.

  My master wakes,

  Gets up and laughs suddenly,

  Totters widdershins picking things up

  Favouring his left hand

  Since this is the northern hemisphere.

  And it whirls directly over his head –

  Do not look up, it is his hypnotist!

  And the sun, that squints through its sun-spots.

  It is the best of rainstorms

  Since it so mightily collects

  And so mightily lets fall.

  It has subdued the great sea-worm

  Who hangs upright, frothing in its embrace.

  Throw a knife into it

  You will wound the heel of a grey witch

  Who will not bleed, she is made of cobwebs.

  It is the spirit of the sealed boulder

  It was born of a beach-pebble, and left by a pock,

  It is the spirit of the oil-gusher, the black that yellow burns.

  It touches the rock, that rock

  Speeds up and is petrol for motor-cars:

  A spark of its friction catches

  The rock is no more in a shuddering flap! But mostly

  It buries this rock-spirit until it is needed.

  I will call it a magical name in the Linnean system

  Vortex macromphalos and I carry on my watchchain

  A silky cocoon reminding me of its quiet moments

  Of its transformation and presence anywhere:

  In the gnat-swarm with smoky feet,

  Faltering in spirals; in the tons

  Of aching black-water-muscle poised over the campus

  Peering in through the long library-windows;

  In four winds bound round in one breast and breeze.

  Dr Faust’s receipt for THE NAILS

  Seek out its unfreighted apparition

  It will be a shimmer between oaks at evening

  Celebrated glancingly by gnats

  In broken spirals, falling and rising.

  Anoint with the lizard. It will turn horn-white.

  Now take nails of sweet-tasting iron

  Drive your nails into the floating bone

  Strike it as it returns each time

  Draw sparks with your blows, keep it

  Spinning, persist. The Whirlwind

  Will shrink, measuring gradually

  Its substance into the nail

  That falls to the grass heavily.

  You may use this nail for many benefits.

  Drive it into rock and the hill will be glass,

  You may peruse its secrets.

  Drive it into a table of dry wood

  It will bloom like a bridefeast.

  Drive it into the skull of a blind man

  He will see men like trees walking.

  VIII

  THE HERMAPHRODITE ALBUM27

  (1973)

  THE SNOW-SHIRT

  There is a door opening on

  A vision of health after long illness.

  There is a lighted staircase,

  There are the deep levels of her blouse,

  White cats struggling among roses.

  My chest is proffering

  Two rosy bouquets,

  They prickle my shirt.

  There is a cold green square

  Among houses,

  Crackling the air

  There are black trees,

  There is a wood-fire

  Belling with shadows

  And a father leaning against

  The heavy mantleshelf:

  He is most elegant

  In a shirt of deep frills,

  The shirt is very white,

  His hair very black.

  The child of me toddles

  Across the warm carpet,

  Now my father’s shirt-frills

  Settle over the square

  In flakes heavy and soft as winter,

  The fire warms us,

  We blush like roses.

  SIX ODES

  I TABLE-LADY

  I sent her into the wine-glass to listen.

  I prodded her into the apple-burrow; I told her to take out her pin-dagger as soon as she heard the maggot chewing.

  I gave her a bath in a walnut-shell.

  She made a salt-necklace, piercing the crystals together.

  I was frightened when she fell into the mustard, but I rolled her clean on a piece of bread.

  I told her to sit in the cruet like an information kiosk and answer some questions.

  I compiled a savoury blanc-mange for her studded with angelica; it was a gobbet of my fish-sauce.

  But she ran from the reek of my steak, the evisceration of an elephant; I gave her a cress-leaf fan.

  She got drunk in a grape. I found her snoring like a scarlet fly on her back in the skin like a flabby canoe.

  It was after I had eaten the blood-orange that I missed her.

  II WATER-LADY

  He asked her to go into the wood and tell him what she saw there.

  She walked between the trees and the first thing she liked was the pond.

  She knelt down and stripped off the thin film of reflections, rolled it up and put it into her pocket to show she had been there.

  The water’s new skin reflected with more brilliance and better colour.

  So she knelt down and took this new skin and put it into her pocket, throwing the other skin away.

  But the colours of the newest skin were without equal so she took this instead.

  In due time she emptied the pond in this manner.

  All that was left was a slippery hole, a sloppy quag with a few fish skipping.

