Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  (Now I have something to tell my plumber)

  Leaping like that antelope through my mouse,

  A charge right down from the waterworks

  And through the fresh green hill of springs

  Where the deer leap, bounding over streams,

  Down from the clouds fluttering with lightning.

  I shimmered with electrocution harmlessly,

  With urinal lightning in the beer-smells

  Enriched like a boudoir by gathering, in their passage,

  All the perfumes of the magic galleries

  They had passed through, drinking up

  The pictures of thought painting themselves

  And repainting over the red walls, enriched

  Like the balsamic inside canopy of a great tree.

  II

  (Then there is the pacing puddle of her shiny shirt;

  Her way of slapping together a cheese sandwich:

  As she does it a figure of lancing light

  Flashes across her shirt-back;

  This shock went up my generation also;

  I became skittish; the antelope

  Of light was in the shirt; my mouse ran;

  I was a hedgehog with prickles in my skin.)

  III

  I went out resolving to trace the source.

  The little stream rippling down the hillside

  Entered the urinal, so I travelled up

  The glittering electrical water I had felt in my generations

  (Some lightning flashed into a tarn held in the hilltop?)

  Towards the source. It was a spring

  Overarched by a tree, the source had reduced

  The relenting mud to black because so full

  Of all the colours of lime, leaf and bough;

  The electrix of the tree had clambered up my spine.

  IV

  Dare I wash my head again, with lightning

  In the water, starlight

  In the source? I went out to the stars,

  Hedgehogs of light; there was no surcease,

  Nor did I need one, like the thunder-source

  The lightning in the black

  Followed by creative shadow, the black

  In which light forms and daylight breaks,

  The lovely shadow kingdom, ablaze with shocking light.

  THE PROPER HALO

  In those glad days when I had hair,

  I used to love to smarm it down with Brylcreem.

  In those old days this was the definition of a boy:

  A scowl, Brylcreem, and back pockets, admonished

  To refrain from pomades at one’s confirmation,

  So that the Bishop would not get his hands oiled,

  Greasy palms, laying them on. My uncle laughed at me,

  And called me ‘Horace!’ with my flat-combed parting,

  My head shining like a boot; though, as a Navy man,

  He liked all that sort of thing himself,

  Shaking a kind of Bay Rum out of a nozzled bottle

  Labelled in Arabic that came from Egypt,

  A brick-red Sphinx on yellow sand for scene,

  Spidered with Arabic like uncombed hair. Retired,

  He would send to London to the importers for it,

  And I asked him what the spider-writing meant. He told me:

  ‘If you want to be like Horace, employ our oil.’

  When he died, he left me his personal things,

  A wristwatch with a back pitted

  From tropical sweat, studs and cufflinks

  Glorified with tiny diamond-chips, a dressing-case

  With hairbrushes useful to me then, his shaving-mirror;

  I mourned him, but enjoyed using his things,

  Conversing with his shade, taking both parts in the mirror,

  Remembering how we talked, fascinated by this grown-up;

  And I remembered catching the habit of hairgrease,

  He dropping a little in my palm and showing me

  How to rub it in with fingertips, ‘You’ll

  Never lose it now, keep up the massage,’

  Which wasn’t true. Still, when he died

  I did have hair, and liked the barber’s shop.

  A university friend staying with me

  Translated the Arabic on the bottle,

  Laughing. I said ‘What spirit? and he said

  ‘Definitely religious advertising; could your uncle

  Read the Arabic?’ I thought not, though he had

  Many spoken phrases. ‘Then he picked up “Horace”

  From the vendor’s gabble; it reads:

  “Horus comes to greet you through this oil.”’

  I liked the barber’s shop; the man

  Stabs the pointed bottle at his palm;

  My dark hair is cut and shaped and forests felled

  Over my white-sheathed shoulders lie like toppled pines.

  The oil shivers in the barber’s palm,

  He puts the plump bottle down, and that hand

  Descends swooping on the other; they rub together

  Like mating birds and as they fly to my head

  I see they shine. His rough fingertips

  Massage my scalp like the beating of a flock

  Of doves; now it is my hair that shines

  And stands up as though an ecclesiastical charge

  Were passing through me; I laugh! ‘You like

  The scent of the oil, do you, Sir?’ I nod,

  Though I don’t. It’s the shine I love;

  I shine with glory! and this is worth

  The barber’s shillings, many times. I shall feel

  Of age as down the street I pass

  In my shining pelt and glittering shako, my hair

  Cut and shaped like my natural urges, properly, proudly,

  In a halo of light and scent, godly contained.

  THE FUNERAL49

  For N.

