Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  THE AGNOSTIC VISITOR

  for Roy and Agnes

  Dawn, his first day.

  Slowly the mountain fills the window.

  They are off to the church. They offer him coffee.

  Gently enquire how he’ll pass his first morning.

  ‘Finish my coffee, browse in a book, take a short stroll.’

  They hear him out mildly, carry plates from the kitchen,

  Lay him knife and fork quietly, with an indwelling look,

  God-takers, inlooking, take none for themselves,

  Lay him fork and knife quietly, a white folded napkin,

  Carry plates to the kitchen. God-partakers

  Touch his hand mildly, bid him goodbye.

  And on that walk the visitor paused

  Looked head up around me snuffing the hill air;

  The hill-face opposite across the valley-steep:

  Slate racked and slotted like shelves of great books

  Leaning tall folios, and the hills bent-shouldered

  Like great slow readers crowded around

  With their indwelling look, sides trodden by god-lovers

  With their indwelling look. And I pulled at the roadside

  Tugged down a small slate.

  Into the rock bed

  Clear water gathered, water spilled over

  From inside the mountain, long cool water

  Threading the mountain within the soft turf

  Under the hard rock, falling presence of water

  Reaching from peaks, downward and cool,

  Moist stone aflow, thick turf-springing.

  I plucked my stone down, the socket a freshet,

  Dabbled a hand, raised my palm to my lips,

  Sipped indwelling water. With an indwelling look

  Trod on down the cutting, reading my brief slate,

  The mountains following.

  FROM THE QUESTIONS TO MARY

  The Virgin Mary gave birth to Dionysus, who said:

  When I have grown my horns I shall begin listening to them.

  Meanwhile, Mother, why do you yet give me that blissful milk

  While I can give you nothing back but these turds

  Which we throw among the straw?

  No, says Mary calmly, there is no blame.

  Make me a turd, my son.

  And Dionysus makes Mary a warm little turd scented with his body

  She holds her white palm out and Dionysus lays his

  Egg of earth in the palm of her hand

  And she takes the turd and she digs a little hole

  In the soft earth of the garden and she lays

  The turd therein and she takes a nutmeg

  And lays it on top of the turd.

  Look, she says, we shall water this spot for a year.

  That was March, Dionysus three months old.

  By April, a slick green spear through the soil.

  May gives it white flowers in foamy tufts,

  In the summer bees come with their eternity drone,

  By the autumn the tree is Dionysus’ height,

  It bears fruits of gold and others of silver.

  Mary says, did I ever make you feel you had stolen milk?

  Her son replies: I used to wonder, before this tree,

  What I could ever give that was half so good as what you gave me.

  THE ORACLE29

  ‘You shall be my partner in fainting’

  (Puppet-magician in my 11-year-old son’s play)

  He is very impressive. I am very impressed by him.

  His hair escapes from his collar like white steam boiling from a pot.

  I don’t care if he remembers nothing. I don’t care if he is deaf.

  He is helping me he has agreed to go the whole way with me.

  Depression is withheld knowledge is his theme

  Go into the dark bravely

  He leaves me in the garden

  Into the dark bravely

  I am in the seat by the sundial, I am waiting for a beam

  Time illuminated in a shaft

  A tall-beam, brimming with health-days

  It comes

  a precise shadow on the stone clock

  I rise and look at the time VII on a sunny winter evening

  It is a time that reaches into the past and this clock never stops

  It resembles time written with fast ink on parchment

  It is horoscope time it gives me hope

  Behind me the shadows are assembling

  I am their hustings and they are holding an election

  They are the shadow-party in opposition

  The sun’s platform has fallen vacant they are unopposed

  The shadow-ministers propose an increase in taxes

  I remove my jacket and throw it into the shadows

  They impose an additional surcharge

  I give them my tie

  There are further concealed duties and taxes

  Where I am going there is no need for shirt and trousers

  I shall walk like Adam through the pinewoods until it is time to die

  And the dew fall on me and the dew fall on me

  I sigh and turn away from the sunny hours

  Away from the garden sundial along the shadowy path

  The shadow cabinet is waiting for me

  With opening doors with open arms

  They bear me away I burn in the dark I go bravely

  Like a wisp of black hair a white cinder

  A voice bravely

  Part of the dark offers me a black book I had better not say no

  His dark eyes flash like rains falling expecting dark pages I open the book

  I am right the pages are black but the writing is moonlike

  The moon is writing on wavelets, the endless nibs busy

  I am on the cold black sand reclothed I am cold

  I peer over the water trying to read the moon’s script

  Downy bones in the mist can that be me? If the wind blows

  My bones fall to the sand, my bones rise as the water elects

  Wavelet flesh of slow water, a gathering-place for mists

  The dark story of the child

  The blood-tides and your mother rides with all womankind …

  The moon writes a sudden picture of a woman in a silver boat

  A silver woman and the blood sea is ceaseless pulsing

  The sundial in the seagarden shows me a moontime V

  I look back over the black book of the waves

  I have read some of its writing

  I know how to faint how to wake how to be written on a little.

