Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

The powder from those muskets the puffs

  Of smoke from our own cannon were harmless

  But the smoke stained my sleeves thus I drifted

  Like an off-white truce a half-hearted white flag

  In my stained blouse with the high neck

  And bosom-tucks and little fringes, my

  Satin skirt with the waterfall back

  My long stained skirt that made me glide

  Stained with the muddy ground and gunsmoke

  This orderly was helping me escape

  My husband was busy with the war

  I went in a besmutched dress across the frontier

  Like a butcher’s wife between the staining cannon

  Between the groaning men I saw my husband

  In his red uniform lacquered in its colour

  I saw his head shatter in a plume

  Of coloured smoke that stained me

  I cradled it, in my spattered skirt

  I crossed the frontier into night and safety

  There was a smoking train whose smoke stained

  I sat besmattered with the train

  Besmattered with the cattle-leavings in the train

  A dog sniffed at my dress

  As though it were a map of battles and escape

  My history written for him in my dress

  The dog sniffed at my dress like my child

  His thorny pads tick-tocked away from me

  The train lurched, new firing began to spatter me.

  THE HALF-HOUSE

  A dry brown bush feathered with mosquitoes.

  A ruined room with a river running through the end of it.

  Tablecloths trailing into the fast water.

  A silver tureen rolling and clanging among the river pebbles.

  A billiard table’s drenched green meadow

  On which the mushrooms have set out an ivory game,

  Their scent of salt meat mingles with the nettles’;

  Ant-scented nettles; the door swings on blackness

  Of a white refrigerator like snow among the brambles

  That have stopped the clock with yellow fire

  On the marble mantlepiece, next to the crucifix

  That has budded, its figure missing, like a white shadow.

  That rustling in the bushes, is it a thrush

  Or the small brown Christ sprinting among the pine-needles,

  In the other half of the house, the little Jesus

  Tanned and hard like Robinson Crusoe, shooting

  For food rabbits and mice with a string of horsehair

  And a gull-feather bow, the hand-wounds

  Almost healed in the hard hunter’s hands.

  He has got into the library, lights

  Cooking-fires from the ruined books, tries to pick

  Pictures of Mary off the printed pages

  (Though, in a fix, he can rip the scabs off

  And light a fire with the blood in his veins,

  Or scare night-animals by waving his thundering hands.)

  He smells like a field-Christ.

  Like a fertile field the Lord has blessed.

  SERIOUS READERS

  All the flies are reading microscopic books;

  They hold themselves quite tense and silent

  With shoulders hunched, legs splayed out

  On the white formica table-top, reading.

  With my book I slide into the diner-booth;

  They rise and circle and settle again, reading

  With hunched corselets. They do not attempt to taste

  Before me my fat hamburger-plate, but wait,

  Like courteous readers until I put it to one side,

  Then taste briefly and resume their tomes

  Like reading-stands with horny specs. I

  Read as I eat, one fly

  Alights on my book, the size of print;

  I let it be. Read and let read.

  THE DOCTRINE OF THE WINDOW

  There are windows, little sliding traps

  Of white wood people push exhausted money through

  Summoned by bill. There are clear squares

  Summating landscapes with the help of chattering highballs;

  There are dark high windows, behind which

  Great novels are written by young persons

  Lacking the price of candles; there are low-down bays

  For grim-jawed women in buns of sandy hair

  Whose knitting has overgrown them like trellises;

  There are waterfalls, whose ever-roar

  Reminds visiting hermits of distant hermitages,

  Through whose speeding glass the black mountain looks back at you;

  And there is this doctor in spectacles

  Sitting behind his desk like his own high windows,

  No he is a clear door, you saw your reflection first

  Then you climbed out of him twenty-seven floors up into weather

  Of city streets that darken as gazes dive,

  Office windows flashing with eyes that plunge;

  The cops arrive in cars screaming like suicides.

  But if you prefer to remain in-windows, this

  Glass of water is Eve with her straight face

  And clear depths; if Adam saw water

  Standing up on its own like this, not flowing

  And not falling, neither living nor dead water

  He’d run a mile to his psychiatrist out of the Garden

  Frantically knocking at his french-window

  Where like a reflection the doctor prepares him for the fall.

  A TWELVEMONTH

  In the month called Bride

  there is pale spectral honey

  and in-laws made of chain-mail and whiskers.

  In the month called Hue-and-Cry

  green blood falls with a patter

  and the pilchard-shoal flinches.

  The month called Houseboat

  is for conversing by perfume

  and raising beer-steins:

  great stone-and-foam masks.

  In the month called Treasurechest

  snails open jalousies onto their vitals:

  pinecones, pollen-packed.

  In the month called Brickbat

  the sea is gorgeous with carpets

  of orange jelly-fish squads:

  and the people ride.

  The month called Meatforest

  is for flowers in the abattoirs,

  catafalques for the steers.

  In the month known as William

  we watch the deer grazing on seaweed;

  police open the strongroom of Christ.

