Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  XIII

  The tides have left my dancing-floor glossy and unmarked. The people assemble on the bank, they pass me forward, and sign to me that I must begin my dance. I lean forward and trace the first features of my shadow-figure. I bound off the bank and stamp eyes. My fear has gone. With lively steps I leap and prance until I stand in the feet of my completed figure, facing out to sea, the red sun at my back. I turn and pluck my feet out and stamp them down facing the throng. They are black figures on the red sunlight sending long shadows down into the mud. Suddenly one leaps out of the sun into the mud and stands thigh-deep in the thighs of my figure. She is in white. Her forked stick stays planted deep in the soft bank, a thrumming silhouette. She crouches and draws herself knees to elbows into the trench of the black cunt. She rolls round deepening the hole and covering herself with black likeness. She flings her arms and legs wide inside the figure in a black star like a navel.

  XIV

  I caper with my black lady in the mud. Both lovers are present at the same time, at last. I dance earth and water. The sun dances fire. It reddens the black mud. I am a seed in her red flesh, she pulls me out of the red mud, we are trees laden with red leaves, we are glistening red serpents slithering in the mud. We dance seamless blood-marble with our sour-sweet skins joined. We interchange our red shining skins by scooping and plastering. We fashion new and surprising organs and wear them proudly for a while and then dash them away. She grows a mudbaby under her flounced and clinging skirt, and I suckle our baby with red milk out of the bosom of my shirt. We bury our baby and we stamp until it dissolves, until its very memory dissolves, then we resurrect our child. I bury her and she buries me in our world bed and we make red love in the queasy bed until the ripples of our embrace reach the farthest shore. Who are these people who signal the end of our dance with silver trumpets, with small dark violins tucked under the chins? We rise, and tear off our garments and trample them in the mud underfoot. We dance towards the crisp foam that dances towards us as the tide rises. My red lady enters the white foam, I enter, the trumpets sing from their silver throats all around us.

  XV

  I run gasping from the foam. The people advance to meet me and to the sound of trumpets and violins clasp a garment about me to warm my body. I turn impatiently from them to where my lady should rise from the sea to join me. The sea is empty and the foam crisps gently in hollow waves. The people draw me sobbing and shivering away from the sea and its empty foam.

  XVI

  This lady has ended in the sea, just like the lady I made for myself. This dance is no better than the other! The dancers dry my tears and urge me with many gestures to join in their dance. Why should I dance with people who are no more than foam and mud and tears dancing on empty bones! But as I dance loverless, I forget. Another lady steps into the circle and dances to help me remember.

  XVII

  Our dance ended at the tavern door, we have climbed the wooden stairs, this new lady and I, we have bathed, and slept in the great bed, and we are dressing each other. I button her blouse gently close up to the neck so that the points of her collar make a little A. I pass her pendant engraved with the A and the V inside the O, over her fine dark hair. She buttons my shirt but leaves it open so that my throat is bare in a V. The sun and the moon circle without end over and under our bed and our table. The rain beats on the hard-packed dancing-ground, and beyond it the sun sets into tango fire like a launching-pad. The moon beats out her triple-time. The clouds draw out of the waves and fall foaming, and shed their peacock rainbows as they will. The moon is an endless necklace of white ladies, red ladies, black ladies always leaving, always returning. I fasten her necklace loosely around her collar. The blood beats time in our warm throats.

  XI

  THE WEDDINGS AT NETHER POWERS

  (1979)

  THE VISIBLE BABY

  A large transparent baby like a skeleton in a red tree,

  Like a little skeleton in the rootlet-pattern;

  He is not of glass, this baby, his flesh is see-through,

  Otherwise he is quite the same as any other baby.

  I can see the white caterpillar of his milk looping through him,

  I can see the pearl-bubble of his wind and stroke it out of him,

  I can see his little lungs breathing like pink parks of trees,

  I can see his little brain in its glass case like a budding rose;

  There are his teeth in his transparent gums like a budding hawthorn twig,

  His eyes like open poppies follow the light,

  His tongue is like a crest of his thumping blood,

  His heart like two squirrels one scarlet, one purple

  Mating in the canopy of a blood-tree;

  His spine like a necklace, all silvery-strung with cartilages,

  His handbones like a working-party of white insects,

  His nerves like a tree of ice with sunlight shooting through it,

  What a closed book bound in wrinkled illustrations his father is to him!

  RICH JABEZ DOG

  Jabez Dog felt very rich. Smells among the gorse

  And strawberries, there was a smell

  Of honey everywhere, he felt at last

  He was one of three persons, Father, Son and Dog,

  And as he trotted into the wood he felt Apostles near,

  He looked among the trees with his nose for those Apostles,

  Then he looked at the trees, they were the Apostles.

