Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 21

by Peter Redgrove

Pulled over the water by their blinding veils.

  REV. UNCLE37

  The cool tankard engraved in wriggle-work.

  A slight scraping or nibbling noise

  In the house-timbers, like boughs chafing.

  The salmon-silvery river over the red rocks.

  A clockwork theatre. A munumental

  Calendar musical longcase bellows-clock,

  That measures the lunations and strikes

  Christmas again after thirteen have passed.

  A salt-saw in a glass case over the fireplace.

  Rev. Uncle’s ’Obby ’Oss: the rotary spark discharger,

  Stinking of ozone with the blue crackling spark

  Leaping among its wires like a chattering monkey.

  He says: ‘Teeth are the most indestructible of fossils,

  And I wish to understand everything to understand God,

  And because it is Sunday I make electrical sparks

  To remind me of His Holy Ghost, nut-cracking ape

  Swinging from Apostle to Apostle chattering

  In tongues. I make myself

  Both literate and numerate, Peter, and the alphabet

  Is God’s knucklebones of Pentecost

  Where he fleshes himself fingers of flame, my lover,

  And in algebra numbers are letters, you can hear

  God’s voice of creation when you vibrate the equations …’

  And he did so, singing quadratics,

  ‘Let X be middle C: now strike me an A …’

  And I did so, on the piano.

  ‘Not that the fossil-stone is a shut-in god,

  Say rather it is a constant, something so slow

  It shows its godlikeness only by residence

  In many centuries. Don’t tell the Bishop

  But God-Mumgod made the world in their image;

  Virgins like you will understand in due time …

  Ma-God is a sea-maid, created from brine

  Delicate skinned patterns of beating gonads

  Like a fleet of umbrellas frailer than rain

  Each like a seawater castle or mandala

  A curtained pulse of bliss of the sea

  And I tell you, boy, being dead is like that,

  A celestial jellyfish shaped like the sky, beating, beating,

  A whole eye, grazing on aether … but I love

  Being God’s vicar on two legs, lad, and the hymns,

  Give me that A again …’

  In my Uncle’s library, my Mother’s brother,

  Every book and stone after church

  Speaking his tongue, and on the brass lamp

  His dog-collar swinging like a starched half-moon.

  LIGHT HOTEL

  The little girl riding the fallen tree like a spindly horse,

  Like a queen mounted on a green spider;

  The little girl’s white flesh is so sacred, so queenly,

  I love and fear it so much

  Carefully I think only of her dress,

  Her foliate dress that falls in dry green pleats,

  Or think as I look away from her sunlit face

  How the sunlight holds a great conference in a sandgrain

  With its plate-glass terraces and vista-windows of gold-tinge,

  Then how the moon will hold her conference in the same sealed chamber.

  In between times the non-staff have no clearing to do, no ashes to empty,

  No glasses to polish, the light simply passes, great guest,

  The light simply passes from the hotel, it is left untouched,

  And above the million sandgrains, the one girl swishing her wide green horse.

  TALL HAIRDO38

  I

  Her bronze hair beaten into a bearded face looking backwards,

  She posed for her photo by the orchard, her coiffure

  Stared backwards deep into the blossom where the clear stream raced

  Full of its rippling fishes without blood, bones or skin

  That wait for the apples to drop and become cider in them.

  Open the wooden doors! cried that face

  As her backwards-countenance stared deep into the trees.

  I took my photo to purify the air,

  Memory will perfect itself with its aid

  Like bees sipping honey from a picture,

  Painted flowers, real honey.

  II

  That face!

  The grass grows fast in the starlight,

  The sheep’s entrails smell of mown grass and starlight,

  The dew falls on the grass like the stars descending to feast;

  That bronze gaze does it!

  The rich bodies of stars

  Covered with molten syrups and roasting waxes

  Have dark-distilled themselves into featherings of moisture.

  III

  Remembering Jupiter’s shadow

  Peering out of the bronze hair-do,

  In the roasting sun I smash that black

  Bristling Devon fly: popping out of its back

  Fat bunches of sallow eggs across the thin green window,

  Like a banana-truck packed with yellow bananas in vehicular black,

  Like smashing a flying ear of wheat which is black.

  IV

  The grave countenance of polished hair

  Climbs into the evening;

  There are clouds like Buddhas of slithering flour,

  There are Butter-Buddhas of fatness, sunset-melting,

  There are Buddhas of flowing pearly wax,

  And now the storm, of great black-eyed Buddhas

  Thrusting quick enlightenment from goffered halls.

  Morning Buddhas climb rungs of frill and ruff, in the quiet air

  White gulls turn, fine themselves

  To a razor-line, turn back

  A countenance alighting with a lemon stare,

  A hooked nose, adjusting feather garments round a look

  Rustling, of gold and black like apple-bees,

  A waspish eye with a centre

  Like the cold black earth flying a sunshine corridor.