  A PHILOSOPHY IN WELSHESE

  The summer before last I saw my vision

  Driving back from the cinema along the Pwllheli road

  Having consumed no more than a quarter of Welsh whiskey

  Glancing out of my driver’s window to the right

  There was the vision walking over the sea

  In a cloud of fire like raw tissues of flesh

  Like an emperor bleeding at every pore because he is so alive.

  On my left the sun westered behind the mountains

  Which were dark and packed with too much scree,

  Too many pebbles in slopes like millions of people

  But on my right hand you walked over the sea in your single scarlet garment!

  I searched in my head for what you were called and I shouted silently

  OSIRIS or some such name and you wheeled slowly

  Bowing to acknowledge my cry then as the road turned inland

  The mountain got up slowly and laid along the crisp shore

  Its pattern of farmers’ fields that fitted each other endlessly.

  Once there was this Chinese philosopher driving his horse and cart

  Through the mountain passes and he was not thinking exactly of philosophy

  His one thought was fuck the slut as he drove carefully along the road towards her

  Which concept alerted a nearby c
loud that was coloured exquisitely

  Like blood washing away on a cool stream. The same cloud

  Had been appearing nightly at this spot for six million years

  Pondering over the pass in the ancient mountains without hearing philosophy

  Expressed with quite such concision and determination before.

  Brother! Old Friend! Colleague! I shouted to China.

  This cloud rolled down the mountain like an immense glowing dog

  Followed him home and all night wrapped his house

  As all night he fucked the slut and every night

  People of the area observed that the sunset descended

  To attend this holy man whom the gods kept safe.

  He never understood why his reputation grew but he kept hard at it

  Preaching that if you wish to be loved by men of discernment

  Find a slut and fuck her deep as she will go into her yin

  Indulging your manifold perversions which you must woo as a fair person

  Which is what the Welsh whiskey showed me and I wonder whether it’s true

  On the road to Pwllheli driving back from the cinema at Bangor

  Through the great mountains on no more than a quarter bottle taken

  With Dante Alighieri, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Albert Einstein in the back of the car.

  THIS CORNISH PASSAGE

  The stone church whitewashed for navigation.

  These terrible seas. The tall church trees

  Spurting rooks like fountains of the dead,

  The gorge leaning towards the shore and the boulders

  Great as giants’ heads, great as their bolsters,

  Great as their white beds, towards the sailing vessels.

  This mouth, with a white church in it.

  The yarrows bend, and weave themselves into odours.

  The beetles’ furniture of fretted lichen.

  Dove-grey tombs, a soft wind.

  These dead wrecked in their churchyard, all around.

  The gossamer like breathing ladders of glass.

  SAM’S CALL30

  for Derek Toyne

  My uncle Sam Lines always seemed

  an enlightened person to me, but then I

  was a child. I never went

  to chapel where he preached, though people told me

  he was a marvellous preacher. I asked him what he said:

  he told me he never could remember.

  He saw his double in the garden. Came in to my aunt:

  I just saw a funny chap, an old un under the trees, he said.

  All right, said my aunt. Went up to him

  to take a closer look and it was me.

  He had a lovely death. My aunt told me.

  Almost gone, then up he sat, bolt upright and cried:

  Meg lass, get me a clean shirt, I’ll not be seen

  dead in this one. They got him one,

  struggled him into it, he never spoke again.

  That was when I was guided, the one and only time.

  Sam was laid out and waiting for his funeral.

  I felt suddenly curious about an old box in the barn

  Meg had said was full of old writings, now I must see them.

  I went out quietly because of the death in the house

  and the blinds down into the barn-smell

  of chicken-shit and damp feed. Inside the box I found

  one old piece of paper with green writing

  ‘To be buried with Sam Lines’, folded,

  a red mark and something stuck round and crinkled,

  like an ancient condom, then the tears

  spurted into my hand, I understood

  it was his caul he had been born with.

  He could tell the time without looking at his watch.

  He’d sleep in his chair by the range; after supper

  we kids’d creep up, whisper in his ear,

  (head back and closed eyes fixed on the ceiling)

  ‘Sam, what’s the time?’ His big oakapple hand

  crept into his waistcoat head still asleep,

  He took his turnip watch out and said the time

  from his sleeping mouth. He was always right

  you could check him from the watch his big hand

  would close and tuck away into its pocket again.

