Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  Beauty, soiled with blindness, brave one.

  The redness of those berries reaches for my eyes

  And plucks them to the bushes, to and fro.

  Every eye has a black target, yours empty,

  Tumbling, twinkling away like berries.

  Which of us is the eyes’ slattern?

  We bath at night, and go to bed. I’d not have heart

  To love without the light;

  You live with night-time uppermost.

  SWEAT

  I sit in the hot room and I sweat,

  I see the cool pane bedew with me,

  My skin breathes out and pearls the windowpane,

  Likes it and clings to it. She comes in,

  She loves me and she loves our children too,

  And still the sweat is trickling down the pane,

  The breath of life makes cooling streaks

  And wobbles down the pane. We breathe and burn,

  We burn, all together in a hot room,

  Our sweat is smoking down the windowpane,

  Marks time. I smoke, I stir, and there I write

  PR, BR, a streaming heart.

  The sun strikes at it down a wide hollow shaft;

  Birds swing on the beams, boil off the grass.

  ON THE SCREAMING OF GULLS

  The wet wings of birds into the air

  Making off from our roofs in the rain

  Clapped hard to the drenched flank

  In a spray of feather-wet

  Must sting the sleek body as they clap.

  The muscle-yoke across the back

  Stings and spurs the armless animals

  And spurs them until they scream

  As they do, as they do all night

  Whizzing into the mist like chain-shot

  That howls where it strikes.

  They are ridden upon by their wings,

  By their ability for flight,

  The wings enjoy the use of them,

  Clapped tight around the panting heart.

  Brute muscle is the brain, and the brain

  In the slippery bright eyes

  Mere watcher and recorder

  Of muscles on the go, always,

  Forcing screams from stung panting sides,

  For fish, more fish, fish

  Sustaining their spurts across the estuary,

  For use, to enjoy the flight

  Tight along their screaming mounts.

  The gull is delighted in by others,

  Ridden by other passengers, parcel of jockey-owners;

  The sex jaunts from ground to breeding-ground,

  The oval, perfect sex, the thinking egg

  Skilled to spin them, bank, and keep their trim

  In tight mating flocks

  As though furnace were gyroscope,

  Compass and owners’ orders in one packet;

  Compassionate more than the wings,

  Mapping no ground, it gives, though the way is lost

  Good company in payment.

  The weary bird launches its neck

  Over the grey rollers.

  Cherry-seed, nematode, spore

  Of bacilli without number, fern-, alga-spore

  Ride too, rafted

  To claw, feather, beak

  Of this airship

  Whose furnace-draught is screams,

  Or grow folded into the grey bowel, bilge

  And breeder too of the gull’s own rotting

  Just as it falls, log

  Scattered, fluttered

  Into unbound leafy bones

  Or feathery bones suspended in rut,

  Worked to the last instant, thin plans

  Surviving pursy passengers.

  THE ABSOLUTE GHOST

  Well, in good time you came and gave it, God,

  Rest of a kind in the mansions

  That lapped at my feet like a watery hound,

  And friendship feigned – that’s dangerous!

  At my feet the fissure yawned,

  Long, low and cold the lake invited

  Visitors to its mists, and I, in my draperies

  Dressed like mist came, while the reeds

  Parted like opening arms for me to go in.

  Like opening arras. In dungarees next

  They came to drag, the colour of mud;

  In draperies I floated, the colour of ghosts

  My substance licking every corner of where I was

  To know it as I was known – then I was legion

  There in the glades of the great lake

  Whose lightest lilt of current, consent,

  Moved us into a mansion. No breath

  But the breathing of the current in which we were riven.

  We passed, we passed, I did my job as matter

  As I tried my mental, but not enough;

  See, this slime-slide opening under her heel

  Is where I ended, is me,

  Spat out by some fish,

  Among the crowds of small evils.

  THE WIDOWER

  Yawning, yawning with grief all the time.

  The live ones are often alive in fragments

  And some of us scream as the weather changes.