  In the month called Clocks

  the poets decide

  whether they shall draw salary,

  And in the month called Horsewhip

  they pluck their secret insurance

  from the rotting rafters.

  In the Mollycoddle month

  barbers put up bearded mirrors

  and no-one is allowed to die.

  In the month called Yellow Maze

  all the teddy-bears

  celebrate their thousandth birthday.

  In the month called Sleep-with-your-wife

  the sea makes a living

  along this quiet shore, somehow.

  TRASHABET

  ‘Wabi is the spirit of poverty … appreciation of what most consider to be the commonplace… something hitherto ignored being seen for the precious thing it is …’.

  Lucien Stryk, Zen Poems of China and Japan

  A is for ash, which is primary trash. With it I can make bash, cash, dash, fash, gash, hash, lash, mash, pash, rash, sash but not wash.

  B is for buttons, which are a cross between numbers and persons. Snip a button from Joey’s shirt, and it is Joey. Snip six buttons, and you have spots to arrange in an equilibrated pattern of Joey. I possess buttons stolen from everybody I have ever known; they are as good as photographs. I have filled four large grocery boxes with the buttons, and I recognise each one perso
nally.

  C is for cat’s fur. If I rub this old plastic haberdasher’s hand with cat’s fur, it will pick up light buttons by electricity.

  D is for dead wood. Sawdust, and lathe-shavings. I have my great beetle stroll over the yellow sawdust in a black dish. He leaves marks that I can interpret, I read them off as stories or drawings. Lathe-shavings may be dyed, and made into wigs.

  E is for egg-shells. Glueing dust-bin eggshells together is good sport for a poor man, but there is always one piece left over.

  F is for dead flies. I have one wall in my shack studded like tacks with flies’ heads dried and glued to the matchboard, as other men have halls of trophies.

  G is for grit. It flies everywhere in the summer, when the wind blows off the dunes. I think sometimes of my house and its treasures riding a tidal sea of shifting grit.

  H is for happenings. When I recognise a button, when I complete an egg-shell, when I sell a wood-shaving dog dyed black-and-white, when I triumph over a muscular bluebottle with a rolled-up paper marked ‘clubhouse’, these are happenings.

  I is for myself. I am Midas, but not greedy. There is nothing which does not interest me, providing it costs no money.

  J is for jamjars. I use these as a sorcerer uses his glassware. A dead mouse in a carefully-sewn shroud rests on seven layers of grit; the particles are graded by size and colour. The shroud is the silk lining of part of my overcoat, it has a hood. The claws are crossed on the tiny chest, the jar is sealed with a page of the bible tied with waxed string. With this machine, that brims with invisible stench like evil prayers; with this corpse, that threads with silvery maggots like new guesses, that, when the maggots have pupated and risen again, buzzes with tiny voices like a church of the resurrected; with this life-machine I curse rich monks and church commissioners.

  K is for Kraft paper that prolongs the life of shoes, that screens the shadow-theatre of my windows. When I wish fresh air, I punch a hole with my fist.

  L is for Livingstone Waterstone, which is paraffin wax. When I have a candle, the shadows flow through my boxes and rags and the air feels good like crackling water, and my house is a river of rags of light. On other occasions I never see the night, since I wake at dawn and bed at sunset. Livingstone also crackles and whispers to me. From his scratches in the air, I read off pictures and tales as well.

  M is for mousetrap, that provides me with corpses. Another wall is crammed with the bright-eyed, sharp-nosed trophy heads. I used coal-chips for the eyes.

  N is for the near-miss I had when I caught cold from fishing in the quarry. I lay on fire, like a horizontal Livingstone burning flames of sweat. Then all my poverty was living vivacity, without any effort of invention at all on my part, and I burned in a world that had never heard of money. This was a near-miss. I near-missed being a holy fool, I near-missed losing all my pride. There was nothing to fight.

  O is for objects of no significance and great interest that have survived millions of years. In the quarry I find the fossil of a wave-ripple, the fossil of the common five-winged button-urchin, the petrified crater of a rain-drop in mud.

  P is for urine, and for my staff of life, my living waterstone, that, gripped in my hands and radiating its sunny beams, reflects: I am a fruit, I am a stem; as its nitrogen sinks into the soil.

  Q is for queer, which I was, and hetero, which I was, and solitary, which I am, and I preserve the best features of both. I live with myself, who am a member of my own sex; and I live with the moneyless ghost, who is a ragged girl, and who enters into more beings than a human woman can. She is the buttons and the urine, and the drenched shirt, and the livingstone and the near-miss.

  R is for arse, which she enters when she is in my fingers, and which she leaves as stable-gas. If you do not understand this, I cannot explain it any further to you.

  S is for shit, which no, I do not make trophies of, nor are they my babies. I dry it for fires and I spread it for manures, and I shall use it for hairtonic or salad dressing if I please without asking permission.

