Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  Full of birdcircuits talking,

  Full of birds and no leaves,

  Birds, not leaves,

  Look higher: there the aeroplanes fly south, scoring

  Skaters’ tracks across the raftered ice.

  SHE BELIEVES SHE HAS DIED

  She believes she has died

  Has become a spirit, naked as air,

  So she steps out of her front door, nude as a peeled wand,

  With peeled eyes, observing like a spirit.

  There is an old tractor, a stiff fountain of rust;

  She salutes as one invisible the squirrel, representative

  Of the creatrix of the British Navy,

  Who created the wooden ships by planting oaks,

  Her presence passing does not hinder it, the rusty

  Squirrel gnawing on a nut confirms her spirithood.

  The elaborate bodies of death that people bequeath!

  The house behind her, with its rustling wardrobes,

  Those fleets of oak tall-masters, the oceans of clean water

  Enough to float them which hasted through that body!

  If you could see the perfume of the wood

  Come rolling from its aisles! Older spirits might.

  She passes through the meadows underneath the pylons

  That flash and hum with their electricals, skeleton castles

  Trapezing with ghosts, past the docks, the black

  Spanish query of the great hook, the steel hulls

  Booming with their riveting, like spirits

  Battering to be released from flesh, or hymning,

  On to the magnetism and glitter of the marshes, the little trees

  With their backs bent laving their faces in the mud,

  For she wishes to live again, and lave her body

  In the mud, to make it heavy

  Enough to live again; she straightens up

  Her face glittering with it. The green lantern cabbages, the

  Spotless mushrooms, are spirits compared to her now.

  THE MAN NAMED EAST

  The dew, the healing dew, that appears

  Like the dream, without warning, hovering on the blades;

  The motions of his wings bring dew and light,

  The man named East. The ghosts have lost

  All sense of perspective

  In the drinking-water, twisting and turning,

  Shaped by too many vessels, and furrowed

  By too many fearful vessels, for we

  Drink the water of a drowned village

  Of a drowned College from College Reservoir,

  And across our drinking-water goes

  A small yacht like a lighted kitchen,

  A fishing-boat like a ruined cottage,

  Dinghies like little violins

  With squeaky rowlocks, with violin-voices,

  With the devil’s music written on the waters.

  I stand by the small stream which contributes.

  I kneel and dip my hand in, it insists

  Into my palm with a slight pressure

  Like a baby’s hand, which is still

  The elasticity of yards of water

  Reaching down the hill

  From the clouds on high; I crouch

  With my hand in that baby’s hand

  Feeling the slight movement of its fingers,

  The light clasp which is love,

  The little bony stones rattle

  And the cool flesh of glass sinews;

  It babbles like a baby, I bend

  My ear to the water and now I find

  Underspeech I did not hear before;

  With the forest like a vast moth

  Settling its wings on the hill,

  I dip my finger in my mouth and taste

  Forests and air and the ice

  Of the white rain-wing and its power-pinions.

  IN AUTUMN EQUINOX

  Black cat sitting in the scotch mist

  A white sheen over her, every single hair

  Piercing a water-bead

  In a high magnetic autumn of electric sunsets,

  My heart leaps in my chest like a cat

  With a silver sheen on it jumping over a wall.

  The sun, the enlightener, the whitener.

  The snail has made his silk track over the berries.

  Summits of water rise above

  Cold summits of water.

  The crowd, the myriad, the millions,

  The region beyond the tomb,

  This day on which the ghosts of those

  Who have died during the year assemble

  And prepare to follow the sun

  Through the underworld as their leader

  Into light, does not feel like death,

  The white sheen over everything, that was mist.

  On my walk over the hill I meet

  A buddleia of the skyline

  The blooms the same hue as the early evening sky,

  So there are rooms in the bush

  Where the sky seems to hang

  And there are white butterflies at the flowers

  Tugging and fluttering

  As if the sky with its clouds

  Had assembled like bloom, the bush hung

  Thick with bunched sky and fluttering cloud;

  While from time to time the silver underneaths

  Of many leaves bend giving their sheen back

  Like an electric shiver on this sky-tree;

  And the long grass is full

  Of big gunpowder-coloured birds who take off

  With a detonation of wings, and to its thunderclap

  A thunderhag rises out of the hills

  Sliding sideways and gunpowder-hued,

  Making our feet tingle

  With its electrical presence, and in this field

  Crouches an idle tractor visited by bees,

  Great flower throbbing

  With its metal scent, and a wasp

  Nibbles at the grease ruched from two great pistons.

  Now the mist returns:

  All the spiderwebs – waterbeds! in the hedges

  Every bush a contraption of sheen and waterbed.

