Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  In blond hair and buttons to his trumpeting prize.

  DREAM-KIT

  Shut away here in Cornwall

  With these provocative black

  Materialising cabinets: TV or radio set,

  That raise horrors and slight

  Glories in the mind with

  Invisible rhythms caught in

  Their lightless black interiors

  On skeletal fingers. The whole

  Earth’s atmosphere is a pond

  Of trembling waves made

  Of invisible colours, a river

  Of transmissions full of

  Coloured images of where it’s been,

  Its receptive water peering into cities

  Full of troubling troubled ripples

  The news makes and the dramatists

  And the rainbowing commercials, and packed

  With invisible creatures that swim

  Plainly into view on the

  Aquarium of your screen.

  The set itself is like the window

  On to a great tank of sharks,

  Or one set into a swimming-pool,

  Or into a river’s banks,

  You switch from place to place,

  You have so many windows; it is like

  A diving-bell searching over ooze

  Or a tumbler pushed into a stream for you to see

  The sportive minows footballing

  Back and forth over the green watery colours:

  But they are all phantasms: you are watching

  Vibrations only, rhythms, which are

  Nothing shaking the radio-ether, which is

  Nothing also. Racks and racks

  Of goodly-looking nothing in a broadcasting hypermarket

  Transmitting centuries of miles away,

  And not at that moment either

  Since these are only phantasms of reflections

  Stored on tape, strips of plastic

  Lined with finely-powdered forms of rust.

  And these rays penetrate our brains,

  Like God’s rays of outer space

  That warm us, but unlike those

  Asking only that we remain

  Distracted. The TV set

  Is an artificial dreaming-kit.

  The true instrument

  Is the dreaming mind

  That pushes its tumbler

  Into the river that flows

  Under the skin: the groping

  Caressing fingers enter

  The neck’s skin and grasp words there

  That cry out.

  THE JOURNEY

  Carriages sealed, and marked ‘reserved’.

  In the dining-car everyone turns

  Frowning at something that slips out of sight

  Past the window among the thundery horizons.

  The clouds are like black cliffs streaked

  With torrents of lightning, with the rain

  Flying against the panes like an explosion in a glassworks.

  Clouds like great white moths, wet moths

  With the voice of an old lady out of control,

  Mist riding over the gravel-pits like white Christians,

  Mist on the steely waters like the cliffs of heaven.

  I see stream past the window

  A magpie like a black bible partly open, fluttering

  Its white pages between black covers; it arranges them

  So that some text is always showing; the wind

  Flicks its pages and the bible spins past, and everyone

  Turns to look again. One bible? What bad luck …

  But here comes another, slowly rowing after the first,

  Catching it up at last. Bible and counter-bible,

  Man bible and wife bible: good luck for eternity.

  The thunder has a human voice, now it is coming close

  To having a human face: the clouds fold

  Into a benign countenance, turning away. Behind its skull,

  A bright shaft of sunlight breaks through.

  On the rubbish-dumps I see the breeze still blowing

  And the many feathery plant-seeds like travelling candle-flames.

  They are burning rubbish-heaps like vast

  Lantern-faces set in the hill, like a

  Village of windows. I think that a city should not

  Be hemmed by its disjecta, however beautiful

  At night, but that it should be surrounded

  By a wall carved to sound a fanfare on the dawn wind.

  I observe this to the young lady opposite; she does not reply;

  Her toes wriggle guiltily in their open-work shoes

  Like a little stream over its rubbishy pebbles.

  THE SECRET BREAKFAST

  The secret that was her marvellous beauty;

  Sometimes he saw it everywhere, when he least expected it,

  Though at any moment the bad habits would wear thin

  And it was there in items of his person, or in what

  He had not thought to look at before. He might suddenly

  Catch a glimpse of it among the birds,

  Not the song merely, but the flicker

  Of white excrement muted

  Between the legs could give it;

  Just that phrase, ‘muting a white

  Excrement’, with its flicker, could

  Do it. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘my world

  ‘Is broken up in patches, little

  Windows. The domes of the acorns

  With their polish as of some Islamic masterpiece

  ‘Infinitely jointed: they will have it. But

  The oak is not my lover, only my friend.

  Snatches of a friend’s speech open to the beyond,

  ‘The touches of a lover’s hand are guaranteed!

