Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  MENOPAUSA

  The change of life in her

  Was like the escape of an animal,

  Escape of a lizard maybe, like a fast

  Comma escaping the sentence and jumbling it;

  Like buildings where the main beam snaps,

  The broken floors and the rubble descending

  In their clouds of pepper. I will build

  A new hall of statement, she said; I am tired

  Of all this blood. It was the lizard

  Which had wounded her, and lodged,

  That now departed. She pointed

  To the Moon rising, and the man in it

  And said: there he is, my lizard,

  Sailing away.

  Or was it the woman had escaped

  And offered her shadow to the dark gods?

  Shadow or lizard, both slipped quickly

  Like silk over the ground,

  Would swerve and misdirect and disappear;

  And often it seemed

  As if she herself had gone

  And the lizard remained,

  The dry sand of the lizard

  Pouring. For she

  Could sit long minutes not stirring,

  The eyes blinking

  Seldom; then she would reach out

  For an apple with an arm so graceful

  It seemed a tongue; and a film

  Wiped across her eyes as if to cleanse them,

  A second eyelid, and then the film departed

  And the eyes sparkled like gems in dry sand;

  If it were a lizard, it was a seer,

  Like a sphinx; after these reveries,

  Munching apples, she would write long poems

  To her friends, each one enclosing a letter.

  ENTRY FEE

  When I stroke her arms

  There is a smell of bread;

  Her legs, of lilies.

  There are fragrant marshes in her skin

  And there is a pulse in the ground of it.

  The Mine called ‘Isyours’ is open today

  On payment of a small compliment.

  This is really

  Very extraordinary value;

  The lights are blazing underground,

  Gemstones stud the walls and floors;

  I walk there amazed for hours, it seems.

  At the very bottom of the shaft

  There is a dark pool with a white swan floating

  It rouses its wings

  It beats over the water

  Pleating it to its depths

  Raising a new odour charged

  With the deep and with the extreme

  Cry of the bird as it ladders across the pool.

  AT HOME

  I

  The spider combs her beard.

  One gave me cobweb-pills for the shakes.

  There is a black Rasputin-fly that can’t be killed,

  There is a dustbin boiling with its worms;

  My mother scrapes more porridge into the faces.

  The flies buzz with swollen lips,

  In a Russian, in the translating sunshine.

  Dew scuttles down the panes

  Like the shaky ghosts of crippled spiders.

  I try to rub the glass free and clear

  But they are running their races

  On the further surfaces. The dry spider

  Will raise the wet flies and drink out of them,

  Like Bellarmine jugs, like horny flasks

  That have wings and faces. Convolvulus

  That smells of nice blancmange

  Twirls about the dustbin lattice.

  My father rushes through the kitchen

  Flapping a tea-towel, ushering a ghost of flies

  Out of the kitchen into the cool green lane.

  There are still flies that circle stolidly

  Keeping the pattern just below the ceiling.

  They pass through my father’s cloth, evidently,

  Like spirits of the pattern. He returns.

  II

  He returns wiping his brow spiderous with dew

  And breathing heavily. He shakes his fist

  At the immovable fly-pattern round and round the lamp;

  My father hefts a shuddering pail of water

  And turns it into milk with disinfectant.

  He pours it in the choiring bin of maggots.

  Their smell of coconut and pus

  Fades behind the blanket of hospital pine.

  The maggots skip in their stringy boiling.

  My mother folds her arms and nods her head.

  We settle once more round the breakfast-table,

  There is a baby brother hoisted in a high-chair.

  The silent changeling grasps the shaggy rusk.

  He was born in a smell of pine-needles and maggots.

  I was not allowed inside the curtained room.

  Its shadows were odorous, and deeper than a cave.

  The doctor brisked the taps to scrub his paws.

  He smelled of her, and the nurse smelled;

  Pine and maggots. In the cave of bedroom shade

  Where she has gone, her voice deepens like a man’s

  Then shatters, and another voice

  Lifts in something which is not a song,

  And she returns,

  Gripping a maggoty bundle, not the same.

  III

  This terrible head suited her as well,

  Distilling tears and wax and drool,

  Lying across the pillow stained like brown paper,

  Stamped and water-marked with sweat,

  Just unwrapped, this parcel, on a fresh head,

  The ginger hair in feeble ringlets,

  The mauve lipstick, the broken veins in the cheeks,

  Severed at the seamy sheet. It

  Begins tossing, lets out an accustomed cry;

  I start back, and clamber under the bed.

