Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  Brown as the hills

  Resolute to stay at home

  Give it up, or maybe sup

  On a few cans, or maybe

  Out for a quick one

  With that press-gang.

  XIX

  The moon smiles;

  She knew it would not last;

  There is drinking money where that came from;

  She shines with her white meed

  As though she were covered

  With cherry-blossom, and, he swears,

  A fragrance from the full arena

  As it glides from behind the hills

  And this clear sensation will surely last,

  This cannot fade, he must catch it

  In his glass, like the coin of a pint

  Lying at the bottom of the pint

  And he drinks the moon up, where

  Is the next moon coming from;

  The woman reaches into her lap,

  Into her handbag; she will forgive

  And she will buy him a last drink,

  Even now, after all that, so he can

  Catch his feeling and tell her about it,

  And she will tell him back again so he can believe it,

  And drink no more, in the small garden

  At opening time among the blossom, watch

  The moon blossom with her and in to bed;

  Even now

  With further silver coins

  With further wells of tears

  Reaches into her bag

  For further wells of tears.

  XX

  All our sailing songs, our stamping

  On deck-planking under sail

  Of glass with reverse lettering,

  Our voyages in the mirrors

  Sounding to the well’s note

  Which fills the glasses not shatters them

  With brown sweat of tuns, we live riotously

  In this well until we are liverish bones

  Wheeled in at opening-time, covered

  With brown-spotted liver-moss and

  There are always men off the rigs delighted to pay,

  The beers flow through our fingers

  Covered with Scandinavian calls

  And German labels sounding like moss

  And green halls and flowing dwarves’ gold,

  Pungent with their foreign colognes

  Which in an international spirit

  We absorb right into our bones

  And deepest tubes, while

  In her belly, a quart

  Of pure water lies, containing a drinker;

  Persuade her in pure fellowship

  To have another mother’s ruin and make her baby

  So drunk he will sing all the way home.

  XXIII

  Time please, she chants

  Breaking open the bubble room

  Like a piggish litter,

  Tumbling them out

  Into the too-bright street

  Snatching them from their rows of teats

  For the sun to devour.

  XXIV

  For he has attended the sinister BROWN MASS,

  The secret Mass of St Stagger;

  He counts his steps home like time allowed,

  Like mortal days remaining;

  He must wait them out in his kindly bed

  Where his ears fill with beer-sweat;

  He tosses his head

  Like a drinker throwing away pints;

  I turn and turn again

  Emptying those shells

  That stain my pillows

  With their murmuring waters;

  I have drunk my inheritance;

  That which disclosed grace to me

  Closed it almost immediately.

  XXV

  Later, and maybe for ever,

  I lift my glass,

  And salute my fate;

  My Grail

  Which shows me everything at once;

  I write of this as I drink

  And find in the morning only spidertracks:

  A few winged ideas caught,

  And drunk up.

  XXVI

  Pallid animal, resembling lemmings,

  Or the long-drowned from the sea inside,

  Myself enclosing the womb-liquor I swim in,

  Hauling myself on feeblest limbs

  Out of a headache of my whole body,

  I have stolen my head from myself,

  I have stolen my hands, my legs, my liver,

  Being stolen they are no good to me,

  My hands cut off, my feet cut off,

  My mouth sealed, my bride eloped.

  Secret brown roots

  Tap my night water, I sleep

  Like the tuns in the cellar, fermenting.

  Is this bed or bar-cellar?

  Time is called again. I walk back

  From the pub like blind Oedipus

  Sockets weeping brown ale,

  I will return again to these bars

  In the town called Colonus, again and again

  Until I can no longer be found;

  Do you call these sanctuaries gracious

  When they show me as I am to my lover and child first

  And to myself only at the very last.

  XX

  THE LABORATORS

  (1993)

  PIGMY THUNDER

  With a supple action

  Of the wrist he extracts or pulls

  My front tooth making no more

  Of it than the snipping

  Of a button off a shirt, though

  That would not make me lisp.

  I take the little cavernous

  Fragment of stained ivory

  Home and upstairs. In it one could

  Carve without much alteration a Taoist

  Temple with a staircase of its own,

  Bamboo plants and cranes,

  Set it under a minute

  Glassy dome for a spirit house.

  Unknown invisible

  Personages would stroll conversing

  Up and down the staircase

  With feet bare and sensitive

  As my tongue which already knows

  Every cranny of that

  Lilliput precinct, though this stone

  When it was fastened into the stones of my head

  Always seem to me the condensed

  Form of a powerful mountain

  Lodged in its rainswept range

  Booming with my pigmy thunder.