  But I will keep my scepticism,’ he shouted,

  As he walked into the breakfast room

  And the table set was a sudden playground

  Of toys, arbitrary and laughable shapes

  That demanded to be played with; the spoons

  Like paunching fairground mirrors on handles;

  The boiled eggs like sealed skulls, full of a runny thought;

  The salt like a caged swarm of pure white flies

  In a fluted aviary; the pepper

  Like beige gnats each with its pungent sting;

  The fried eggs shining like the sun and so defenceless,

  Blood of greasy gold; the napkins folded

  Each in its ring like the silver thorax of a snow-moth;

  Marmalade like an aquarium of orange eels;

  The butter shining like a sweating steed

  In its small loosebox; all the forks

  Tingling with their tunes; ‘Hum,’ he said,

  Watching the zoo parading and his actual breakfast

  Coming and going, like poetry

  In between the factual lines; ‘Good,’

  She said, not bothering about his hesitation,

  But knowing he was happy, and that, in his case,

  Meant seeing things, while

  The eggshell fluttered in her white hands.

  THE HOUSEKEEPER

  The long esparto of the nether world,

  The grass avenues that rip you to pieces

  Whispering Isis, Isis,

  Go there a second time

  And they restore you whole;

  It is worth risking all.

  The left hand of God is clothed

  In a whispering glove of rushes,

  Or it is clothed in a bed that creaks

  Like leather; I found a great spider

  That held fast like straps of leather tacked

  Behind my picture of the Vicar smiling.

  In the high wind, in the churchyard, he and I

  See that the spiders are having difficult landings,

  They have become caught up in their parachutes

  Now their flight is hampered by a light drizzle –

  They cannot raise their soaked webs, the
ir windrows,

  Their skyhooks, their gossamer strands

  That lift them into the unknown by their

  Bottoms where the spinnerets are; these matters

  Blaze at me because my buxom pillow

  Waits for the kephalia of my teacher, while the yews

  Distil their flashing poisons over the indifferent graves.

  I will seduce him from the church

  With the empty foxskin

  That wraps my full white bosom; after

  Through the mists and jet black graves we’ll wander

  With the light gone out of holy marriage,

  Religion changing hands, and all the old

  Arguments gone. The sea goes on

  With its distant signing on all the beaches,

  White writing on gold. I draw off his limbs

  Jesus’ black shroud of cleric’s cloth.

  My master of communion

  Lies flat on the pillow like a snake flattened

  On the superspeedhighway, crushed

  And recrushed by the speeding traffic,

  Its venom evaporating

  Harmlessly. I have tried

  The taste of the cloth mask of his chest,

  I have loosened his linen collar with my teeth,

  Rustling Isis, Isis, and he comes

  Like an express-train, calling on

  The thousand-windowed name of God; and now

  It is the yews distilling slowly on the mirror-graves,

  And the marriage gone up the chimney where the cats shriek

  On slanting roofs in midnight moonlight. My cup runneth over

  And my house is as if full of holy bread new-baked,

  A tough flaky roof and inside

  One entirely beautiful white bed that must be eaten

  Smelling of love’s light alcohols and yeasts

  Before staleness hardens it like holy marriage.

  SILENCE FICTION44

  The late houses are built over the early caves,

  The foundations and cellarage are where the first people lived.

  We have fitted stout doors and hang their keys

  High in the chimney-vaults where, out of sight,

  They gather from the flames great swatches of soot,

  Bunches of soot-flowers out of the food-fires,

  Like the brushes of black foxes through the generations.

  Then in the especial bad times a besmutched woman

  Enters in defiled white to fetch down our keys

  And open the earth to us. As she stands in the threshold

  We know we must cast over our hearth pitchers of water,

  And she treads through the warm ashes and with black sleeves

  Reaches into the hanging soot,

  Unhooks and rubs across her skirt revealing

  The bright metal under the black grease. She

  Throws the key down ringing on to the stone flags,

  Leaves into the dusk for the next house.

  We unlock and descend into the cellar-roots,

  Light in the chimney-roots our lower fires,

  And begin our lives on the unadorned earth floor

  Some of which is sheer sand, elsewhere silky clay.

  There we find shells of earliest cookery, and our fingertips

  In the dirt encounter marvels of red-ochre bones,

  Our torches tossing shadow like black potter’s clay.

  The wind blows through the upper houses, and the rain blows,

  Cleansing hearth and porch, rinsing chimney. We know

  By no messenger when to return; under the tangled

  And matted hair, and the grime, and through the rags

  That have rotted, a look shines,

  An acceptance. Then we return

  To the sunlit chimneys and the whitened hearths,

  Out of the earth cradle; quenching the flares,

  Troop chattering out of the cellar stairs,

  Draw baths and strop to mirror-glass the rusty razors,

  Secure the lower doors with their immense keys we hang

  Shining bright in the chimneys; light our upper fires.

  The black soot feathers through generations on the long keys.

  We recall wondering, occasionally, that in those cellars

  We never spoke, not at any time; once through the door

  We were to keep and breathe the silence

  That had gathered there like foundation water

  In the roots of the chattering houses, deep and pure.