  She felt sorry for the fish so she went down into the quag and captured them in her skirt and climbed out.

  Then she looked for where the torn scraps of reflection had settled among the undergrowth and she slid a fish into each one.

  After she had done this she went back to him. ‘What are those stains on your skirt?’ were his first words …

  But his suspicion
s were drowned in amazement as she unrolled the tapestry of reflections for him.

  III HOWDAH-LADY

  A little bloodstained clockwork in a puddle of blood.

  She picked it up sighing, wiped it on her skirt.

  Look, she said, it’s all that’s left of Peter, I wonder what could have done it?

  I shrugged my heavy shoulders.

  I don’t know, she said, whether one can give a piece of machinery a proper burial. Might it not be better, she sniggered, to fasten it in a memorial clock, so that one always thought of poor Peter as one looked at the time?

  My eye itched, I rubbed it with my ear.

  I suppose he was thrown from his elephant, she said, placing one tiny foot in the crook of my trunk, and when they dragged him away this piece remained.

  I hoisted her to my back.

  But I don’t want the beastly thing, she cried from the howdah, and she flung the clockwork into the swamp.

  As we left, I saw it turn into a golden beetle that buzzed off into a belt of wild nasturtiums.

  IV WARDROBE-LADY

  She wears the long series of wonder-awakening dresses,

  She wears the fishskin cloak,

  She wears the gown of pearl with the constellations slashed into its dark lining,

  She undresses out of the night sky, each night of the year a different sky,

  She wears altitude dresses and vertigo dresses,

  She plucks open the long staircase at the neck with the big buttons of bird-skulls in the white dress of sow-thistle.

  She has leather britches known to be chimp-skin,

  She has combed star-rays into a shaggy night-dress,

  She has a bodice of bone-flounces, a turbinal blouse through which the air pours.

  There is a gown she has that shimmers without slit or seam like the wall of an aquarium:

  A starfish moves slowly on its pumps across her bosom,

  A shark glides, a turtle rows silently between her knees,

  And she adopts in turn the long dress of sewn louse-skin,

  The romper suit of purple jam packed with tiny oval seeds,

  The foggy grey dress, and lapping between its folds

  Echo bird-cries and meteor-noises and declarations of love,

  The ballgown of ticker-tape,

  The evening dress of flexible swirling clockwork running against time,

  The cocktail dress of bloody smoke and bullet-torn bandages,

  And the little black dress of grave-soil that rends and seals as she turns.

  Often she sits up all night in the philosopher’s library

  Sewing strong patches from his wardrobes of thought Into her wounded dresses.

  V LEARNING-LADY

  I sprained my wrist taking her skirt off; it was moving too fast in a contrary direction.

  I grasp the difficult mathematics of topology because I know her saddle-shapes.

  I know conic sections also from the fall of her skirt.

  Transcendental numbers are not difficult since inside she is much bigger than she is out.

  As for theology, she always gives me good answers to my short god.

  VI COMING-LADY

  She comes like a seashell without a skin,

  She comes like warm mud that moves in sections.

  She comes with long legs like a tree-frog clambering

  Towards some great fruit, niddip, niddip.

  A small acrobat lives inside her flower;

  The canopy blooms.

  She has an underground belfry tolling the bushes

  Which shakes the ground,

  It is full of shivering bats that fly out and return.

  Her blouse comes off like the clean paging of new books,

  There is a smell of fresh bread and a clean active

  Strong-teated animal inside.

  Her knickers come off like opening party invitations,

  And between her legs pigeons are laying eggs without shells.

  I have lost dread there longer than a man reasonably may,

  I believe I know there white lids sledding over mossy wells,

  Shearing prisms and silk splitting for me to walk

  Into the red room in order to inspect the ancient portraits

  In warm loose oils that are always repainting themselves.

  EROSION

  Darkness is a power. She haunts with power.

  I begin to fear the pebble and its outpourings, I fear

  The blood of the nearby hills, the outpourings

  Of the rock. She makes endless soil

  And ponderous thick earth earth wanders through,

  Presiding from her hills, reflecting herself

  In her wet estuaries. She reclines at ease

  In emerald flanks and winding satin clefts,

  And wanders through herself. Mire gloats everywhere.

  The lurching packs of birds

  Bear mire-stings in their tails,

  They eat her fruit and make more mud.