  X

  FROM EVERY CHINK OF THE ARK

  (1977)

  DOG PROSPECTUS31

  The dog must see your corpse. The last thing that you feel

  Must be the dog’s warm-tufa licking of your hand,

  Its clear gaze on your trembling lips, then

  Snapping at flies, catches the last breath in its teeth,

  And trots off with you quickly to the Judge,

  Your advocate and friend. The corpse a dog has not seen

  Pollutes a thousand men; the Bishop’s hound

  Tucked like a cushion at his tombstone feet

  Once through the door carries a helix staff

  And looks like Hermes on that side, the Bishop tumbling

  On the puppy-paws of death …

  as a temporary Professor

  at this U

  I practise, when the campus swarms with them,

  Focusing out the students, so the place

  Is amply empty, except for a few dogs.

  They should study here, the U enrol them

  And take more fees, at agreed standards teaching

  Elementary Urinology, and Advanced

  Arboreal Urinology: The Seasons and their Smells;

  Freshman Osteology: The Selection and Concealment

  Of Bones; Janissology: The Budding Watchdog, with

  Fawning, a two-semester course. Lunar Vocalisation,

  Or Baying at the Moon; the ‘lame-dog bid for sympathy

  With big sad eyes and hanging tongue,’ which is

  Cosmetic Opthalmology with Intermittent Claudication

  In the Rhetorical Physiognomy Gym. Shit and Its Meaning;

  Coprology: the Dog-Turd and Modern Legislation; The

  Eating of Jezebel, or Abreactive Phantasising; The Black Dog,

  Or Studies in Melancholy; The Age of Worry

  An Era Favourable to Dogs …

  How to Beg:

  A Long-Term Economic Good; with How to Fuck,

  Or Staggering in Six-Legged Joy; Fleas,

  A Useful Oracle and in this same last year

  The Dedicated Castrate or God’s Eunuch,

  The Canine Celibate as Almost-Man;

  And finally how, if uncastrated,

  To change places and become Master-Dog,

  The Palindromic Homocane and Goddog-Doggod,

  Wise Hermes of the Intelligent Nose

  Leading to the Degree of Master of Hounds.

  The campus throngs with hounds, this degree

  Is very popular, alas,

  I focus them out: in ample emptiness

  A few humans hurry to their deep study

  Without prospectus, without University.

  This one is desirous of becoming a perfect scribe:

  He knows vigilance, ferocity, and how to bark;

  This one studies gazing as the dogs used to

  On the images of the gods, as prophets should.

  What gods, what images?

  Those glorious trees, trilling with birds, cicadas,

  Pillars of the sky, our books and ancestors;

  I piss my tribute here, I cannot help it;

  The few humans left, noble as dogs once were,

  Piss on this university.

  TAPESTRY MOTHS32

  for Vicky Allen

  I know a curious moth, that haunts old buildings,

  A tapestry moth, I saw it at Hardwick Hall,

  ‘More glass than wall’ full of great tapestries laddering

  And bleaching in the white light from long windows.

  I saw this moth when inspecting one of the cloth pictures

  Of a man offering a basket of
fresh fruit through a portal

  To a ghost with other baskets of lobsters and pheasants nearby

  When I was amazed to see some plumage of one of the birds

  Suddenly quiver and fly out of the basket

  Leaving a bald patch on the tapestry, breaking up as it flew away.

  A claw shifted. The ghost’s nose escaped. I realised

  It was the tapestry moths that ate the colours like the light

  Limping over the hangings, voracious cameras,

  And reproduced across their wings the great scenes they consumed

  Carrying the conceptions of artists away to hang in the woods

  Or carried off never to be joined again or packed into microscopic eggs

  Or to flutter like fragments of old arguments through the unused kitchens

  Settling on pans and wishing they could eat the glowing copper

  The lamb-faced moth with shining amber wool dust-dabbing the pane

  Flocks of them shirted with tiny fleece and picture wings

  The same humble mask flaming in the candle or on the glass bulb

  Scorched unwinking, dust-puff, disassembled; a sudden flash among the hangings

  Like a window catching the sun, it is a flock of moths golden from eating

  The gold braid of the dress uniforms, it is the rank of the family’s admirals

  Taking wing, they rise

  Out of horny amphorae, pliable maggots, wingless they champ

  The meadows of fresh salad, the green glowing pilasters

  Set with flowing pipes and lines like circuits in green jelly

  Later they set in blind moulds all whelked and horny

  While the moth-soup inside makes itself lamb-faced in

  The inner theatre with its fringed curtains, the long-dressed

  Moth with new blank wings struggling over tapestry, drenched with its own birth juices

  Tapestry enters the owls, the pipistrelles, winged tapestry

  That flies from the Hall in the night to the street lamps,

  The great unpicturing wings of the nightfeeders on moths

  Mute their white cinders … and a man,

  Selecting a melon from his mellow garden under a far hill, eats,

  Wakes in the night to a dream of one offering fresh fruit,

  Lobsters and pheasants through a green fluted portal to a ghost.

  THE STAINS

  The woman in the besmutched dress

  It was I who was afraid and the Indians rising