  Or I raise a frequent steak to my pluming nostrils,

  Starving, or yawning, so hungry for air,

  Gasping for life. And a snowflake was her friend.

  And the sky of clouds hurrying and struggling

  Beyond the skylight, were her friends.

  She was daytime to the mind,

  A light room of trees, spray of water, high flowers

  Over a cloudscape, and I brought her

  Twelve-hour lyings down for fear of this world,

  Head buried in pillows for perfect darkness,

  And into this she walked with nothing but advice

  And what I called her spells for company.

  Ah well, no doubt such happens to many.

  Now I myself am alive only in fragments,

  A piece of uncertain, of filthy tattered weather.

  Pull the clothing to shreds; huddle the tatters together,

  Wild and horrible! easily in my rags.

  But you said, take another look!

  Watch the mixtures, the things moving with one another,

  Water running across running water, wind woven on it,

  A sudden bleat of black birds marking across the marshes,

  Beating wind across water, rooms built of glimmer and mist there.

  I don’t say it wouldn’t have worked in time,

  But my brow knitting it was lighted up my brain,

  Mere strain over a surface,

  And I just couldn’t believe anything, anything at all.

  Now look at me!

  There’s always something there, you said; now let me try

  (That leaden waterspout searching so thick and tall

  Over the mincing sunny water is no good to anyone)

  Some vista of life, some mentality, so let me try now,

  Something to watch always, and it’s called your spell,

  So what do I notice now in my nice quiet room

  With the mullions and the college table and the books?

  Why, look, there’s that exciting queasiness

  That queasy vividness of dark windows before thunder:

  So I cross over quickly and there I am!

  Up among them, the bad clouds over the bright blue,

  Adjusting my black pieces over the innocent cricketers

  Who tremble like white splinters in the deep gulfs beneath me,

  Through the rifting thick platforms … I quite enjoyed that –

  But it wasn’t true, was it?

  All lies, and here the lies come again,

  The dead, and the inventions of the dead,

  The night, and what the night contains,

  The great quivering jelly of resemblances,

  The spreading, the too-great majority,

  Whose heads hang from memories and naus
ea,

  Who stroll about vomiting, shaking and gaping with it,

  Who goggle in terror of their condition, who retire at dawn

  To almost inaudible thin quarrels up and down the graveyard strata

  Who lurk with invisible thin whines like gnats in daytime

  But who billow through the deep lanes at dusk

  Like a mist of bleached portraits, who do not exist,

  Who walk like a shivering laundry of shifted humanity

  And who stink …

  Not true! But thank God the day’s come again,

  A sunny warm day, a good morning, a morning to recline,

  To wear shirts, to look simple and true,

  To run hands with definite pleasure

  Over the shorn bristly lawn full of mentality,

  To plunge conjecture

  Easily in a bold search for truth through the lawn’s surface,

  To consider the small kin, and their place in nature,

  The spires and sinews of the worm, how excellent!

  Dragging the long cold chain of life for itself,

  And the cold speed of its terror,

  And the drops of itself massaging into the corridor.

  How it spreads under the harrow with no cry!

  How it breaks into the bird’s beak!

  And what sublime sleep, oh marvellous fortitude,

  Ever could breed these quiet pallid delving fancies?

  And it was joy, one tells me, joy to die,

  Moaning and tugging in terror of her condition,

  With a thin grip around my ankle out of the turf,

  Sinking into the majority, wobbling reminiscences,

  And here they come again! because it’s the nighttime,

  Gelatinous bundles nozzled with portraits

  Unconvincing and terrifying, but how many lie there!

  You never actually saw one, do you think it’s true?

  Look for the truth in the lawn, one said, and I don’t doubt she’s found it.

  Now somebody melts … but thinking of death got them this way

  That’s what you’re saying, in these environs,

  These parts of the mind, any mind, these fancies,

  Thinking of horrors created them horrors.

  Love frightens them, so let’s frighten them.

  It frightens them because it’s so mysterious.

  It frightens me. You are a shapely white.