  The approach of an Apostle is like the approach of an oak;

  The approach of an acorn through the earth

  Is like the approach of an Apostle: but these were female,

  Female oaks, like bearded Apostles with tits:

  Jabez felt his piss inhibited: flowers without yellow pollen!

  It was unnatural, he wanted a sunlit oak,

  The yellow light attending on the sunny pollen

  Through a day of expressive balsams of the trees

  Emaned in changing rainbow-odours through the day.

  This was unnatural: a grove of bitch-oaks!

  But then a new smell like a spirit walked through

  All the trees at once, it was less a smell itself

  Than a doorway to one unimagined yet, like the negative

  Of crushed coconut, which is gorse, or like a golden door

  Of honey slowly opening, and the opening opening:

  Virgin Jabez gathered himself, and leapt through.

  THE WOOD

  The wood ticking like a water-clock,

  The drops gliding on slant twigs like funicular tears;

  They hewed great tree slices, piled them up, forgot.

  The wood contains a city of tables and chairs,

  A countryside of doors, a continent of windowframes;

  The wood is a secluded library full of shelves

  And on the shelves softening books

  And through the waterdrops like glistening spectacles

  The vision of unborn librarians pores, of carpenters takes measure.

  I open this book with an axe,

  The grain pours within like a slice of a waterfall;

  I slice open an acorn: down the corridors of power

  Oak-lined parliaments approach, and votes approach

  Like forests of people shedding green rain.

  OR WAS THAT WHEN I WAS GRASS

  I was putting a bandage of cobweb on the sudden cut

  In the pain the fly told me what the web was like

  The spider’s face with its rows of diamond studs

  And my skin crackling as the pincers drove in

  That crackling pain went all over me

  I knew I would never grow well again, my shell crazed,

  And the acid came from the jaws and began to turn me liquid

  And I felt a terrible pressure all over with the suction

  And I was drawn up through the tusks into that face.

  Then I woke up as though I were in a distillery

>   Humming with energy, retorts of horn and transparent tubes

  Buzzing with juices, but I was at rest

  Sealed like wine in crystal vases, and I looked down myself

  With my eyeskin which was the whole egg, and I felt

  The wine condense and become smoky and studded with rows

  Of the eyes through which I saw that the mother watched

  Benevolently from the roof of the factory which was herself

  And my father whom she had eaten was with me too

  And we were many flies also contributing to the personality

  Of the eight-legged workshop, and I began to remember the man

  I had fed on as a maggot or was that when I was grass

  Or the snail slying from my shell crackled on the thrush’s anvil?

  And whenever my eyes closed or my shell crackled in pain,

  It was as though I stepped out of black winged habits.

  MY FATHER’S KINGDOMS

  The lovely shimmering skins of water

  Swooping between the lions

  The gown of water of Trafalgar Square,

  The hollow brides of water:

  These belonged to my father;

  And the policemen pacing it in their deep clothes,

  Their silver switchgear on their Queen’s helmets

  They belonged to my father, said ‘Good-day’

  Saluting like the thunderous city.

  All the clothes of the city-men, the umbrellas,

  The sponge-bag trousers and the stiff white collars

  Belonged to my father, the starched points,

  The studs, the charged tie wedged in the points,

  The sparkling shoes trotting down Threadneedle Street

  Like city serge bright-sewing

  These belonged to my father, and at the City’s centre

  God sat like a dome and with wide eyes

  And broad wings and a smart tolerable beard

  Jesus swam through St Paul’s ceiling, said ‘Good-day’

  Saluting like the thunderous city

  Which belonged to my father

  The BBC’s sparkling hair

  Of lines of electricity that reached into our homes,

  The voices that were correct from London

  Belonged to my father

  The trains belonged and the clocks obeyed the trains

  And Selfridges and Father Xmas and Richmond Park

  Belonged to my father, and his father gave it to him.

  Even the bombs that fell on London

  Belonged, he let a few in.

  BORN

  Born with a little cap of slime, his caul,

  The midwife washed him, and the skin floated off,

  She fished it out like a paper-bag,

  Shut it in the dictionary, P-Z. Later

  She peeled it off the page and folded it in a locket

  She gave him on her death-bed, in the scent

  Of coal-tar soap; even her death

  Smelt like nurses; and when he wore it

  For his own death he tried to rip the locket away:

  It must be evil! for he wanted to rest

  Closing his eyes but they were transparent

  Like a caul and he saw the room unchanged

  Except for his nurse who had arrived as his eyes shut.

  She stretched out her arms as though he were drowning

  But when he opened his eyes there was only his wife

  Drowsing on a chair, but shutting them more people had arrived

  With straining arms and faces about his bed,

  And then the soap-smelling midwife bent and pulled at his face

  And took a squalling red thing out of his head

  With a little cap of slime, and he was awake

  Among the grown-up people, his head being sponged

  And the corpse floating off like tough paper in the bath.