  I

  Clouds and mountains were invited, both the conscious

  And the unconscious creatures. The trees

  Like visible outpourings of the stream’s music,

  The urine of the animals in the dawn frost

  Puffing like rifle-fire. The dark meat of the sun,

  The bloody meat, the cremating sun.

  II

  Ninety-two percent of what we eat is from direct

  Pollination by the bees, he tells me this

  To cheer me and if true ninety-two percent

  Of what he says with his mouth is said by bees. The first light

  On leaves shines like apples hanging in the trees,

  The whole forest a vast orchard, and all things

  Are more than they seem, for they may fly away,

  And disappear like Mother pausing on the threshold

  Of the fields of light, which are like dew

  Thick in the grassy meadows, for the light hangs

  Dripping in the leaves, stands on the wind.

  III

  There is a Witness, I think, who has magnetic wings.

  First it seemed to me at the funeral service with the terrible

  Useless brass handles that would be saved screwed to

  The veneer cardboard coffin which was much too small

  That my emotions such as these swirled round my flesh

  And some of them spurted from my eyes but ninety-two percent

  Were beating in my back in a sensation like spread wings.

  Since mine were sprouting I was able to see

  The wings of others, such as my father’s, standing next to me,

  And his were ragged and tattered like those of an old moth

  Close to drying up and drifting away, it seemed my duty

  To merge my birth-wet wings with his, and this I did,

  Entwining them in an embrace with him that he would never know,

  And sure enough he, the widower, perked up,

  And I felt tattered, but not dry, for back at the house

  I sobbed
my heart out in the little white-tiled loo,

  And there was still a little angelic witness lodged in my spine

  At the small of my back, in Jesus-robes, little calm watcher

  In white, which I cannot explain, merely report.

  IV

  The other thing the funeral showed me, unpromising seance,

  My Mother, subject of it, at the door ajar

  On the field of light, looking back over her shoulder,

  Smiling happiness and blessing me, the coherent veil

  Of the radiant field humming with bees that lapped the water, and she bent

  And washed her tired face away with dew and became a spirit.

  WARM STONE FOR N

  I

  Death as pure loss, or immutability.

  A watch falling into the well,

  Ticking a while in the cool spring, distributing

  Its faint shock; or death

  As a diamond-second in the year, set

  Glittering cold in the anniversary,

  The tiny diamond in her ear

  Surviving the cremation?

  II

  Death suddenly appearing, like a spiderweb in the fog,

  A piece of paper opening into a house, the snapshot

  Through an open door, and at the table sitting still

  Somebody; the house

  With one room and no kitchen,

  The house with the card door;

  The disposable house.

  III

  I turn my back on the ascensions,

  The unscreened smokestacks, I do not wish

  To watch her ascending, the knots

  Solving themselves, fading,

  Climbing into the antechambers of rain.

  Besides, her smoke should be white,

  Blinding!

  IV

  And the colour of lost rain escaping!

  And the photographs white

  As the clothes are empty.

  I open the prayer-book;

  It is empty.

  So, with her death,

  I will baptise this small

  Quartz; it shall stand for death

  Like a glass room

  Of which only a spirit knows the door,

  Which only a spirit can enter

  Turning and showing itself in the walls

  Lined with warm mirror

  Knowing its form in floor and ceiling,

  Able to say ‘I am here!’

  V

  It shall become a custom,

  Warm room ringed to my finger,

  Warm so long as I am warm,

  Then left to my daughter

  To keep warm, and bequeathed

  To hers; warm stone

  It will house multitudes.

  TRANSACTIONS

  I

  The waves break on the shore with a scent

  Of briny cellars of sea-fungus shrouding

  Drowned shiny forests. I have a white door

  To my cellar which when I crack open

  Is as though the house were a wave, stopped,

  Overhanging, and in the still

  Round cellar in that moment’s time

  The mushrooms manifested. I put them there.

  A pulse of phosphorescence keeps the house up.

  II

  The little mushrooms are salt

  And they smell of zest and venom.

  I swim into the yesty air of the cellar

  And see them stand like white circular messengers,

  Helicopter-winged angels.

  Stiff one-vertebra spine.

  III

  The pylons choiring in the wind

  Marching like the X-rays of cathedrals

  Along their zesty ozone spoor like the odour of mushrooms,

  The earth spinning within its mother, the waters,

  Around its father, the sun,

  Within clear sight of its godmother,

  The mob-capped, nectar-rayed moon.