  Oh, I droop with admiration. No, no, I spring!

  That kills them … and are you really there?

  Yes, especially there. What happens then?

  It makes them so thin. They are gone from themselves.

  Did I frighten you then? Everyone fears.

  Two is a round reality. Dead is a nonsense.

  But a real one. And one of us is dead.

  DECREATOR

  Grown-up idiot, see the slow-motion of him,

  And that slow-motion sludge of a tongue

  Coiling along its stream of happenings,

  Head lolling and tongue lolling,

  Sudden brightenings, lurches. He was brisk,

  Carried his headpiece like a haughty dish,

  Suddenly his brain churned thick

  And with a dull chime his brain turned over

  A clucking and he sat down suddenly.

  His poll curdled with a dull clack,

  Cocked listening, a crooked cork of the neck,

  A lid flipped. Not a spatter of larks

  Rising, cheerily callous and irresponsible, nor melodramatic

  Red entrails labouring, living brain split

  All over, like a hairnet, bolting out of the ears –

  Though the red mouth chewed, clack,

  And the raw eyes soaked suddenly –

  But a dull cluck and a dull kind of clay twisted

  And skeined into a surprise and twirled up to

  And round and round a wide stare.

  Thereafter he was to wander

  With a hesitation at either elbow

  And a little free-wheeling spittle

  Through a kind of pastoral, in the parks of patrons,

  By their dusty greenhouses, bubbling glassy streams,

  Springing up in odd corners, by snivelly taps,

  Serious avenues. Their doves

  Would babble off their lawns at him, their crones

  Croon to him over the spinning,

  Their tapping blind pensioners fall nodding as he came up to them

  Leaky-lipped, faulty, and no part of it at all.

  For one ordinary Sunday strolling

  He looked down himself as with a dull crash

  His brain fell several floors and stopped

  And he sat down suddenly. It was a glance

  From the sinewy confident husband and the rolling pram

  Hooded like a whelk and pearly, started it, its scrap

  Of white meat and fluff lodged in recesses and the woman

  Fluffed on the man’s arm

  Like a floss of him, and he an elbow of her,

  And the face-bone with its marrow of eyes,

  Stare-marrow, and the lurking look in the whelk,

  The same look, and all six with the one stare,

  One flesh with six eyes, one person

  In three stares, and the creation all rolled of it,

  And he looked down himself and the creation trundled

  Uphill at him and he looked

  Down at himself and he sat down

  Suddenly and his brain dropped several storeys

  Burst the front door and pitched away downhill.

  THE SERMON15

  Minister: Dearly beloved. I should say, Friends!

  Coming events! God will roast the globe like a goose on a spinning spit, the tiny mites of men will lie enfolded and faceless in the crackling of its crust, he will come with his hot knives and trumpets and carve the steaming tender flesh of its rocks and lick them up with smacking lips of fire, the savoury crisp much praised in his mouth, and his coming, so great he is, will seem like the dripping upon us of galaxies before the fire takes us all. Repent! Repent!

  Congregation: But you told us before that God suffered for us, that his face was webbed with tears for our loss.

  Minister: I was coming to that.

  Ah, brethren. In the fear and terror I struck you all with just then, in the gracious sweat I drew from under your hairlines like cool and pure spring water that leaps from a tap in clean arched crystal staves, in the shivers I clothed you with like sackcloth, it was but the fear of death I gave you to give you back again the appetite for life.

  Appetite for life, friends … in all your pantings, your teemings, your pantings, the green roofs of your fields, the juices of the laid grasses, the soft beds of feathery hay in the sun and of haymaking feathers in the night-time, in all of these you may sometimes meet God – in the city’s symphony of bedsprings on spring nights under the peppery sky twirling with stars, in the white soft babies waited on hand and foot, in the bedrooms and in the bedsprings …

  Congregation: We don’t understand at all. Didn’t he make us? Isn’t he above and beyond us? Doesn’t he live in heaven, out there? If he’s infinite how does he get into our houses? How does he know what goes on down here?

