Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  This man of integrity, slow in the flesh

  But painstaking in mental application, required his life

  Consolidated by small ceremonies. Time to make sure

  Of a sufficient amount of sugar in his tea, the canary fed,

  Of the small pocket notebook carrying his list of daily requirements.

  Time in fact to provide for

  Duties and the slow exactness of his bodily movements; all

  In order that a portion of the day might be set aside for

  Study without guilt, delight without distraction.

  For he was slow from the flesh,

  But fresh as a schoolboy clambering on a loom,

  His bastions of rubbish were earthworks

  Where heroes turned to fight and classify.

  Sunk in small echoes, handfuls of advice,

  He bred his applications in the warmth he made,

  Caressed and planted them like velvet pile;

  For he loved his words and tied them to his fingertips

  To glance and dazzle at his weakening eyes,

  Trail through the sand, smear honey on his lips,

  And weigh his teaching in a golden scale.

  We know he took his pinch of dust and let it fly

  To be a mote in sunlight no pupil there could see;

  And before this angel came to spoil

  His breviary, and to crack his seal,

  He loved his words, no woman flowered for him,

  Sheer multiplicity chuckled in his loins.

  GUARDIAN3

  He was a good husband to his family

  And to his home; a fine business-man certainly,

  He saw to his property and to his solid home; his family life

  He saw to it first, provided first

  Of all for his family and for his wife.

  There was no question that he married without love,

  It was incumbent on him (he saw to it first)

  To the community in which he had settled his life,

  A proper duty to these children and their kindly mother

  The full-rigged ship for his last adventure,

  This settlement, the correct furniture

  Without which he could not plant the dedicated grove.

  Hunched in his black coat like the agricultural crow

  He haggled over property and bought the ground,

  He had his background of experience and there he found

  That his family would never dare to follow.

  Rare in this age, a tradition of service,

  (The king’s gardener, son man and boy),

  He gladly assumed their ancient responsibility

  In the twilight of his life, by his own choice.

  Dragged in the portly soil the seed of green

  By the virtue of his own and the sun’s green fingers

  A harmless hobby reared the nodding stately assembly,

  A place in whose service fine wits grew lean,

  In which no breath of mechanism ever lingered.

  In time a god grew there, and spoke to him sometimes

  From the tall temples. From his own image

  Of a glimmer of white collar in a dark patronage

  Of shuttered leaves; or of a black fly busied on a green pane;

  He brought himself to see the thickness of a great tree

  Rippling out through time like a rod thrust into water,

  A marrow to these segmental days and hours

  Passed in the world through his aged body,

  Like a backbone scaled through thin fingertips.

  They now regarded it all as an intolerable folly

  In the domestic shade; and at pain of his liberty

  They would constrain him to tell his sacred story.

  But when he would tell, the tender god hid

  And would not be discovered again among the flowers.

  He would have mourned the trees like flutes to his lips:

  – Broad-chested against the wind of the morning,

  Sewn out of dirt, green capes against the weather,

  White birds among trees, seen in the springtime,

  Hung out on a bodice of black branches,

  Consorts to the white fountains sobbing in the garden,

  Shaped and sharpened by the departed form

  Stand my trees, emptied of godhead. –

  But most cruelly beset the frost of such enquiry

  Chilled the red rose of brain which grew

  Cradled in the snow-white bower of his dedicated bone.

  And so it passed that the sound of his last expiration

  Should be content with this sorry evasion:

  – Lay me like a sword in my own garden,

  Among the turning leaves; I wish to remain

  A monument to the proper action of sun and of rain. –

  II

  THE COLLECTOR4

  (1960)

  AGAINST DEATH

  We are glad to have birds in our roof

  Sealed off from rooms by white ceiling,

  And glad to glimpse them homing straight

  Blinking across the upstairs windows,

  And to listen to them scratching on the laths

  As we bed and whisper staring at the ceiling.

  We’re glad to be hospitable to birds.

  In our rooms, in general only humans come,

  We keep no cats and dislike wet-mouthed dogs,

  And wind comes up the floorboards in a gale,

  So then we keep to bed: no more productive place

  To spend a blustery winter evening and keep warm.

  Occasionally a spider capsizes in the bath,

  Blot streaming with legs among the soap,

  Cool and scab-bodied, soot-and-suet,

  So we have to suffocate it down the pipe

  For none of us’d have dealings with it,

  Like kissing a corpse’s lips, even

  Through the fingers, so I flood it out.

  In our high-headed rooms we’re going to breed

  Many human beings for their home

  To fill the house with children and with life,

  Running in service of the shrill white bodies,

  With human life but for sparrows in the roof,

  Wiping noses and cleaning up behind,

  Slapping and sympathising, and catching glimpses

  Of each other and ourselves as we were then,

  And let out in the world a homing of adults.