  T is for the architecture of my bed-sitting space. There is a pillar, which supports a roof. The pillar is of wood, and the roof is of iron, which is corrugated for strength and to shed the rain. The cross-piece runs north and south, the pillar penetrates the earth, which is the past and the future, and rises into the present. During my near-miss it was wreathed with vines and nests of grapes in which golden birds chattered.

  U is for my uvula when I sing and my upraised arms when I dance around my tent-pole, my mouth full of white buttons.

  V is for the forked twig in which I light my livingstone.

  W is for the three weathers of the moon, I grow with her, I stand still in her light, my thought decays, and in the decay flash new silvery guesses; and for Writing this alphabet, which is taking me to X the cross-roads I am approaching for Y should I remain poor when Z the silvery flash-guess strikes the world to how a child is all-interested and his body made of breathing jewels, but this

  Takes me round the circle to A

  Which is for ambition and ashes.

  DOLL-WEDDING

  Bride and doll.

  The hanged woman’s portrait, ultimate vexation,

  The death-necklace and the curse on the passer-by.

  The smell pours from her like a ripped bag.

  She dries to stringy toffee, the smell goes into autumn

  The smell goes on the wind like an immense

  Hanged woman’s shadow cast across the world

  She enters your lungs and hangs there

  The autumn leaf cuts free

  She hangs still in her icicle

  By the time Spring comes we have forgotten her

  She has however filled all the winds

  Getting together with all the other dead people

  Who share death out equally

  With each breath, generously.

  ALL THE SKULLS

  The skull formed in bliss, judging by its grin,

  True heaven packed with skulls, their ecstatic grinning,

  So many skulls, like a snowstorm, all pure angels,

  The blizzard of blessed fixity, with crystal teeth,

  The great clouds white with their smiles, all

  Light as white leaves, blown off the skull-tree,

  What happiness to be light as a skull, and blown

  By God’s wind everywhere that blows a tune on you,

  And shines a light in all of you, ranged over the sunset,

  Singing; and the three-master singing as she sails,

  The wind blowing through her tree-bones, and the light

  Dazzling her canvas, which is flax-flower bones,

  And the mountain singing from a larynx of slate and waterfalls,

  And every little bubble in the mountain stream

  A fragile skull of glass opening its mouth

  To sing, and disappearing. The great moon

  Floods over, like a birthday skull, shining

  THREE AQUARIUM PORTRAITS

  (Penzance)

  I

  The lobster leans, and taps on the glass.

  Among the fiery hands of light and ripple

  It has a face like a barbershop of scissors

  Shaving drowned men in a lambent steely light;

  It has a face and shell

  Of blue holly-leaves in a beating-gently breeze:

  These details cleaning themselves always

  Scissors through combs, and leaf rescrubbing leaf.

  It walks like three headless armoured dancers

  Of a machinetooled Masque of Industry

  Who set their precision clawsteps down

  With computered watery stilts on feathery ooze

  That sends up gunpuffs. It sees

  But it sees through sucked black stones on skinny telescopes.

  Its swept-back aerials are the only red instruments.

  It is loppestre, or spidery creature, but I dub it

  Lob’s Man, as a teamster gathers up his rein
s

  Lobster has spikes and studs for harnessing to some evil,

  Must be the jigsaw piece for some horn-hoof pattern

  Being like a witch that marshlight blue

  Carrying its hell’s radio in those crimson aerials.

  There! I can eat it with good conscience

  Being our Lob-Star, the colour of Sirius,

  Clanking on its platter, alive-boiled and buttered:

  We shall eat the evil and make it our very own,

  Cracking his male-claws with our silver pincers.

  II

  This is one picture along the dark corridor

  Of windows like a train under the sea.

  Instead of scenery streaming, flocks of birds,

  We have the fishes who swim their little masks

  Of innocence with big dark eyes in silver faces,

  Of pouting generalship, decorated fins,

  And nibble at her fingers, through the glass.

  With ripples, dusky lights, these frames

  Seem full, as the passage is, with fiery hands

  That push out with other portraits, as

  CUTTLEFISH AMONG GLASS-SHRIMPS.

  III

  The boots have golden eyes, like cats or sheep,

  Slashed with a wavery iris, rippling welts.

  They blush dark as fruitcake with a chewing beak

  Deep in the centre of a flower of tendrils.

  There is a creamy wand set in the moccasin

  And when they slip upstairs as they like to do

  Aiming this waterhose at their launching-pad

  They are something between a pussy and a carnival-nose

  Something between a fruitcake and a boot

  A cross between a miniskirt and a pasty

  Float water-gently like a gold-eyed turd

  Of inscrutable wisdom among their glassy shrimps

  High-stepping like lean assistants who are

  Mainly spectacles and the joints of spectacles

  Being entirely of glass with a few guts

  But shining like a neon sign at every joint

  Like ladders who are greenhouses and jobbing gardeners

  Who are bees returning also, joints pollen-packed,

  Easing their silver slivers like encased decisions

  Of see-through steel whose clickering chimes