  THE APPLE-BROADCAST

  (Meditation-experience at Boscastle, N. Cornwall)

  An Apple a day …

  I

  A valley full of doctor apples,

  A valley-stream like flaming straw,

  The valley blushing from its roots, and rustling,

  The hill-roads cobbled with red fruit.

  Some hidden bird blows his dry trumpet

  Under the oaks, hoarse as an insect

  Crying, under the crisp fretted oakleaves,

  Hoarse as a fly walking in its hair,

  Its swishing skeleton, its crackled footsteps,

  Over the tusked leaves, hoarse as broken bone.

  The air goes taut on water-strings

  To dirigibles of thunder riding, it splits,

  We see the lightning packed with apple-valleys,

  All the insects shaking, and their shutters shine

  In repeated flashes, under the lightning.

  There is the dry trumpet from the rustling leaves

  Of some bird chopping at the oak-line

  Full of green caverns with the dew

  Running over every twig forming

  An eye wherever it can,

  Walking up from the sleep of water,

  Shaken into the sudden light,

  Tall water-being shaped by fretted trees,

  And the hoarse bird trampling over the leaf

  Under the green caverns with its dry trumpet,

  While I lie intensified among the grass-sheaves

  By cobwebs in their flashing wheels,

  An instrument among bird and insect instruments:

  The oak-walker scrubbing with its throat,

  Or the spider’s wiry grasp

  In its silk aerial hung, catching parched transmissions

  That cry with dry coughs

  Out of their saline drops

  That moisten their batteries of wings,

  The moisture that looks out of their dry eyes

  Which the spider blots up with its tusks.

  A bird speaks like crackling porcelain,

  Like the crunching of its sky-blue shell,

  The lightning flashes over the apples,

  The black birds skid across the red roads,

  And I lie as if transfixed by the lightnings

  Amid the stiff dry arrow grass

  Near the Spider with her crisp handclasp

  In her glass ladder rocking the empty fly.

  A dog barks a command from a cottage yard,

  The apple-college shakes

  Over the entire valley.

  On the upper road a quarry-lorry

  Hits a bump, its boulders bark and spark.

  II

  The valley full of doctoral apples,

  Round doctoral books among the spider-webs,

  Scarlet with white sugared pages;

  The oak-colleges ponder in their timber halls

  To the bird’s music of the dry oak-trumpet,

  The wasp demented in the apple-crags

  Turning over and over the red book

  Of tattered skin and fragrant learned oozing,

  The bird barking under the trees from far off:

  That standing wave called ‘Bird with Dry Voice’

  Held in branches, broadcast in echoes;

  The broadcast ‘Valley Water’ flashing and rustling;

  The birds sailing on their silky circuits

  Among the laddered robes of water,
/>   And transmissions whistling in these vivid outlines,

  Their skirts that brush us constantly

  Hanging from stars, their sparking silks,

  The enormous white voices over the wet apples.

  III

  I listen to the voices in the rock cottage

  I dwell in which is a radio-set,

  I go outside and watch the planets brush us,

  Their wakes of birds and insects, their broadcast

  Called Spider in her silk antenna.

  The stars shine down in their long dresses,

  Every cell of the grey house becomes glass,

  The skin clears of each red apple, every seed

  Like slow lightning spreads in orchard-boughs,

  The enormous white voice over the apple-valley

  Beats in echoes orbed like spider-webs that shine

  In broadcasts hung with appled water-drops,

  Its electricity races down all streams and stems

  Like flaming straw and mirror appleskins,

  The stiff grass stands on end.

  I am electrical for ever with these sights,

  This broadcast uttered from the apple-storm,

  Beneath my skin its lightning runs for always;

  Like cobbled groves of rosy apples

  I will transmit my programmes,

  Like insect-eyes glittering under lightning.

  IV

  In the valley full of doctors,

  In the weather full of round young doctors,

  The lightning is a white priest hurrying

  Past fat black convocations far above him,

  And the red doctors knock heads conferring

  Like the rolling green heads of the sea close by

  With white beards and rumbling snowy rafters;

  In my granite cottage which is a crystal-set,

  The walls flashing with their ancient broadcasts

  Recorded as the rock flowed, then set in wavelengths,

  The baby sits with fingers weaving programmes,

  Sitting in a broadcast which is a jersey,

  Picking up a programme which is a rusk,

  Mouth full of dew, fingers which are aerials,

  Sitting on a wavelength which is a blanket

  Woven out of meat and starlight on some far hill;

  I will give my baby an apple which is a doctor daily,

  We shall tune in together to what it says,

  Breathing apple-scented air-transmissions,

  For with my tender knobbed antenna

  I tuned into a certain star babe-broadcast

  Deep in a girl’s receiver