  V

  She looks out of the picture,

  Her bronze countenance facing backwards

  Pores over the gravestones at St Materiana’s:

  Smooth bald slate to the east, light lichen coastwards.

  We paced it out

  Like walking through a great black tree

  Of silver-lined leaves, changing as we passed

  The colour of God’s acre.

  VI

  The croaking frogs in the springtime:

  The cries of unborn children.

  The light shower sets the wood ticking

  Like a great oval watch made of many oval drops.

  For modesty, she looks down at her feet;

  The bronze face rears up, alert:

  Suddenly all the hoar oaks are chattering with auburn sunlight

  As though troops of monkeys with torches ran through the boughs.

  VII

  Your inward skin studded with eyes like yonis

  Looking down within you like the stars

  Dilating out of blackness: there presides

  Your photo-face and a bronze countenance watching backwards.

  All the stars are gliding to fresh places,

  Fretting as they glide, twirling like gimlets.

  As they pass over, the dark apple-trees

  Release their perfume in slow explosions.

  They relimn into a new constellation

  With two profiles that is the whole sky.

  The moon climbs its slow hill to the centre,

  Wish! it hangs there like a mirror.

  Then the sun rises and does not put the stars out:

  They shine still, strong black rays, and beams of perfume.

  XII

  THE APPLE-BROADCAST

  (1981)

  ON THE PATIO

  A wineglass overflowing with thunderwater

  Stands out on the
drumming steel table

  Among the outcries of the downpour

  Feathering chairs and rethundering on the awnings.

  How the pellets of water shooting miles

  Fly into the glass of swirl, and slop

  Over the table’s scales of rust

  Shining like chained sores,

  Because the rain eats everything except the glass

  Of spinning water that is clear down here

  But purple with rumbling depths above, and this cloud

  Is transferring its might into a glass

  In which thunder and lightning come to rest,

  The cloud crushed into a glass.

  Suddenly I dart out into the patio,

  Snatch the bright glass up and drain it,

  Bang it back down on the thundery steel table for a refill.

  SPRING

  Even the bicycle-oil smelt of daffodils.

  The full round drops slid into the little orifices.

  I made my chain glitter.

  I pumped the pedals with my hands, the bike

  Inverted on its handle-bars and saddle,

  And made the wheels shine like mirrors,

  And they whirled like skirling puddles;

  My pleasure was intense to think

  Of the scented oil spun into the machine’s recesses.

  She came out into the sunshine from the house;

  She wore a kind of bloomers and a blouse.

  She mounted on her wheels like summer cobwebs.

  The air was scented with my father’s daffodils.

  My pleasure was intense to see her cycle

  And to watch the air puffing through her blouse,

  Past every recess in her perfumed fields.

  I opened my collar to the breastbone

  Like a proper cyclist, and my erection

  Was angular and pleasant on

  My pointed pommel as I pedalled after

  Along sweet-smelling roads, the scented oil

  Spinning through my glitter.

  THE BRITISH MUSEUM SMILE

  None of the visitors from teeming London streets

  Smiles. The deeply-lined downtrodden faces

  Elbow the galleries. The sphinxes inside smile

  And the colossal faces.

  The face of a king with shattered legs

  Smiles. And the guards smile. Their solitude

  Forms into a smile and the patience

  Of all the seated faces in navy uniforms

  On the little chairs with the deeply-marked cushions

  Smiles. They have caught it from the sphinxes

  And the colossal kings and the powerful scribes

  With the stone incense-bowls who smile sweetly

  Over the smoky crowds. Some of the smiles

  Are printed on the air from the faces of the guards,

  And the stone faces have dissolved a little in the air;

  Passing through and through the smiling galleries

  Rubs inch by inch the face into a smile,

  The smile of the king you pass (whose legs are sand),

  The imagined absent smiles of the drenched nereids

  Whose headless robes blow back against their flesh

  In many folded smiles, whose smiling heads

  Are museum air; the mummies

  With their gasping toothy grins

  Under the polite smile-paintings of their coffin-shells

  Lumbered here by ship and block and tackle

  Scattering a trail of smiles; elsewhere

  The nereid heads are pebbles or sand,

  And who picks up the pebble smiles at its smoothness;

  (And the sleek sand is made of microscopic nereid heads

  Turning and kissing in the water of the tide

  The smiles rubbing from quartz lip to lip,

  Dissolving in the sea and flying on spume;

  The mariners inhale, and smile.)

