Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  I wash the oily skin and sound of the metal off,

  I buzz still in my skin like those grinding hulls,

  I see the water roughen in the buzzing bath,

  Soap-clouds spread, the steel mantra dies.

  The metal bees have sought their garages.

  We are their honey and pollen, the sweet thing

  They gather and destroy, the flesh-roses.

  GOD SAYS ‘DEATH’34

  God says ‘Death’ in a gentle voice

  To the corpse sleepless with the wheats

  That hiss on a low earth-note all night

  Like a door hung over with dark leaves

  Out of which the immense syllable blows:

  ‘Death’ in God’s voice dressed in his spiderweb shirt

  With its tassels of wheat, in his knobbly dressing-gown

  Pulled from the oak; he

  Says ‘Death’ with all his clothes,

  And his mushroom buttons,

  And his ponds which are mirrors

  Tunnelling into the sky where he jumps up

  Parting the thundercloud with electrical claws;

  The reedy marshes of the railway, on some platform

  Deep in East Anglia with the mire-drummer thumping

  Through the lonely sky, God might pop out of the mud

  Puffing a smoke rolled of flesh, dung and pelt,

  And offer me one

  And I could ask him then why ‘Death’,

  And he would smile like a dago in his black cloak,

  And offer me life to keep quiet about it,

  ‘Would you call God a liar?’ he hands me flowers

  From the churchyard: ‘Do you call these dead?’

  VICARAGE MOONCAKES

  The white pillar of water throws itself

  Over the inlet cliff. What keeps the Moon up?

  Nothing but itself, rolling over the ground,

  Luminous millstone. The Vicar has made a clock

  Out of balsa-wood and black soapstone,

  He has a pair of pants of black bible-leather,

  He has a parson’s leather-jacket marked Holy

  Across the shoulders, and Bible on the bum;

  He has made a walking-stick

  Of plaited straw: he likes featherlight things.

  He lies on Fridays in a special bed

  Which is a wooden plank in his large dry hall.

  He writes a long letter to his Bishop, cold as a prison corridor.

  He feeds a death’s-head moth on a piece of marzipan:

  He is an authority. The Moon

  Grinds soft white flour over his parsonage,

  The daily round bakes him like a loaf of crust,

  And he feeds us with Jesus like little soft moonstones

  That taste of marzipan from his lepidopterist’s fingers.

  THE GRAND LUNACY

  The moon is the mansion of the mighty mother,

  With its one blazing window it wings across the sky,

  It is the abyss, sensing everything,

  It is the opener, pulling up the frail spirit,

  Snapping its rootlets a little more, each time.

  Its glassy beverage, sticky as libido,

  Oozes out of the mistletoe,

  My moon-yolk leaps out into the bedroom,

  Moon-beam, self-coloured.

  The dead are the embryo people of the earth,

  They are called Demetrians, eternal freshness

  Is guaranteed for them; as the moon passes

  They all stand on tiptoe, her beams

  Comb them, they are like cobwebby wheat

  As the wheat is, with its indefinite stalks,

  Its frayed alleys of shadows, bending, tiptoe.

  It is she who causes the woman’s tongue in my mouth

  To branch like an antler, and the wings of cupid

  Deep in my body, to beat; it is she

  Who twines her fingers in my skin,

  Flays a layer as one pulls

  A sheet off a mirror in which she stares

  From the one window flying in the sky of her stone cottage.

  SEAN’S DESCRIPTION

  The grave of the careless lady who swallowed pips,

  From the rich subsoil of her stomach and snapped coffin-timbers

  A fine greasy crop of apples glittering

  With their waxes; and Sean told me

  Over a customary glass the best description he’d read

  Of what a dead person looked like, actually:

  ‘A green doughnut with eyeholes in it,’ he said,

  ‘A green doughnut with black cream,’ as we sat

  By the waterlilies rooted in mud of the pub garden,

  And a bumble-bee in a tippet of glossy fur

  Snatched a line from the air, and I brought

  One of her apples from my pocket, and bit

  Through the sweet flesh that fizzed with young ciders

  And my toothmarks blazed white through the red skin.

  ‘Look,’ I said, holding up another firm sweet apple,

  ‘This is what a dead person really looks like; taste her.’

  THE LOOMS OF THE ANCESTORS

  Cloth woven on a loom whose spindle-weights

  Are made of the sliced bones

  Of forefathers and foremothers.

  The loom is the burial place of the ancestors:

  The long bones for the treadles,

  The sliced bones for the weights,

  The thin bones carved into the shuttles.

  As each person dies, some portions

  Are fed to the birds,

  The remainder buried in the cotton-fields,

  The bones boiled and varnished,

  Carved, and pegged with bone-nails

  Into the loom, which is called

  By the person’s real name, which is not used

  When they are alive, but is their loom-name.