  I admire

  The clean acid scut-bite of the enormous wasp.

  She was rock, now she is endlessly deep

  And too soft for thought:

  Too much dark and power to stifle in. Her rocks

  Rot the clear rain. Sometimes I see the clouds above the shored-up mud

  Tugged open as if by the hymns of mud mud sings,

  Hymns to the sky out of her low dank softness.

  Each night from hedgerows

  Huge glossy slugs skim out, hour-long transparencies

  With mire-cud inset deep that melts

  To individual flesh and back again,

  Not like those hills that spend themselves completely,

  Leave place slowly in their thick green dresses

  To bathe their heads and sink in ever-mud.

  BRAINWALL CORNGHOST HORSESTORM

  They are not sheep on our hills, but rain-bringers,

  They are thunder, lightning, and the like,

  And the name of the flock is Peter.

  One of its names. I will tell you the other one soon.

  How the thunder bangs! Look, look, up above,

  There is a mask of God still bellowing, and drifting slightly.

  Who is that in the shrubbery, in a wet evening gown?

  I know one of her names. She arrived recently.

  I notice the bees are swarming by night, iced white by the moon.

  The name of the flock is Artaud, or one of its names.

  Your job is to polish the sweet jars in the upper room,

  One of your jobs; the low broad room lined with dusty bottles.

  There are motes in the late sun dancing like voices

  All saying their names, which are Joe Dust

  And one other, which I am forbidden to tell you

  As yet, until you have changed into dry clothes.

  The stars are bony tonight, and the river bright like a worm;

  It is never the same river twice, so I cannot tell you its name.

  Our hens are laying soft-skinned eggs now, for the stars

  Take all their calcium, despite our prayers. There is also

  A granular stench in the refectory, and I fear

  Scab hardens somewhere, like precious stones

  Perfecting themselves in the earth, chalcedony or bezel,

  And the great gate rots on its posts. Moths called Eliza flutter

  Against the puttyless panes rattling in the tall windows, the chanting

  Of words called English seeps through the birdsong stables

  And horses are there for the riding, called Kindness,

  Gaiety, Intuition and Poetry, despite our fears.

  SOME BOOKS, SOME AUTHORS, SOME READERS

  There is dead wood in this author; open his book and certain pages crumble like rotten wood between covers of bark. Out of so much else scramble boot-shiny beetles, very compact and intent, like the readers it inspires, like the sincere readers of difficult dead books.

  This
one sloughs off his dead faces. They are the pages of his books. The old gentleman! – meet him now as pink and sweetly-smelling as a freshly-washed baby. A new book gathers in his face as we talk. He adjusts the shade of the club-room lamp so that it shines away from the darkness gathering in his face.

  This one specialises in pages that become water as their white crests turn. Thus you can only read on, but there is a sea there containing many curious fish, and whales that move in schools together among their scented milt.

  This one travels over sunlit waters in a shiny tin boat. He is very tanned, almost black, and sails with one hand grasping the white mast, but he cannot look down, the water is so bright.

  This one writes books you do not read because they read aloud to you. Immersed in the writing, you lounge up to your neck in the talking water, your collar of water high around your neck, your river-robe fast-flowing.

  The books of this one are like biting seaside rock. The same word runs straight through to the end.

  This one makes books of stinking quicksilver. It is your own face you regard as you read, but the smell is the author’s.

  Opening the covers of this one’s book is like opening a stove that has not been lighted for centuries. But its clinker is thousands of pearls.

  How can I evaluate or describe to you the plots of any of these books, or the information they contain! For I am a lover of books, and this is my misfortune; to tell their worth is beyond me.

  FOR DAVID

  She has six-dimensional laughter.

  Her face closes placidly on twelve intersecting horizons at right angles.

  She dresses in colours that taste of wells.

  She stands on pebbled beaches and I think of the skulls of foes.

  She stands on sandy beaches and I think of a billion years.

  She builds a sandcastle with bucket and spade and I think of the children I want.

  She paddles, and the tide inches up her legs.

  I am the sea immediately, and I contain seaweed and ink.

  My brine wets her skirt with a quick splash and I travel through her vesture.

  She wades slowly along my shore.

  My surface shines with a straight path that reaches as far as the setting sun, a far-retching pang.

  IX

  SONS OF MY SKIN28

  (1975)