Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 20

by Peter Redgrove


  Round the world upsidedown since Garrick cast

  An acorn into the Thames from Parliament Bridge. We got a tractor

  And wrapped chains and lugged it from the harbour,

  The gears screamed with the weight of the wet leafhead

  Spread through the harbour like a green medusa

  Dragged out of the sea full of acorns and foliage

  Encaching tons of brine. I think the rains had clawed it

  Out of Trelissick’s precipitous shores upriver;

  The Clerk replanted it in our Gardens. In my dreams

  It is a true sea-oak, riding shockhaired over the dark water,

  Voyaging through the years white-barked like moonlight,

  Its branches like veins of light dredging the deep.

  VII

  The whole world’s water at some time or another

  Flows through the Carrick Roads, bringing

  Its memories and Chinamen, its Portuguese ships,

  Its sectarians and its briny sea-fruit.

  Some days the water is bloodstained with trade-battles,

  Others it is birth-water running like hot fat,

  Sometimes it is industrial dregs, quite often

  It runs pure from crystal springs:

  And Helford oysters

  Sit in the Passages selecting these waters.

  Harvested by leathery faces with good eyes

  And hands like watercourses, they entrain to London,

  To the potted ferns and bow ties,

  Where they induce savoury dreams of moonlit water

  And Ancient Cornwall, in new young tycoons,

  Seductive Poldark dreams that draw the money west …

  We watch the great cars glide by to the boardrooms,

  We own only topsoil, the minerals are reserved,

  The ground is sold under our feet.

  The Oysters call them here, the Blooms keep them.

  They will own everything. Let the land

  Packed with underpalaces of gold dripping with oil

  Be oyster-tales only, told to a mining penis

  On a hotel-bed in London; let it be rumours only, lest all

  Our first-born be made miners by the great absent landlords:

  Not made deep starved miners by the enormous absent landlords.

  […]

  IX

  Cinder-cakes and sour beer. In the cider-cellar,

  A corner stuffed with cobwebs, and a little grey drinker.

  He drinks and drinks until his loins hurt, and what does he see?

  It is what he thinks he thinks that matters to him now.

  He thinks of all the stars like animals, he thinks he dreams

  He snips a piece of bristling fur from each, and puts

  Peltry of light into his purse to sew a suit from.

  He jerks awake and laughs, in his cider-cellar corner.

  When he tries to tell us about it, he gets lost

  Among the processions of animals, and animal-headed men,

  In among the feet and hooves plashing starlight. Amazed,

  I suppose, like him, I love the moist stars of morning:

  Orion with his brilliant cock shining like the wet spiderweb,

  Like a ladder of light heavier than all the world,

  Climbing in his drenched plumage like pulsing snow,

  Like a silver beaten so long that it gives back light in pulses,

  Or like a black tree over-arching, of white apples with pulsing juice,

  Or like a rainfall so massive it gluts and cannot fall,

  Or like a full-rigged black ship, sailing with all knots white,

  Or like wet herringbones at the rim of a great black plate,

  Or am I drunk on apples like crushed stars, potent fruit,

  That turns you grey and folded one day as cellar spiderweb?

  X

  Our radio is sensitive, but there is, thank God,

  Beethoven sunlight beaming from the ionosphere,

  Yet I can hear rain on the radio, and I think I can hear

  The sheep tangled on the hillside, and I’m pretty sure

  I can hear the broad black stairs of the slate quarry

  Like pages torn out of the open hillside

  Rustling packets of static;

  And there is thunder! far distant,

  High-pitched, like cellophane;

  The soft grey sacks of rain pass over

  In scratchy slippers,

  The water is a continual whisper

  That paces all ways down out of the skies,

  Plashes on boulders, puts itself together

  In new ways, raising rain-smells

  Over the boulders, down from the moors;

  You can hear every rasp and scratch

  Of water from our speaker,

  Every drop in the whole sky:

  And Beethoven’s gone, dead

  And buried in busy Cornish water.

  XI

  Sea-waves that are dry

  Come off the tide

  Or off the rolling Redruth highlands,

  Electrical Winds,

  Charging us up

  It is one explanation.

  Waves of exhilaration,

  Waves of political rich broadcasts put out by the moorsoil,

  Sparkling their invisibilities, recharging us.

  The real broadcasters are marching, they are a sightless surf,

  There is wave after wave of imperceptible police,

  Invisible black psychiatrists in coats the colour of sea-wind,

  Invisible white healers in the moonlight

  Charging us up

  The gusty weather heaves all the leaves of the brain,

  The red cells scatter, you can see views through them,

  We shall be down to the skulls soon –

  Recharge us!

  The dead have powerful lungs,

  Lungs like parks, sky lungs,

  The cemetery sex-adepts at their pursuits,

  Joining the worlds with their maggoty electricities,

  They set my mind to work with poisoned arrows

  That dance you to death like windy trees

  Charging about.