  Minister: I was coming to that. Yes indeed, he is above and beyond us all. But how does he get to us, how does he know what goes on? Why, he feels the hydrogen bomb like a little prick in his foot; he knows it all through that little shard of awareness, of god-power, of soul, he put in each one of us – rather like the barb and bud of a nerve-ending to him. It is a bright crystal and splinter of understanding in each of us that he could not and would not destroy any more than he would pluck out one of his own all-working fingers.

  Congregation: But then tell us why he came to earth, if he’s within us each from birth.

  Minister: I was coming to that.

  If you poked your finger in an ants’-nest could you get a good idea of their lives,
how they live? Would you suddenly become a sav-ant? No, you’d get bitten, and the teeming sooty little creatures would scuttle all up your wrist and down your shirt-collar and you’d have a hell of a picnic. In us, God is blistered and bitten by the ants’-nest of nature, its hissing acid teeth and lies, its dirt and greenery, its love and venery, its steaming hay-quilts and its uncovered and dangerous well-shafts. Every suicide is a nasty shock to him, every motor-smash a new toothmark, every rocket into the sky a little dart in his side.

  We then are God’s littlest fingertip, our world is formed and built up around him, our ploughed fields are his looped thumb-prints, so are our ridged and whorled streets, our roundabouts, our sweating neon circuses.

  But – he visited all this, he visited it with his eyes, and left the heavens empty as concentration upon the pages of a book dims the stars. He held up, you see, the tips of his working fingers, they were smarting, they stung, he came to heal them, not to finger in the dark any more, but to see what he was doing for a moment – and may he not have been a little surprised by what he found on his fingers? It was as though he were riding a bicycle – look! no hands – and in his visitation had suddenly gripped the handlebars. And it’s a good ride – look at our tools, our machines, our skyscrapers, our friends of the American continent, our technical economy …

  Congregation: How lovely! Now tell us again about the day of judgment. You tell it all so gloriously.

  Minister: I was coming to that. And I will tell you what I see in my dreams.

  It is the valley of dry bones. A dry, long valley. Heaped bones, like an ancient massacre. A dust-coloured sky, burning hot, coppery. Then, at the tip of the valley, a shaft of real sunlight, sunshine. It begins to cross the splintery ground towards me. A small white figure seems to carry it; it swings with him, like a caber. It is a naked child, a toddler, struggling over the burning rock. He picks his way over the scattered bones, and, in his wake, they stir, twitch, flip on their ends, and fly together like filings in a magnet’s field, bone to bone. Sinews spread over them, flesh creeps upwards, eyelids blink on the flayed flaces, and skin whitens and flexes there like hot milk. A host of them stands, and where they stand the young grass begins pricking through the rocky soil, so that soon they throng, and breathe, in a great green moist meadow, a mighty host of men and animals. Ezekiel 37.

  Then the fleecy clouds in the new, blue, summery sky gather, and pile up and up into a great white chasm, and the naked child behind whom these hosts have sprung to life begins to climb up and up the bolstered clouds. Angels appear, with their staring golden eyes, nodding like sunflowers large as planets. The child totters up to eternity, past the steeps of the sky, past the hills of angels, and his eyes blaze with authority. Up and over (say) poor Mr Jackson, on his newly-assembled knees and wearing them out already. The infant is a boy, and strides higher, over the toad that has popped its thin white wits into their sockets to hear the angels sing, and has jumped back into its sloppy-throated skin. The boy is a youth who strides higher and higher, over our drowned dapper friend Pincher Martin, his bones rolled here by the sea, who shoves on the red-lined gloves of his hands, adjusts his heavy casque of bones and brains, and strolls out to kneel to the tiers of madrigalists, the Shining Ones piled over the sky with throats of power, that sing dead pigeons spurting out of the turf … and above all their heads the youth becomes a man, beard flickering at the lips, and the man strides up and beyond the limits of sight, up the white-hot rock-hard funnel of witnesses, to fetch his father …