  At home in autumn

  The dog’s magnetic body

  And its dynamite health abounding

  Marking with its delighted pawprints the sensitive sheen,

  Drives winter sickness from our blazing hearth.

  WHITSUNWIND

  The aerodynamics of the hold of the house,

  Our wooden, cello-voiced ship,

  The hull of the house, its grip on the wind,

  The sheets and rigging of the beds

  As they dream their noisy voyages,

  Its heeling in the seaweather,

  Marvel of nailed timber,

  My carriage which thunders:

  The dead trees of it resurrect and

  Howl through their corridors

  Like huge fires passing by on either hand.

  I draw a tumbler of foaming weir, let there be

  Weir foaming out of all the taps,

  I run From tap to tap to augment the sound,

  And all the lights on too, trees of lightning

  With fruits of thunder,

  Wagner on the recorder;

  There are ghosts enough to rattle all the bolts

  Like nuts in their wooden cases, and the nails

  Bow silkily their grains; such bottles

  Of stouted fire, and the charged air,

  And the sea wind rushing with its manes

  To leap the mansards packed with light

  And groaning like string orchestras.

  Now, the calm of Whitsunday. The waxy seed

  Of grasses that shines over the field

  Of light laid down like mother o’pearl,

  And the sea still rocks, and in the ears

  Water-radios in stereo sealed in a cave,

  Two coiled shells like cockles locked in chalk,

  Small twin blowholes ta
king the air’s full fetch;

  The sea quietly puffs tons

  Of white sound at them in Whitsun.

  THE BROTHEL IN FAIRYLAND

  (Madame Twoswords – Goddess-patroness of brothels)

  The courtesan with a taper guides

  A young man to her mosquito-net.

  There is a river-party in full swing

  With hired geisha, and three courtesans

  Dance their winding dance on the

  Landing-stage of a teahouse. It is called

  A teahouse where we drink the girls

  And meditate on the tea, the women

  Dressed like peony-gardens fill the fairyland

  Of painted screens and doors, their shadows

  Lie solid on the layers of mosquito-net

  Where a woman holds up a stone saké-dish

  With cherry-blossoms in it and beckons to a client

  Unseen behind the mosquito-net, the stone steps

  Shine with the little hovering lamps,

  And a lighted-up pleasure-boat like a wedding-cake

  Iced with light, a ‘fairy-boat’,

  Does its winding dance

  Like a torchlit procession down the guts of the river;

  It passes on the current swiftly; we glimpse

  On the deck a woman holding up a bamboo cage

  Of fireflies and pointing at them.

  In Japanese, ‘fairyland’, in English, ‘brothel’.

  The fairyland is full of candlelight, perfumes, and electrical skins,

  You can feel them as they pass by on their currents swiftly

  Entering your skin and leaving it, gliding by

  In their visible skirts, touching you

  With their invisible clothes, their electrical dress

  Such as a forest also makes, or a wooden scow

  Blazing with candles, or a swift-flowing river makes;

  With a screen by the enclosure announcing business

  And a shaped electrical neon picture of Madame Twoswords,

  Lightning in a peony gown. Many holy ghosts

  Crowd round her to see the outcome of that fight.

  MOTHERS AND CHILD

  I

  The soft modelling for hours,

  The soft handling.

  Undressing, she forgets to say her prayers.

  The town of wives, promenading,

  Staring among the lighted beauty-shops

  Which are shadows of the beauty that is above,

  That is too bright to look at

  Except in the shadowing of lipstick and powder,

  Painting with colour, camera obscura,

  This in the town of the two electricities,

  The powerhouse, lighting the shops,

  The wives, stiff in their orgasms

  With fingers stretched like starfish

  And eyes going like electric bulbs,

  Witch-hair cracking the taut white pillow;

  And the stiff filamentous reach of the powerstation

  Incandescent also in its circuits

  Like some miraculous gestating glow-worm

  Or silk-spinner of tungsten

  That shines with that power,

  The elastic of magnetism,

  For whirl wheel within wheel

  It comes spitting

  Into the lamps, over the sheets

  Of the great metropolis of rooms

  And the lighted villages of wives

  With the lover wanting the skin off

  Wanting the electricity in essence,

  The stripped wires,

  Electricity with its rubber off,

  Electricity more naked than last time;

  He strokes for hours

  Mowing the magnetism,

  The sheets crackling,

  The soft handling over and over,

  And gradually the first skins loosen;

  And the wives observe this recreation

  As the mother her rounding belly

  And wishes her child to be naked of it

  Herself now willing her own birth

  As the fish skips out of the wave

  To be nude of the water

  Water that peels off water as it marches

  Nakedness off salt nakedness,

  So that, undressing, she forgets to say her prayers,

  As water forgets, and reflects

  The beauty above her.