  Such smiles have flittered down

  Like pipistrelles of Egypt on to the faces of the guards

  And the smiling guards know something unknown to their crowds,

  Something fallen from the sphinx that patters down

  To fit you as you sit still on a stool

  Polishing with your back those polished stones

  For twenty years, or among those polished volumes

  Not reading, but learning that smile. It took

  Four thousand years to teach that smile

  That flutters in these galleries among the guards

  Who exchange mirrored smiles across glass cases; how

  Did stone first catch it, that virus smile?

  MY FATHER’S SPIDER

  The spider creaking in its rain-coloured harness

  Sparking like a firework. In the cold wind

  Round the sharp corner of the house,

  In the cold snap of that wind,

  Many turned to ice:

  Circular icicles.

  My father lifted one off

  Very carefully over the flat of his glove.

  When I see these hedgerow webs

  It is always with the sighing of the sea

  In my heart’s ear; it was at the seaside

  In the smell of sand and tar that I first

  Understood the universal perfection

  Of these carnivorous little crystals

  Coiling from their centres like the shells.

  They were cruel and beautiful

  At the same time; abominable

  And delightful; why else did the silly

  Flies dart into them to be drunk

  Up like horny flasks, as if

  The pints of beer had veiny wings –

  If I could see those dartboard webs

  Surely they could. They are doorways

  To death and the mandala-sign

  Of renewed and centred life. And this one,

  Here, look, with its array of full lenses

  (For the thread is fine enough for minutest

  Beads to catch and roll the light in strings)

  Is like a Washington of the astronomers,

  Planned, powerful, radial city, excited by flying things,

  At every intersection and along each boulevard

  Crowded with lenses gazing upwards, pointing light.

  DELIVERY-HYMN

  (During birth the baby’s head rotates against the os crucis at the back of the mother’s pelvis.)

  See! the Woman is coming,

  A Christ child in sun’s rays

  Painted across her clothing.

  The Ancient of Days is in His heaven,

  Dangling like a parachutist in angelic cords

  Among white wings feathering and beating;

  The Ancient’s finger is hushing His nose,

  He is white-nightied in womb-clothes,

  Curled currents of birth-water are His beard;

  His Mother’s true presence rustles through all her veins,

  He knows the whole Torah,

  His skull bowed and in the mouth the small thumb,

  Preaching the thumb-suck sutra from the hollow womb.

  See, under her bellyskin little knuckles punch up at heaven!

  The Mother croons over her cathedral-dome

  Hymns to her Ancient who will emerge into light and form

  Fragrance and other wonders in His good time,

  But is first to be crucified headlong on bone.

  Now He is full-bearded and in the nave,

  His serene locks are curled pulsations of the water,

  He is warm-shirted in membrane,

  And knows the whole Torah.

  (The Woman is coming now, and some Christ spills Bright-red over her clothing.)

  AT THE STREET PARTY39

  (Jubilee 1977)

  Water makes her way, accustomed

  Into all places, through mire as an eel,

  Through the air as a hawk,

  She gets past the obliterator of forms

  Because
she is the transformer,

  Gets past clothed in food-chains,

  Buckled into such sappy, stretchy satchels,

  As wasps and gnats, such expanding

  Revelation luggage as you. And the air

  Which separates forms: to breathe with joy

  Through the double nostrils, the nosethrills,

  And to smell at the street-long table

  Of the jubilee party in the open air

  The head of my son as a mark of tenderness,

  Smelling my sweet son in salutation,

  Like fresh-baked bread mixed with the smell of tar

  Of useful rope, sitting at his banquet

  Under the street lamps with the other youngsons,

  And – I could live on the smells of it –

  He is warm and slightly sweating,

  My sweet son, having drunk wine,

  And I can smell the wine escaping from his hide,

  And on the table the scones brick-brown

  And the fruits arranged in castles,

  And water making her way into our forms with joy

  By way of wine and beer in cool pewter

  As we drink to each other, and the pewter has its scent

  Its faint eternal scent of tin, and the crowned

  Heads above smiling wide on the flags, bending and rippling

  Taking into wide mouths their great draughts of air.

  GWENNAP CROSS40

  Suddenly, it is autumn,

  The convolvulus chars

  With a fleshy scent,

  The little Saxon Christ

  Stands among his ebbing flowers.

  He is carved from oolite

  With his arms outstretched,

  He stands in his stone loop

  Supported by a thick shaft.

  The prehistoric seas strive

  And the result is this same Christ

  Speeding through the corridors of time

  With arms outstretched and welcoming

  As though the shaft into the ground

  Were those self-same corridors of stone time,

  For the sea has set as stone, and we,

  We carve it into welcoming gestures.

  And since the light that fell into the great tree’s head

  Became that plant, and the beasts

  Nibbled and their bones were inundated

 

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