  And if there ever should be a corpse in the house

  Hard on its bedsprings in a room upstairs,

  Smelling of brass-polish, with sucked-in cheeks,

  Staring through eyelids at a scratching ceiling,

  Some firm’d hurry it outdoors and burn it quick –

  We’d expect no more to happen to ourselves

  Our children gradually foregoing grief of us

  As the hot bodies of the sparrows increase each summer.

  THE PREGNANT FATHER

  Where have we come to now, pausing on our walk

  To consider a few paltry roses in the hedge,

  A dung-hued thrush, and across the grass

  The murder-cheerful cuckoo’s hoot.

  The sun is shining – and last night there was

  A petty skirmish on the sea that choked

  And strangled with white cords the landing-stage.

  Certainly the sun is shining, but what of it?

  We’re on our way to tea to stuff

  The shallow organs of our sense with buns.

  Let’s get it over quick, and have a sleep,

  Not loiter round these oft-repeated flowers.

  I dare not whisper anything like this to you

  As you shine with such delight at flowers

  And are replete with the outcome of our love:

  The start of one love and ending of another.

  Well, well, we start back; and the world turns round.

  We leave soft footprints
in the dust

  While waves yawn and crack each others’ backs

  And that thrush snaps a worm short at the turf.

  I feel my dung, and want to get back quick.

  You feel your child, and want to muse your flowers.

  I really want to weep. Where is our love

  When you watch your belly like that with your tears?

  Where is my love? It’s why I do not speak

  Moods like this one, fleshy with its death.

  I wait, and watch the sea, and sneer at that,

  Excoriate myself with thoughts of cuckooed homes,

  Disregard the crosslike uncrossed rose

  And russet-throated thrush, or sneer at that,

  But in all my recollection never mock

  Your heaped-up belly and your heavy walk.

  LAZARUS AND THE SEA5

  The tide of my death came whispering like this

  Soiling my body with its tireless voice.

  I scented the antique moistures when they sharpened

  The air of my room, made the rough wood of my bed, (most dear),

  Standing out like roots in my tall grave.

  They slopped in my mouth and entered my plaited blood

  Quietened my jolting breath with a soft argument

  Of such measured insistence, untied the great knot of my heart.

  They spread like whispered conversations

  Through all the numbed rippling tissues radiated

  Like a tree for thirty years from the still centre

  Of my salt ovum. But this calm dissolution

  Came after my agreement to the necessity of it;

  Where before it was a storm over red fields

  Pocked with the rain and the wheat furrowed

  With wind, then it was the drifting of smoke

  From a fire of the wood, damp with sweat,

  Fallen in the storm.

  I could say nothing of where I had been,

  But I knew the soil in my limbs and the rain-water

  In my mouth, knew the ground as a slow sea unstable

  Like clouds and tolerating no organisation such as mine

  In its throat of my grave. The knotted roots

  Would have entered my nostrils and held me

  By the armpits, woven a blanket for my cold body

  Dead in the smell of wet earth, and raised me to the sky

  For the sun in the slow dance of the seasons.

  Many gods like me would be laid in the ground

  Dissolve and be formed again in this pure night

  Among the blessing of birds and the sifting water.

  But where was the boatman and his gliding punt?

  The judgment and the flames? These happenings

  Were much spoken of in my childhood and the legends.

  And what judgment tore me to life, uprooted me

  Back to my old problems and to the family,

  Charged me with unfitness for this holy simplicity?

  OLD HOUSE

  I lay in an agony of imagination as the wind

  Limped up the stairs and puffed on the landings,

  Snuffled through floorboards from the foundations,

  Tottered, withdrew into flaws, and shook the house.

  Peppery dust swarmed through all cracks,

  The boiling air blew a dry spume from other mouths,

  From other hides and function:

  Scale of dead people fountained to the ceiling –

  What sort of a house is this to bring children to,

  Burn it down, build with new-fired brick;

  How many times has this place been wound up

  Around the offensive memories of a dead person,

  Or a palette of sick colours dry on the body,

  Or bare arms through a dank trapdoor to shut off water,

  Or windows filmed over the white faces of children:

  ‘This is no place to bring children to’

  I cried in a nightmare of more

  Creatures shelled in bone-white,

  Or dead eyes fronting soft ermine faces,

  Or mantled in carnation, dying kings of creation,

  Or crimson mouth-skirts flashing as they pass:

  What a world to bring new lives into,

  Flat on my back in a warm bed as the house around me

  Lived in the wind more than the people that built it;

  It was bought with all our earned money,

  With all the dust I was nearly flying from my body

  That whipped in the wind in this normal November,

  And outstretched beside her in my silly agony

  She turned in her sleep and called for me,

  Then taught me what children were to make a home for.