  ONE TIME

  Her dress rushed and glistened as she went

  She carried a green handkerchief

  We walked through the first act of a great thunderstorm,

  We sheltered in the silent ovens.

  The clay had been built so deep and thick in the pottery

  That no thunder reached us there, only the violet flicker

  Through the doorways; the floor soft dry sand.

  Now when I make love the memory of that time

  Rises through my skin, her skin

  Rushes and glistens as it goes, and the black thunderstorm

  Deep in the silent ovens, lightens.

  THE SHRINKING CLOCK

  The pug-nosed bluebottle butts my window

  Buzzing like a watch that shrinks the day

  Into a hundredth of itself: now it walks

  The white cross-beams and enters the sunny stage,

  The light strikes rainbow sparks from its black waxes,

  It is covered with oily spectra, like a black motorcyclist

  It stands and preens in the hot sun-patch;

  It is not clockwork: it is not filth;

  It is a spark of the sun that knows the sun

  And clothes itself with the sun; its eggs

  Are sculptured urns of the sun, like sallow

  Grains of wheat; it is a winged lion of the sun

  Roaring, high-pitched and very fast roaring.

  FROG-LEAP PLOPS

  Frog-leap plops into the sandy water,

  The water, the jouncing spring, its bubbles,

  The fresh and skinny frog that dances

  Upright in the spring,

  The little clean legs, the clean satiny mechanisms,

  The body of clean cushions and levers, lips and lenses,

  Shimmering mucus and clean silky muslins;

  The green cock-frog decays, still dancing

  In the sandy spring while his generations

  Of flickering black tadpoles surround him like black fire

  He feeds them

  Ah the water is a clean organ again

  Dancing an upright pencil-thin skeleton.

  Frogs are the cleanliness of water,

  Not mere streamlined water in fishy capsules,

  But water dancing in its springs of water,

  It rounds in fish-shapes to flow,

  In frogs to dance, and the dotted mucus

  Everywhere in water like an eye of god,

  Its black centre everywhere in limitless frog-pond.

  AUTOBIOSTEOGRAPHY

  When he was dug up his bones were found covered

  With fine minute cursive writing which when rubbed

  With lampblack stood out like a crabbed inventory that was

  Notes for an autobiography composed as though he stood

  In his bones with his flesh over his arm with his limp head

  Reading what he had written over the everlasting portion of him;

  It seemed to have been scratched with the diamond-point

  Found loose in the grave at the site of the heart.

  I thought that all bones had their life-story graved on them

  Like a stony map of how I have used my flesh;

  He did conscientiously what no one can escape:

  Leaving stone maps of judgment. However, he

  After writing that composition passed into the museum gallery

  Where millions of soft gazes like a stream wear his bones away.

  Dickens signed soiled collars on his American tours. Hosts

  Pass through the sea, utterly changed, unscathed, without writing a word.

  SHAVING

  I regard the wet brown eyes in the stubbled mask,

  Why do we all wake to the day in turfy masks?

  I wet the face, I pat it, I energise its roses,

  I begin the day by scraping off the dead layer of the night.

  My face floats expanded in a concave dish of mirror,

  Perfumed, embalmed, stung to life again,

  A little streak of red mingling with the cologne.

&
nbsp; Men with beards are wild men!

  They stand around in their tangles of slumber and growth!

  The shaven man learns anew who he is each sunrise

  By standing in his own full view watching his own expression

  For ten minutes while the blade sweeps away the blue-black embers

  Of the night’s fires; the tempered blade, Samurai! the face is born.

  These faces rise into the mirror blue-black as from death’s bruises;

  Lazarus had a deep stubble of eleventh-hour shadow:

  But he emerged from the cave super-fatted, shining with glory,

  And beardless as a baby, his Jesus tomb-barbered him.

  AFTER THE CRASH

  My soapy meditation in my still-colliding bathtub.

  I am all blurred, I am warm soapy water;

  Hard edges are for dead people,

  Like the breadloaf that cannot be holographed

  Because it is moving, gently heaving,

  Living even when sliced, cannot stay still

  Till it is staled and corpsed; and the face

  That hangs like a blurred mask

  Behind the ruby hum, the laser,

  That is an alive face: it is a trembling curtain.

  The roads full of cars, pouring metal

  With beating oily streams of air above

  Like the syllable Graaaa endlessly pronounced,

  Blurred from living death, the metal slightly blurred

  With vibration, beating with hot air, then

  As the solid car touches the solid car, the final

  Dead stop with all the sound of the world in it,

  A bird-call and a volcano, a soprano and a hammer,

  All the possible tunes of metal, the trombone in the foundry,

  And the mark of the sound wadded into a flat conch impact.

  I lost nothing but an old tooth.

  I rode the ambulance with the new moon like a keel

  In hard-edge of the deadboat of souls above me.