  From this room we see a clock of breeze

  And clouds that run fast or slow depending on

  How much we interest each other,

  Recharging ourselves

  Great dockleaves stampeding in veridian pelts,

  Herds of them with muscles of breeze,

  Leathery resurrectionists!

  The dew crackles and sparks,

  Charged up,

  In this wind the Goddess kisses every child at once.

  XII

  The church is very real, absolutely too real,

  It is realer than me, realer than where I live;

  If this church is a house then I am a white shadow;

  Look, there are written stones here 200 years old.

  Being my senior by 200 years they do not speak to me,

  Except with formal cursive manners like engraved visiting-cards

  Quoting their names and numbers, their vast antiquity.

  They are so still my footsteps must fidget them,

  I expect they wish I were as still as they are,

  Sitting in some pew studying stoniness until I grow slatey-cold.

  And there is that vast cross-death that is worshipped inside,

  Tainting the air with sweats and hymns so that breath,

  Which is something he doesn’t need on his side of the altar,

  Is like a superfluous whispering of trees, appropriate to trees

  Which are best cut down and employed as crosses,

  Or chilled till they turn to stone; this death

  Is so vast and old that the local deaths are trivial,

  The people of the stones have not died, they have moved into the yew-shadow,

  Which is a tree that has been casting shadows longer than I have,

  And my parents who ca
st me are moving into the shadow: I follow slowly.

  EXCREMENTITIOUS HUSK36

  In the bright light which is the sun’s excrement,

  That which it throws off in its processes,

  I saw the big spider wrestling, intricately involved,

  Wrestling with a shadow, with a filmier spider.

  Was this its mate that it is sucking dry, is it

  Topping up its fertilised eggs, the tight little capsules

  With their juice of their father? Oh horror, I said,

  That life comes out of death, and that this spider

  Is feeding its children on its lover; and I saw

  The spider struggle as a man might struggle

  Out of his boots and his trousers soaked in the river,

  And I saw the spider crooking and uncrooking its knees,

  Extricating specks of claws from outworn skin,

  Giving birth to itself in fits, like a belly-dancer, and having done

  Scampering away leaving its dead self stuck to the altar-stone

  Of St Cuby in Cornwall, mock-celtic restoration

  It had chosen for its transformation

  In the rosy light of the phony roundwindow,

  With the little stream chugging under that altar

  Where the Saint’s bones would have been laved to make miraculous water

  Passing south through his skeleton for every pilgrim to drink

  In the fabulous middle-ages where every other bone was a saint,

  And the spider was a nothing, and the altar too busy to think.

  ROUGH AND LECHEROUS

  The wind blows furiously through the laurel grove,

  As the frost twists and shatters there are sparks of ice.

  The oaks create the morning-mist that is arranged in shelves,

  White sequence of oak-shapes as the dew steams off their leaves

  In the sweet tinge of first sun like a staining of honey;

  But he wants the harsh tastes, he is not a man

  Who lives in the steering eyes, in the jelly-globes,

  The geographies of coloured images without taste or odour.

  That he left his white syrup-of-mushrooms in her

  In a meadow glimmering in the moist dust

  With white puffballs large as lambs, is recorded

  In the memory of his palms, the soles of his feet,

  His prick, his scalp. He folded the woods up,

  And all the moisture with the sheep and the puffballs,

  Folded them very small and passed them through her cunt

  Like a painted cloth through a ring, and through his prick

  Like a lance into the heart as they made love

  In the hot rain that splashed and steamed off

  Their bodies-in-spate full of tumbling scree.

  The birds mute their white cinders, happily fluting.

  Now she cooks eggs on the stove of lava-bricks;

  He lifts the Mexican sugar-skull white as a seabird

  Out of its red paper, and takes it to her,

  With its meaning: I wish to kill you sweetly again;

  The frost-crackled horse-mushrooms smoking as the sun touches.

  THE NINETY-TWO DEMONS

  The vast brown shallows planted with seaweed

  Awaiting harvest: iodine harvest, the violet element,

  Evening element of the violet clouds vast as the shallows,

  Vast languid harvest beating in the rock-pools.

  The seaweed-scyther comes, his trousers rolled,

  His hands crackled with salt sea-gathering, the little rivers

  Of hand-blood add to the millions-of-brown-tongues harvest

  Licking salt, licking blood from the gathering hands.

  The boulders flower slowly with stone barnacles

  Built of boulders that long ago dissolved in sea-chafe,

  The dissolved ancient boulders rebuild on the boulders.

  There are only ninety-two elements and most of them come from rock,

  And the violet iodine returns like hair to grow on the rock,

  And the human feet made of seawater and stones

  Splash in the shallows gathering iodine

  Under the violet clouds, among the dissolving rock

  Made of the ninety-two demons of existence who

  Travel the length and breadth of it, whose names

  Enable you to chemist them; you are they.