  STENCH AND STORY57

  What a child fears most

  In a parent is fear. When the maroons woke us

  I lay in bed talking to my children

  The whole night long, in the steep house

  By the dock of ships under repair and the

  Fish-packing station that fills the whole air

  With invisible dead fish swimming in

  Odorous shoals; these smells, I swear,

  If you smell them sleeping, cause nightmares.

  My children feared their dreams, was this the cause?

  My stomach noticed the stench, then my heart fluttered,

  My nostrils told me why; it was a presence

  Rather than a stench; the moon was full, it smelt

  Decidedly of fish, the moon-goddess a fishwife

  Bending over her tides and shoals of ghosts.

  My children wanted talk of ships, not goddesses,

  Which were and are spontaneous painting in steel,

  Still-life great as a village of rusting fruit

  Tall as three-storey houses in their dry-dock. Ships

  Had read the ocean, and printed it on their vertiginous sides.

  I lay talking with my children, all night

  In bed, in the house with the tidal atmosphere

  And the warm south-easterly blowing off the plant,

  Overlooking the Roads where in summer the small boats race

  Their sails smelling only of their storms, where

  The water runs in long c
lean sheets like decent dreams.

  THE MOUNTAIN

  The beefarm on her sloping meadows, the sweet

  Exacting spaces spinning honey;

  Under the elms and the sycamores

  The light leaves cherish many flowers,

  The light air under the boughs threaded

  With the vivid bees who return

  Speaking excitedly by dance

  Like soldiers in armour yellow with pollen

  Instead of bloodstain from the battlefield,

  Buttercup field. On higher slopes

  The banks of pines with their silent smell

  In serried battalions, their needles

  In thick hushing carpets; here only

  The solitary wasp lives, or the rotund

  Humble bee, under that dark green light

  In that cherished silence as under

  A thick fabric gathered up and pleated

  Into trees on the skirts of the mountain.

  ORPHELIA

  Orpheus’ swimming torn-off head

  Babbles its prophecies as it speeds

  Upstream to the source, an entire river

  His muscle-rippling body that flies

  Mission to the clouds which are a river

  Winding above, and the muslin petticoats

  Of drowned Ophelia reaching into

  Every rainy chamber of the rapid sky

  Pouring into the river; her sole dress

  Water, from mouth to source; there is

  A certain fugitive countenance in water

  Which shakes its locks and utters a penetrating

  Small voice or voices, called Orpheus,

  Ophelia, Orphelia, Ophelius (but how can one

  Be mad or bad any longer in water’s presence,

  Be of anything but magnetic water?)

  POPULAR STAR

  He was hounded from one bride-chamber

  To the next, because somebody dreamed of him

  Every night, and used him; or was it

  The weather used him? When it was not girls

  Or married women, it was the clouds – he pulled out

  On racks of clouds, and stretched carefully,

  Lovingly, limb from limb, the white intestines

  Parting, the rain falling like glass blood, putting

  Him together in the calm reflecting puddles; this dream

  Better by far than those where the girls

  Dressed him in leather and whipped him, or he them,

  Or revealed that the next stage was

  An acid bath, or maybe that cruel sawhorse

  Set with the butcher’s cleaver upright so that once

  He was astride, with weights pulling at his ankles, he was

  Very slowly sliced in half, upwardly, the severance

  Of his right and left halves complete

  Long after he was dead by the blade passing

  Of itself through his navel and after that

  All the way; or the wire jackets waffling

  The flesh, or the body-cages which let in rats

  To partake of living him to the grating bone.

  The frequency of these bad ones made the good ones

  Quivery: being married to the Princess in St Paul’s

  And bedding down in Buckhouse for the dream would never

  Let him settle in case she changed her mind

  And had him decapitated in the Tower or defenestrated

  In Whitehall. It seemed that the whole human weather

  Used him in its seasons for its dreams, passing him

  From mind to mind or more likely

  Featuring him in many minds at once,

  So, if he woke to all the dreams

  He would be the anthill of himself being

  Branded, butchered, fucked, knighted, blinded, deballed,

  Wedded, delivered out of royal bellies so She could say

  ‘You’re mine at last, truly mine,’ putting him

  To the nipple and stopping his cries; so popular,

  Passed from city-mind to city-mind across the globe,

  His head torn off and winged like Morpheus,

  Or like Orpheus the torn and raw wound of the neck

  Connecting him to his dreambody which is every-Body.