  II

  Or does she beam beauty up

  To be bounced off the ceiling

  Or off the man above her,

  Transforming her beauty

  Into his (and he needs it);

  Her fighting-gear

  A silk shirt,

  Excellent accumulator of electricities,

  Admirable rubbing battery of orgasms,

  Or, as they say, Static,

  For time stands still.

  Such heroes as there might be

  Awake when they touch her skin,

  With a silent shout of recognition,

  Skin which flutters unbearably

  When they touch it sufficiently,

  Like a moth beating in the light of the sheets,

  The moth whose wings are flaming

  Without being consumed;

  And the wellspring where the more it is drawn

  The more it flows;

  While the wife as mother of herself opens

  And draws herself off

  That which steps out

  Over the sill, the berth, the landing-place.

  LIKE A ROCK

  Rain marks cold coins in the water.

  When she wears a shirt, a blouse,

  It is as if she were dressed in water;

  The whole river turns with her

  And crinkles with her breathbeat.

  I have seen a rock in the

  Fast stream dressed

  In a beautiful shawl of water

  Hunched round the shoulders and

  Open in front; I have seen

  A smooth rock standing

  In a waterfall, dressed

  In a never-ending weave

  Of water-trails down the stream,

  A twisted glass shirt like flame,

  Like a personage

  On whose head light beats

  And refines him utterly down to the tail

  During many centuries. When

  She wears a shirt, or blouse,

  This is saying: thus

  I glisten, and ripple so,

  Under my skin and in my secrets,

  And I am dressed like this for you to

  Prepare your entry and stand

  As a rock does in flowing water.

  WOODEN WHEAT

  As the ear of the wheat, the cone

  Of the pine. A bunch

  Of wooden ears, the wooden

  Honeycomb dripping with balsam

  Tasting of cough-drops,

  Ligneous cog; and aphids

  In swarms like a tremendous crop

  Of green apricots with legs, big

  Glass bums of clear emerald syrups.

  Over there a modern hotel

  Among the terraced needles,

  Like a luxury liner washed up in wooden tides,

  The green-shadowed fish of air

  Vaulting through their rollers, feathered fishes

  With ample wings, and everywhere

  A pine cone, like wooden roses

  Perfumed with cough-balsam;

  Or a cabinet of ears that prick up in the sunshine,

  Or a comb of wooden eyelids curiously jointed

  Opening upon honey; a cabinet

  Of wooden eyelids most marvellously jointed

  And overlapping like an Islamic masterpiece

  That falls open with a click, spreading;

  A cabinet of a hundred lids that all at once

  Unlock. It is full

  Of yellow dusts and sherberts, each grain

  Elaborately carved, carving within carving.

&nb
sp; Unripe it is green and like a spindle

  Of green fingernails tipped with red,

  Of green fingernails that begin to tap and click

  As falling off the bough this gift rolls

  Into the patch of hot sun and starts to stretch.

  Many remain fastened to the tree

  Like dark lanterns engraved

  All over with sealed eyes.

  THE YOUNG AND PREGNANT SPIRITUALIST

  By mere breathing, she sees her own shape,

  The solemn tranquillity of her naked life

  Under her clothes, the day-long caress.

  The tie of each sitter like a crucifix

  Nailed to the throat, their heads

  Being washed in blackness; she is

  Washing their heads with night

  In her chant, her moaning chant,

  They bow their heads and take it,

  All of them, in their circle, the sitters.

  She has a baby in her womb that sways in its bonds.

  In trance, that baby is, communicating with her;

  And she tells herself this child is of such a virtue

  I am made a prophetess. Accordingly I speak

  From the womb to these nice young chaps

  Who serve in country offices and shops;

  I help them jump the counter into this world.

  The room is psychic, the whole space answering,

  The draperies flutter at the windows in grimaces,

  Straining to speak, the great sewn faces,

  The very air is living with currents like her birthwater,

  And tapping out her heartbeat there climbs a disc,

  The luminous tambourine, to which there floats

  An ectoplasm that grasps the shivering drum

  Like a foetus in its robes,

  Or like a lily unfolding, and from the draperies

  Steps out a spirit naked as pips, with

  A few wisps caught up for modesty; and to herself

  This is the grown-up image of her baby

  Adult and unspoilt; I pray I will meet her

  In our afterlife together; but now

  She is the centre of this circle, they may ask

  Their questions, and to one it is

  The dead wife returning, to another

  His sainted grandmother, seeing her drapery as age,

  Those wisps clinging to the face as wrinkles, but I,

  I know she is the future

  Growing in me and talking round this table

  XV

  THE MUDLARK POEMS & GRAND BUVEUR

  (1986)

  EYE-BESTOWING

  (Mudlark III)