  Here there are long lattices of dust

  Rolled up against the wainscot from the blankets,

  Fibres minutely ground through the springs

  That coil above me, the mill

  Of nightmare sickness and copulation,

  The flour of germs and fibres rubbed

  From bar and dance-hall all loafed together

  In long limbless clooties which drift at me,

  Shift very slightly in the mattress-wind

  That puffs as she turns over in her sleep

  Of the medicine alcohols that net her dreams

  Blackening in the broken veins

  Exhaling tinctures into the fresh window air

  That begins again to smell of pine and coconut

  And taint her appeaseless, helpless ghost.

  It is in the boards and bricks.

  The room and house will always smell of it.

  JOY GORDON

  The death of my mother, it

  Doesn’t mean she’s gone for ever,

  It means she has crossed over;

  I cry because I have tears, and there seems to be

  A joy in the air (she liked

  To call herself Joy, it was her

  Dancing name, Joy Gordon, thus,

  When she danced she was my Father’s Joy;

  His name was Gordon.)

  What are ghosts? The medium said

  Whenever you think of her,

  Greet that image kindly, say

  ‘I’m glad to see you’ it will give

  The spirit Joy; to be fluxile

  Like air, but

  Constant as metal,

  Not keeping to the one world,

  Seeking unity with the living:

  I see her now, she dances,

  I am very glad to see you dancing,

  Joy.

  I see spirits, and try

  To greet them kindly; and there is never

  A company of the living

  Without its spirits mingling:

  There they were

  Doing their Tai Chi

  U
nder the dawn trees, the living

  In their loose linen jackets and white ghost-trousers

  A ballet of clowns moving as the trees move

  To the dawn wind and the dawn chorus,

  And among them, spirits,

  Like air coiling, as though

  Certain enhancing lenses had swept

  In front of trees

  Or between the dancers;

  Under the dawn trees collecting

  All the natural forces that do us good,

  Gathering the metals of the trees

  In manual alchemy, in sequent poses

  Adopting the shapes of the vessels

  Of human distillation, the hushed

  Receptacles, and without, within,

  The condensation of a magical dew;

  To gather Joy.

  The fair-haired one in the long skirt

  A portion of the gnosis

  Dancing slowly under the dawn trees,

  She was the first one there, she was dancing

  When I arrived, slowly under the dawn trees

  To catch their bright metal, the distillation vessel

  Itself dancing.

  Just so might my daughter

  Call herself Zoe Peters

  For dancing or other joys

  And signify ‘Peter’s Life’:

  I went to fetch her

  From a friend’s birthday party

  In the long upper room of the Church Hall;

  Some eleven-year-old lingerers were murdering

  ‘Happy Birthday’ on the old piano by the little platform;

  There was a memento of iced cake in a twist of polythene

  To take home, and there had been dancing;

  There was still dancing,

  The room was full of dancing, no girls were dancing,

  There was dancing up to the ceiling, the air still paced

  With Joy and I looked up and greeted them kindly.

  XVIII

  DRESSED AS FOR A TAROT PACK

  (1990)

  GEODIC POET

  Since the flamen dialis was not supposed

  To spend a single night away from his bed, and since

  The poet likes to keep tradition, he arrives at the site

  Wrapped in his surrogate bedsheet like a toga’ed Roman

  Or a brisk ghost in its crackling aura. One book

  Opens another, one grotto leads to another, he has made

  Fast friends with the speleologists who are

  Retired miners, and astronomers in reverse; they will open

  New grottoes for him, the baby; on this miraculous day

  They have opened five, one after the other,

  With picks gently through the walls of each, the poet

  Quivering in his sheet, his hair electrical, holding up

  His lantern, the miners taciturn, hacking

  At the quartz-back of the just-discovered cavern, then standing back,

  The poet creeping through the ragged crystal hole and calling

  ‘It is another grotto!’ as a shining smell

  Diffuses out, all smile, surrounded by scintillae. It was like

  Excavating a gigantic bunch of frozen grapes

  Whose juice had crystallised, chamber upon chamber

  Packed with millennial crystals, and with an odour

  Of chalk and alcohol which had distilled

  And lain there undisturbed a billion years;

  The poet should take first breath, in case of poison.

  SIXTY STAGS

  The serpent was more naked than any beast,

  The biblical serpent rustling through the tree,

  Who walked upright like a sheen or glory,

  A light and turbulence spinning round the temples;

  It slipped its skin off enamelled wax

  With a snake-smell of naked blessedness,

  Sleeping by its cast skin, its decanted sin,

  Its magical companion, its killed self.

  There was no curse.

  The curse was fear, fear cursed them,

  This is the self-renewing poison –

  Which when reversed

  Is like the boy

  Who said to his father there were

  Sixty stags in the forest, and when the man

  Told him he lied, asked

  ‘What, then, was all the rustling in the woods?’