  ANNALEE AND HER SISTER

  I

  I rainwalked to Annalee in Lower Lodestone,

  I met her sister and felt the wells

  Of friendship rising in a great daylight

  Which pictured the recesses of her clothes

  Like private rooms where she strolled naked,

  I pictured such intimacies because of their scent,

  The fresh smell as she turned of the wind turning

  Over a bed of flowers with the infrasmell

  Of dark soil that is the buried garden

  Containing all possible flowers.

  II

  When I rainwalked to Lower Lodestone intending Annalee

  It was her sibling’s clothes that hung

  Around her sisterly blue stare, and upon

  The triangle of her throat

  By means of flowing ties;

  It was because of this that in her presence was bent

  The scent of things, as light is bent

  By the mere presence of the magnetic rain.

  III

  I felt the wells of friendship rising in a great daylight

  Dwelling on Annalee’s sister, for when she dressed

  To meet me, it was in her sister’s clothes,

  Creating thereby a new world. In that scent

  Of flowering soil I pictured intimacies

  Alternative to the clean bright sibling

  Who would not walk in her caryatid clothes

  Which her sister borrowed; their apartments grew damp

  And clung in galleries emitting

  Earthy wetness, creating in that scent a personal world in which

  Only the one sister walked as the tall rain walked.

  TOAD AND OTHERS

  The butterflies pause to sip at nectar-

  Stations, their spiral tongues

  Like watches’ hairsprings

  Poked stiff into the nectar-wells

  Of amaryllis, rose and myrtle-flower;

  Time stops as you watch

  The floral wings pumping full of insect wings

  Drinking up the flower-nature,

  Becoming it. In the garden,

  A well silk-lined by water-spiders,

  A white sleeve to the well, supporting spiders,

  But I choose toads; and, above,

  The aeroplane sounding with its purr the abyss.

  Among the dusty ivy-creepers

  A toad makes its apartments

  Feminine and studious;

  I will bring her, so she seems to purr,

  Into her twilight, dusky grapes,

  She will eat the nimble

  Grain-sized flies that breed in grapes,

  That will be her banquet in her rafters,

  That will be her beauty,

  Reaching in to scoop

  The grapeskin see-through with a dainty claw.

  XXI

  MY FATHER’S TRAPDOORS

  (1994)

  EIGHT PARENTS58

  I

  At the climax of the illuminated

  Book of Hours the Trinity is seen in truth to be

  Three self-same white-clad bearded figures

  Of Jesus on three identical thrones.

  It makes the eyes go funny, like trifocals.

  II

  This devotional picture resembles

  My mother’s triptych dressing-table mirror;

  When she sat there, three other mothers appeared.

  III

  The fourth turned round to me and smiled;

  The three simultaneously looked back over their shoulders

  At somebody out of sight down the glass corridors.

  Then she got up, and the thrones were empty.
/>   IV

  Nearly a decade after she had emptied her throne, my father

  Sat himself down in front of the same mirror and died.

  He paid his Access- and paper-bill, laid out

  Like hands of cards folders on the dining-room table

  For his executors, climbed the stairs to his widower bedroom,

  Sat down at my mother’s mirror and saw there were three more of him,

  Then his heart burst and shot him into mirror-land.

  V

  Where is that mirror now? you may be reasonably sure

  If you buy a second-hand house or bed, then

  Somebody has died in it.

  VI

  But a dressing-table triple mirror? Can you

  Enquire of the vendor, expecting nothing but the truth,

  ‘Who died in this mirror?’ Death

  Leaves no mark on the glass.

  ARGUS

  Argus, in a pulse of waves,

  Closing some eyes here, opening

  Others there; the long

  Light lashes shake out an air

  As if his skin were breathing.

  Were all the eyes closed

  At one time, then he would be

  Pelted like a beast with those

  Thick womanly lashes, but, no,

  The soft-lidded darkness travels

  Over his skin in bands;

  Were all his eyes wide open

  At any one time, then it would be

  Like surprising a peacock

  Whose whole skin was vivid with eyes;

  But they are not, in the iridescent man; those

  Which are shut are opening and the open eyes

  Are flickering drowsily, and beginning to close

  In brindles over the skin, of sleeping, waking:

  The opening eyes admire the world outside,

  The closing eyes surprise the inner world, and

  The opening and closing of the eyes

  Winds inner and outer close

  And ever more closely together,

  Like ropemakers on their long productive walks in sunlight

  To and fro between the shadowy boles of avenues.