  Some flesh flies in the air, other meat

  Is buried wrapping cotton-seeds,

  This harvest also bears their name and is woven

  On the loom of their bones which is placed

  In the courtyard where the birds drink.

  The garment is called by the relationship.

  I am wearing my grandfather’s aunt on my back.

  My first wife is these knickers.

  Sheep graze on the cemetery grass

  Where the wool-people are buried, not far from the hills

  Where we white cotton-people burst our pods.

  When the sheep are filled, the goats graze there,

  We ferment their milk to a spirit

  Which speaks through the shaman’s lips

  Drunk on ancestors. The chief wears

  A robe of woollen chiefs, many-layered as an umpire,

  And the birds feed from his grandmother mittens.

  I spin my father’s white flesh onto my wife’s fast wheel.

  PLACE

  The train’s brakes lowing like a herd of cattle at sunset

  As it draws up by Lesson’s Stone, by mountains

  Like deeply carved curtains, among small birds

  Knapping at the stationmaster’s crumbs, hopping-black

  Like commas of wet ink: I could see their small eyes glisten.

  I thought I must die in my sleep, I lay in my bunk

  Like wet clothes soaking, the convulsions were the journey,

  The bedroom bumped. I stepped off and the mountain landscape

  Was like stone guests set round a still table

  On which was set stone food, steaming

  With the clouds caught on it; a plateau

  Surrounded with peaks and set with cairns

  And stone houses, and a causeway up to Giant’s Table,

  And the railway trailing like a bootlace. My house

  Was hard by Lesson’s Stone, near the sparkling Force

  That tumbled off the cliff, that in summer

  Left its dry spoor full of thornbush. Then the
lizards

  Flickered among the rocks, like shadows

  Of flying things under a clear sky, or like

  Bright enamelled painted rock on rock, until they swiftly

  Shot sideways too fast to see. I arrived

  On Lesson’s Stone Stop platform a decade ago;

  The place where I live is still like pieces

  Of a shattered star, some parts shining

  Too bright to look at, others dead

  As old clinker. I am afraid to mention

  The star’s name. That would set it alight.

  GUARDED BY BEES

  The pornographic archives guarded by bees

  Who have built comb in the safe; iron doors

  From which the honey drips; I sip a glass

  Of bee-sherry, yellow and vibrant; I came here

  Past the old post-office, boarded up,

  From within the cool darkness sun-razored

  I heard the hum of bees; my friend tells me

  That the radioactive cities of the future

  Will be left standing for euthanasia,

  They will be kept beautiful though all trees

  And lawns will be plastic. Those who wish to die

  Will drift through the almost-empty streets,

  Loiter through the windows of the stores,

  All open, all untended, what they fancy they can take,

  Or wander through the boulders of Central Park, its glades

  To hear the recorded pace and growl in the empty zoo-cages,

  And consider the unperturbed fountains of water,

  While it, and they, are rinsed through and through

  As the pluming spray by sunlight, with killing rays,

  Lethal broadcasts, until they can consider no more.

  Germs over the whole skin die first, the skin after,

  Purity first, then death, in the germless city that amazes

  The killed lovers with its pulsing night-auroras.

  I reply I would prefer a city constructed of OM,

  A city of bees, I want this disused city

  Converted to a hive, all the skyscrapers

  Packed with honeycomb, and from the windows

  Honey seeping into the city abysses, all the streets

  Rivers of cloudy honey slipping in tides,

  And the breeze of the wings as they cool our city.

  This would be my euthanasia, to be stung by sweetness,

  To wander through the droning canyons scatheless at first,

  Wax thresholds stalagmited with honey-crystals

  I snap off and munch, and count the banks

  That must brim with the royal jelly …

  And some wander through the sweet death, city of hexagons

  And are not stung, break their hanging meals off cornices

  In the summer-coloured city, drink at the public fountains

  Blackened with wings drinking, and full of wonder

  Emerge from the nether gates that are humming

  Having seen nature building;

  others stagger

  Through the misshapen streets, screaming of human glory,

  Attended by black plumes of sting,

  With a velvet skin of wings screaming they’re flayed.

  THRUST AND GLORY

  A great longhaired hog, glistening with the dew,

  It knows night by heart, sucked through blue irises,

  But day it allows to rest and glitter on its skin

  And its long hairs harsh as fingernails

  Like coarse reeds on a hump of the bog.

  It is a golden pig and its underslung rod

  Is the very word for thrust, like the drill

  Into the future, and it will run along that drill’s sights;

  But now, glistening with distillate, it waits

  For the sun to raise moulds of steam along its back,

  For the sun to warm it dry and the air to towel it

  Testing its hooves meanwhile that clock on the stone,

  Ready with its seed and tusks and bolts of muscle

  And the grease of seed it pumps into the black sow

  Like lightning-bolts into the hulking black thunder anvil

  And the storm will gather until it breaks and rains pigs,

  The mud glorious with rain-shine, pig-grease and wallow.