  MARMALADE

  I shift my shape into a shirt, and that

  Adjusts my skin, which before was shapeless

  Having sprawled all through the shapeless night;

  Once I had an orgasm at my elbows because of that

  Focussing device called sleeves. I read that

  Brazilian Giant Otters trample riverside

  Vegetation to a quag where they urinate,

  Defecate, deposit anal sac jelly and generally

  Squirm about in the marmalade. That’s what I call

  Family life. Marmalade

  Is the distillation of mud through

  The tree’s alembic, the great pure drop

  With its glass-lizard skin swelling in the boughs,

  That ripening alchemy. They come down again

  To breakfast and find me staring still

  Into the marmalade jar as into an aquarium

  Of orange peel, the nights passed

  In a flash of black, and now again

  The sun shines through this jar. Right, I say,

  Some toast; I spread the luminous plasm

  And my anal sac quivers, I start to think

  Of a woman running naked who needs

  Body-painting, I put coins

  Over her eyes to protect them, and leave

  A small unpainted patch on her back

  Through which she can breathe, and in orange

  I paint marmalade everywhere but there,

  Over her soft peel. My elder brother

  Sits down, discharging hot cross smells

  From his armpits, he is thinking: ‘This innocent

  Is gleeful because he doesn’t know he can

  Be destroyed, and therefore escapes destruction;

  Because he believes marmalade is

  For ever and ever and creates itself besides.’

  WAVE-BIRTH

  The young spiritualist giving birth

  In the spirit of a seance full of sheets,

  Drapes and milky plasms,

  Such plasms as will appear, the birth-water

  Moving of itself, the uncanny

  And erotic slime, and attended

  By serious Sunday-school men

  Whose mannerly rituals she is accustomed to,

  The mysteries of the seance being

  So womby, the atmosphere that seems

  To transduce questions into forms

  And suggestions into shapes

  Who know more than they might; but the shape

  Of this emission cannot be questioned,

  It is a tiny child putting off its veils,

  A child manifesting covered in wax

  With an almond birth-place of her own

  Clean as a mushroom. The mother-made

  Smell of flesh is supreme,

  Out of the collision of forces that meet

  In the tidal chamber of this woman;

  (For the manlike waves

  Pound below the seance-chamber

  Which is the accouchement-room

  In the house on its sea-poles

  Of the old docks; where better

  To guide the spirit-ships in

  With their fresh intelligence?) And I walked

  Up her drive in a heavy sea

  Where the blowhole spume like a plume

  Of steam from a horse’s nostril,

  Immense spirit-steed,

  Rose about me on the path,

  In which huge light hung split

  Like banners of rainbow,

  Or an enormous rainbow bending down to drink,

  The he-waves holl
owing into their she-waves,

  The carriages of foam that shake

  The resonant foundation-chamber,

  And the seance-room tuning all those waves

  Piled to the horizon of our intelligence,

  Our mortal state;

  The tongue of brine sounding the bell of rock;

  And we replying to them in their own tongue

  So far as we can, in labour-cries and hymns.

  She speaks of ‘My seance-room

  Now occupied by my baby’s high fragrance;

  I adjust the resonance of her chamber in me

  With my holy yells to guide her,

  When the tuning is just right I hear her cry out,

  And here she comes all gurgling

  Smiling and playing with the spiritual slime

  And she looks straight into me

  Her iris pleated like the coloured

  Wave-pictures stacked in every direction

  Straight to the celestial heights, in vox humana.’

  XIX

  UNDER THE RESERVOIR

  (1992)

  THE SMALL EARTHQUAKE

  The birds can’t soar because all the breath

  That carries them has been withdrawn

  Into this great hush, the sea and sky

  Calm as two mirrors endlessly reflecting.

  Then the stars flicker like candles where a door

  Is opened, and closed, and the ground

  Bumps slowly, like a ferry as it is steered

  Into the quay, bumps on its rope fenders;

  And afterwards you cannot believe

  The ground shifted; except, high up in the corner

  Near the ceiling the white has cracked like a web

  Until you try to smear it away: the spider

  Under the earth spun it and threw it

  Into the house; and I recollect a certain

  Tang passed through the air, like

  A champagne elixir passing from the abyss, creating

  A freshet that soaked the grass, a web-crack,

  And a jammed window in Zoe’s room upstairs.

  THE SECRET EXAMINATION

  The wooden desks, the wooden stools

  Inscribed with their flow. The examinees

  Inscribe their flow. The invigilator

  Has a special smell, kindly snapper;

  The examinees smell of a good wash

  And clean ironing with no black marks;

  There is a lean smell of cream and treacle,

  Or, as the Bible says, of milk and honey,

  For the examination is going well