  IV

  Whose white patched cap resembles a mushroom

  Flying in its helicopter wings of magnetism

  That raise the metal-sheeted tides

  And crack them open scenting the sea-air with zest,

  The pylons choiring,

  Her silvery blouse flashing with electricity

  Through its opening leaking her ozones

  As the moonbeams scent the night-opening flowers,

  My white shirt like an electric ghost

  Specially laundered to enter this darkness

  Under the cellar stairs where the white door stands open.

  LIGHTS IN THE MIST

  Lights in the mist branching across the water

  Like fruit shining out of an orchard.

  Then the mist clears, and the waves are disclosed

  Stacked to the horizon, each with its poised sound,

  Visible sound.

  Her sleeping glances, her sleeping gloves,

  Her body like some soft delectable debris

  Awaiting collection. He breathed her odour in,

  The carelessness of her relaxation overcame him

  As no planned seduction could. He tastes the apple

  She was eating when he began touching her.

  The explosions of sea on the walls,

  Random shell-bursts, traversing. Now she dreams

  Of putting the final touches to the firstborn,

  Knitting the baby’s only garment with bone needles,

  Engraving on the flesh the fingerprints like a colophon.

  Dewy cobweb frozen like bone-of-lace; the orchard

  Doing its one thing: creating leaves and fertilising flowers

  And rounding fruit;

  The water of the well twisting back into its brick socket.

  Tasting alternately the cold earthy water, and the cool

  Earthy fruits out of the apple-tree rooted in the wall.

  The fenestral mists branching. The new veins branching.

  CLOUDMOTHER50

  to D.P.

  I

  Several hot days,

  The one after the other.

  The standing cells of sunshine, lofty sunshine,

  And in them blossom black thunderstorms.

  Lathering clouds.

  The wind tumbling in chunks.

  The yachts tacking through the cells of gust,

  Rigged like crescent moons, scudding.

  The clouds the accumulated sails

  Of the invisible wind-boats.

  They throw their lightshadows,

  Their visible loomings,

  And they throw their windshadows,

  The dark splashmarks of gust hurrying on.

  The mountains in the distance

  Steer the evening wind towards us.

  The notes of bells

  Blow towards us from the ravines of mountains

  That halt the morning wind, and so

  The long hot days, and the thunder

  And the necessity for thunder, piling up

  Like invisible pillars of the law: over the sea

  Invisible and mere vapour, but over land

  Which lifts the wind, it crystallises

  Like silent moored navies awaiting orders.

  II

  A gap in the hedge which is a dry stream

  Awaiting thunder. A footpath of dust to a wet valley.

  My skin needed the wet meadow, I wanted to be

  In that state of rest after thunder.

  I considered the tree that gripped waters deeper than the dry stream

  And the hedgerow in its roots, it

  Considered me. The Cloudmother was glad

  I noticed her, the invisible streamers

  Pouring up from her boughs like

  A reversed waterfall, patterning over the city.

  I overheard a thought: ‘The unmoved mover

  That wishes to be moved,’ then from her own

  Accumulation of clouds her upper foliage fell

>   And shone, the Cloudmother hissing with the pleasure.

  MOTHERS

  The Mothers elect to keep their hair

  Cropped quite short in close caps.

  It is as they pitch their voices close,

  Near voices without coiling timbres or

  Disturbing undertones, just so their faces

  Shall not be swung across with hair

  Nor with unpredicted modulations the expression alter,

  Nor a curtain sweep to give the child a glimpse

  Of the other half of her feelings

  Instead of the whole libration, the balanced face.

  Another mother may well peer out of the left-hand side.

  That would make Mother unreliable, or

  Seductive, and stunt the growth. She

  Must carry everywhere that certain voice,

  And with her a certain structured cloud of fragrance,

  A pleasant regulated scheme of odours

  That are bedmaking, and kitchen,

  Clean paint, and freshly-cut bread,

  Like a balsamic mother-tree growing

  Behind everything; that oak-avenue

  Of Father’s book-lined study, that

  Alphabet-tree in the playroom tuck-box,

  Joined at the Mother-trunk

  Behind the appearance of everything,

  A balsamic tree of odour everywhere,

  A tree of flowering home. The Mother’s hair

  Is short and frank; and, recollect,

  That maiden that she was had never learnt to swear

  Or curse either before she made herself a Mother.

  THE WILL OF NOVEMBER

  The millionth leaf blowing along the path.

  The sea white-headed, white-tailed.

  Sky of wind-pounded ice.

  Frozen bees shaken from their hives,

  Rattling from the box like gravel.

  The travelling shadows of the gravestones,

  Oblong slots of mortal sundials

  Among the puffs of young fog

  Out of the brown wet grasses.

  Oak like a telephone exchange