  THE WHOLE MUSIC AT POD’S KITCHEN

  While eating a crisp ice-cold lettuce at Pod’s Kitchen

  I thought of how the white flesh of cumulo-cirrus was ice,

  How wind pulled the fronds from the seven-mile lettuce

  That hovered daintily over counties, wide as a county,

  I thought of how the thunderstorm whirls the white blanketings,

  How the sheer-white terraces become a palace of fireworks

  Like a Snowdon aviary of rainbows spreading their wings

  And sparking their beaks and fucking in great thumps;

  I find on my green lettuce

  A tiny snail like hard snot

  I think of poisons so old

  That they have become precious stones

  Pulling back to black earth edible men and women

  And how the earth folds over them like grave thunderbulks

  With white inscriptions startling in the dusk.

  I swallow my edible green fronds and regard

  My glass of water fallen from those clouds

  In black thunder;

  It stands still and clear, poised to enter me,

  Like one long distinct note of the whole music.

  A MOVE TO CORNWALL

  I must raise a teashop in this place with my own two hands,

  I am marrying a wife to conceive a child to adventure

  Once more in these mother-lands, these hills

  Like great fat mothers in green, dreaming

  And as they dream sweating slightly in their sleep;

  And the woods of grey oaks unravelling from their age

  In green foils and glossy membranes this dawn’s freshness;

  The black-and-white fungus like a branch of magpie;

  The radar we call trees reading the weather day by day,

  Building models of the weather vertically in grids

  Fining to twigs, the climbing axis of rings,

  Cylinder upon cylinder of recorded weather,

  Like old people crabbed with their reading,

  Cramped among their books, the forking pathways between stacks,

  Each apple a complete summary indexed in ten pips

  That I shall serve baked brown and running in juice

  With a core of sugar like melted resin,

  With a drawer of money,

  With a drawer of forks smelling of fish;

  The child runs in from the swings; I gave her scalding hot weather-apples.

  from LIVING IN FALMOUTH35

  I

  Seagull, glittering particle, climbing

  Out of the red hill’s evening shadow into sunslant

  At high tide and sunset; there is a moth

  On the rusty table that spreads out wings

  Like lichened tombstones.

  A crackwillow leaf

  Floats into an ashtray; we are among mirrors

  And water, and the small windowed boats

  Gently in the tide play with long beams

  Like silent swordplay

  And the gull arrives into the high air

  Still full of sunshine, and his particle shines

  And the boats knock gently among the shades

  And the heads nod

  And the good and bad dreams come swimming

  Up out of the water glittering as they arrive

  Sliding from under the red hills on which

  The four-legged phantasms of wool graze,

  Cloud-dreams let loose a moment of shower,

  Dream-tides knock the fencing dream-boats

  And two-legged dreams make one flesh.

  II

  I sit inside one of her gran
ite tents

  Praising against reason the high winds,

  The stars hard like gimlets, her bronchitis,

  Her onsets of winter and damp moulds,

  Her spooks that do not linger,

  Her magic touches.

  She is only the same town from day to day

  In the sense that a book is the same from page to page:

  Or her water in the estuaries banked high

  With mica-mud that glistens like satin garments

  Ready for the spring to put on and shake out

  To every colour, is the same water

  That lies glowering under corpse-skies.

  III

  The tourists run like tides through granite houses,

  Their ebb the dereliction of seaside pavilions,

  Summer woods like smashed clocks, cliffs

  Like crumbling cloudscape, dry-rot like wood-spooks

  With white cobwebby arms: a bad smell, holding

  Out a large repair-bill. Falmouth’s bathing-beauties

  Are sewing next summer in their dressmaking classes,

  Her art-school a tenement of night-dreaming canvasses;

  His clouds a tight lid God fastens on the box

  Full of thousand-year-old churches and stony boarding-houses

  Deciduous of visitors; her echoing mines

  Terrible art-galleries for works

  Of miner-death that mills tinfoil, of cars in the raw

  Bleeding over the roofs of profound caverns. That

  Organ-note as the Redruth wind blows over the moor

  Winds on the pipes of long-dead mines,

  Brings all the bad weather, all the ’flu.

  This is the wind that blanches Falmouth, shrinks it

  To thin-glassed tombs of drunken landladies;

  Her blossoms wither, like an alcoholic flush;

  The tourists ebb like tides out of the houses.

  […]

  VI

  A ship’s figure-head bobbing in on the tide?

  A floating pew, shaggy with saints?

  Then I saw some of the hair was roots, it was an oak

  Upended, a tree swimming ashore.

  It bumped against the quay, nobody I could see

  Stepped off its felloe of roots, but the town lightened

  As if this traveller had tales. Two hundred years

  Of voyaging oak, by its girth; say it had sailed