  THE BIRD

  That bird upon the birch branch stirs my ear

  With a long cool pole of sound,

  The spiders shift uneasily behind the bearded boards

  Piled damp beside the woodshed,

  For it underhunts a tatter of curled bark

  And when it cannot get a grub it takes a spider

  And does not refuse their bodies in its beak

  The black-and-suet bodies that I shudder at

  Nor their bitter break of juices at the bite,

  And flies worms rot-coated to its children,

  But so unlike we please each other

  Since I put out water from my drinking tap

  And summer and winter it stirs the garden

  Out of its hot body with a long cool pole of sound.

  FLIES

  The small wind of a fly’s wing stirs my thumb,

  And rounds and stops, and bends a dog-eared paper,

  And flies away upon a shadow, then pauses on a cloth,

  Poses, a shabby, crooked, thin-shanked trumpeter

  With comb-and-tissue-paper voice,

  Small elephant on wings with dabbing trunk,

  Almost a circus animal: think

  Of him tamed with spangled side-cloths.

  Comic, he keeps the seasons of the refuse-dump,

  And clusters round the grimy housemaid as she throws it out,

  And in the sun they leap upon each others’ backs:

  Fawning, predictable, that die in hordes,

  Shun the rain, in winter live in caves,

  Savage with no weapon but a voice,

  Twitching, nervous, short-lived, suspicious,

  Spry, lecherous, dirt-mouthed and golden-bodied,

  They wash their paws and faces like any sleeking cat,

  They fill the air in chase of livelihood,

  They snuffle up the smells around dry bone.

  I walk in leeward of a mound of dung,

  They offer me a bouquet of high-pitched wings,

  A tapered whirlwind of dirt and filmy lace.

  Fine-grained eyes, hemispherical and dull,

  From lakes of sewage bordered by dusty hills

  You infect my meal with your self-interest

  Steadfast in the light with dabbing trunks,

  Infect my tender mouth with what I kiss.

  What refuse of whose loves is my career,

  Whose diseases must I take upon my back,

  What silent lips and nostrils are your food,

  Whose film-eyed ending is my start of pain?

  THE COLLECTOR6

  Caught in a fold of living hills he failed,

  For, out of his childhood, he had wandered on

  An alien soil;

  Extending his amiable senses, he found them blind.

  The senses still, the reason kept its sway;

  Nothing could be of conscious choice but still he chose

  Observations made to stir him in default of love.

  And thus the beauty and the terror of his life

  Moved him mildly. This living landscape where before

  He failed, was absorbing, with the horny rocks and the

  Mist that glittered like a skin,

  And with reasona
ble curiosity he saw

  Crows fall from the sky, lilac tongues

  Of death in the square-cut hedge; such omens

  Were full of interest.

  A busy life it was, watching the people with the

  Gay clothes and the lives whipped like tops;

  The tongued folk who burned with

  The fire that warmed his watching.

  At the end, as he would have wished, the Divine

  Fingers plucked him from this skin

  With much pain for both;

  For he was interested in his illness,

  And the world, strange to relate, had grown fond of him.

  SHEARING GRASS

  The long grass searches the wind.

  Her rust grit shears snap. She leaves

  A broad path behind

  Like a barber’s matted floor. A squab mouse flees

  In a quiver of hair. She’s

  Fatal. The fumbling beetle on its flower

  Cracks its back as the crisp stalk falls.

  Yoke-muscles under her tumbling hair

  Squeeze shut. Some foot-splaying grass moves on with her heels

  Stuck in its sap. The long tree-polyps snatch

  Their birds.

  Flowers, spread on their safe beds, watch.

  In its bulk a black laurel stills

  The air, leaves piled like an audience regard the stage,

  Or as the breeze breathes its lines, applauds.

  The sun draws rich oils from her hair,

  Through her shirt pours in its rage

  From the electric softness of her flesh distils

  More there that through the warm cloth wind.

  Later I take her up the stair;

  We stride in the house above the garden where

  Two blisters at the third finger-roots left

  And paid for a ravaged festering weft.

  BEDTIME STORY FOR MY SON

  Where did the voice come from? I hunted through the rooms

  For that small boy, that high, that head-voice,

  The clatter as his heels caught on the door,

  A shadow just caught moving through the door

  Something like a school-satchel. My wife

  Didn’t seem afraid, even when it called for food

  She smiled and turned her book and said:

  ‘I couldn’t go and love the empty air.’

  We went to bed. Our dreams seemed full

  Of boys in one or another guise, the paper-boy

  Skidding along in grubby jeans, a music-lesson