  SILICON STARS

  (Diatomaceous plankton)

  In the deep of the sea, a dandruff of plankton.

  In the thin sunlit layers life thrives,

  As it drops into the ever-night of the depths

  Buries itself in itself, in fine dust

  Always-raining. Adam, look at it

  With the eye that God gave you for naming the smallest.

  Those are footprints of life sharp as spur-rowels,

  They are silicon stars like transparent iron,

  Each is a vessel growing from its own centre

  And pierced with windows like Washington

  And, falling empty suddenly, so raining

  Like a snowfall of glass;

  much whale-meat masters

  The open ocean, whistling and plunging,

  Whose turds of plankton are entirely

  The massed crystal vases of the almost-invisible creatures

  Hurtling down to line the ocean with mud that is fine porcelain.

  PEACHWARE

  On the stoneware platter, a peach of bloom

  Faintly blushing, arse-cleft like a wet dream,

  With a gathered-in feeling under the down

  Of heavy sap, like a great drop of honey

  Held by its fibre and a little napped pelt; at its side

  A silver knife with a white bone handle and writing

  Cursive on the silver, the surname, Box;

  And on the one-hundred-year-old planks

  Glossy with beeswax and a hundred thousand man-hours

  Polishing, done in peachwood with mountings of silver

  At butt and tip, with a bunch of thongs

  Riveted with thin stars in stainless steel,

  A whip in peachwood, a wicked little whip.

  AMONG THE WHIPS AND THE MUD BATHS

  She offered the liqueur glass of Grenadine

  Between her legs; the beard lapped it up;

  She swooned, recovered, said

  M. Grenadine’s the man for me; and from that day

  The establishment was known as Mme Grenadine’s.

  I saw her lose her temper with a punter once.

  It was unprofessional, but after forty years of coaxing old cocks

  She thought she had a flier, and it was not.

  She screamed at him so furiously the sparks of anger

  Danced in her teeth, picking them; she had a mouth

  Of blue flame; I think I saw this; I was so respectful

  That when she blew her top like Krakatoa I saw things

  I did not believe. This went with the rumours of China,

  How she was said to have learned to ease the slow blue lightning

  Out of her skin and out of her lover’s skin

  So that they were sheathed in radiance, and the dark room

  Flickered with their body-prints, like sand-dunes electrified

  After a dry day. I did go in without knocking once

  And I saw something gleaming, but it was so faint,

  A kind of mouldy shine on the snoring bodies

  Wrapped like beached tunny in their silken sheets.

  I have flickered static out of the great bed

  Its sheets clung to me and would not be smoothed,

  And there is continual restless bedmaking in this place, but aside from that

  Her power makes me see things, I mean her personality, I mean my love,

  Among the balustrades and carved galleries of her house,

  The damasks and the fur rugs, the whips and the mud baths:

  All t
hat sex populates my imagination and makes me happy.

  THE WEDDINGS AT NETHER POWERS

  I

  The grass-sipping Harvestmen, smelling

  Like haylofts on stilts, creaking

  Like wet leather; a raven hops

  And picks at them through the gravel:

  It has macabre dandruff.

  In its spotted froth the bark-faced toad squats

  Among the daffodils like Stars of David.

  II

  A wasp crawls over the crucifix, sting out

  Searching for a vulnerable part; the savage vicar

  Strikes, the usurper bursts in melted butter

  And horn-slices; another takes its place

  Searching with its sting out over the holy places.

  III

  A gold-and-black body pinned to a matchstick cross,

  The extra leg-pair free, glossy with wax, their cloven

  Dancing-pumps shadow-boxing with slow death;

  The sting stretched out in agony and clear drops

  Slipping along the horny rapier to the tip

  Where a woman crops the venom in an acorn-cup.

  IV

  The laboratory with skylights, the glass assemblies,

  Tubes, taps, globes, condensers, flasks and super-hot flames:

  With windows wide open to the pouring waterfall

  White with every colour and exclaiming with every word,

  With roof wide open to the starfall; just down the stream

  The Mud Shop, with fifty-seven varieties of bath.

  V

  Two birds singing together like learned doctors;

  The dew is open on every page;

  He washes the dog’s feet gently with warm water;

  She spreads luminous marmalade on cindered toast;

  There is no tree of flies in which creamy skulls lodge, humming,

  No dogs here have intercourse with any virgins;

  There is a slug in the garden grey as a city kerbstone;

  There is a cool sweet book of one page bound in appleskin.

  VI

  One hundred ship-weddings, the scoured planking, the pure sails,

  The bride’s train blazing across the scrubbed poop,

  The century of marriages and a hundred brides

 

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