Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

And sacrificed to geology, therefore

  Is it any wonder that this stone

  Became our patron?

  Do you see a person here,

  Or just a stone?

  Do you see a person in the moonlight,

  Or is the Moon just a round stone

  With a hare carved on it

  Flying without a shaft?

  If It is just a stone, why

  Does it fly, spreading

  Magnetism like feathering wings

  Whose beat you see reflected in the tides

  Whose claws pluck at the water-margins?

  I pause, and look up at the full disc.

  Someone has carved a man there

  Sitting safely in a boat

  On its floodlit surface.

  I kiss the head of the Gwennap Cross,

  It is a hard and odorous stone

  And tingling, but the smell in it

  Is as though I kiss

  The head of my baby with its rinsed mossy smell.

  SALUTING WILLA

  (The great boulder at the mouth of Boscastle harbour in N. Cornwall is sometimes known as ‘Willa’.)

  The warship glides in like a malicious buffet of cutlery.

  Willa’s petticoats are slamming under her stone dress

  Like iron doors detonating deep within the rock,

  Shuddering through the feet that tread her slate sills,

  Her blow-hole smoking and saluting

  That has buffed for centuries her inside corridors

  With the sea’s rifling from which they shine like glass

  As for military inspection. The warship’s personnel

  Line their greymetal platforms at attention,

  Salute with ship’s guns the rock that has been firing

  Its cannon at high tide longer than artillery

  Was ever thought of, or steel could float,

  The hollow rock volleying from its caves

  Returning thunder with thunder

  Back to the buoyant anvil hammering

  Among the windcells and the catspaws tautly anchored.

  THE SIRE OF BRANCHES AND AIR

  I

  The sire of branches and air.

  The low waters begin

  To give off their cunny smell;

  It means rain is near.

  We have the emergency edifice,

  The umbrella, which is a cross

  Between a city suit and an office.

  The moist wind bends the trees

  Which have acquired presence

  And their extra dimension

  From this alluring smell

  Forced through their budding branches

  From hammered reservoirs like cold pewter shields

  To which they add their own pinch of cunning.

  They are threads of pulse

  To which the breeze

  Puts its own beating fingers

  Gently, like a bearded physician.

  II

  The branches toss with such question,

  And swell with such abandon,

  I think each tree is a child at play,

  It has donned the wind

  Like a playsuit that thinks up games,

  And falls thoughtfully into its quiet folds,

  Then the resumed wind mounts

  The stiff sire of branches,

  It is a ghost trying on bodies,

  Streaming over the land and letting them drop

  After their battles.

  A great face opens laughing

  In that tree-head, and in that other

  Head, the hair smarms flat as a seal.

  I think that elsewhere this spectre also

  Is a child; that somewhere in a nursery

  Just over the treetops, a child’s

  Sleeping body lies in its white bed,

  Emptied of the small omnipotent ghost

  That can overturn a countryside

  Of leafy timbered rooms, like a burglar

  Passing invisibly through green walls;

  Now large pawmarks appear printed

  Across the leafhead and satisfied

  The spirit of the child condenses

  From the muscles of wind,

  Lays itself along the little body and

  Shrugs its way back into the angelic countenance.

  I open the nursery door on my way to bed,

  There is a knowledgeable smell of rain;

  I shut the window and notice how still

  The cunning trees are on the ridge after the storm.

  EARTH SHAKES AWAY ITS DEAD LIKE CRUMBS FROM A CLOTH

  They have smoothed their mounds down,

  The dead, they have healed the soil and gone;

  All is smooth lawn, a trifle long.

  Where there was once an orchard of stone,

  They have left, however it was done,

  Only a seeding lawn, a trifle long

  That works in the wind like television:

  Across grass pictures, viewless sprinters run,

  The prints of an invisible force flying,

  Every wing-beat distinct in the grain

  Of winnowing stalk and shadowing stem.

  They have picked up their skeletons,

  The people of clay, they have walked in their bones,

  Plucked up their gravestones and not scythed the lawns;

  I cannot tell how it was done;

  All vanished into grass, a little long.

  They have pulled up their static stones,

  Their texts, and tucked them under their arms,

  They have gone off like borrowers in the evening,

  In the twilight returning dull thick tomes;

  I wish I knew how it was done,

  The graven texts gone.

  All that is left is a shivering lawn;

  Under it I can’t tell where who was lain,

  Or whether or how he is coming again,

  The writing gone. Shadows hunt on the wind,

  Calf-deep in cool grass I could hardly be stung

  By these shadows of snakes, by these skimming scenes

  Healed into a park; my feet laved in soft grasses

  I wade through green streams.

  Where are they hiding? I want to meet them

  Now, before they are departed and quite gone.

  Will they not be clean

  And cool, like this wind-driven lawn,

  And like the wind flying into the unknown,

  Not by still text kept down, or solemn stone?

  ROCK, EGG, CHURCH, TRUMPET

  There is a churchy rock

  Mothy with seagulls

  Looking as it would fly

  If only they would beat together

  Their bread-mould pinions,

  Fly like an angel of rock

  With a stubble of wings;

  Ripples pass over the rock

  As though it were planted thick

  With wheat that is mouldering.

  The gulls mew-mew.

  The rock that has indeed become a church

  Is crazy with its wounds,

  Having been sliced from the hill and

  Blown up from it, and fitted together

  On the same hill, a little higher:

  The windows moan, the hinges shriek,

  It is carved into weeping angels, it is

  Thickly-set with their wings and open-mouthed guttering,

  And is something between an egg and the rock;

  Church is one of three kinds of feathered stone

  That cannot fly. An egg is full of feathers,

  A sealed stone globe, the pebble of a bird

  That has roosted and will roost on a grey rock

  That ripples its hide with feathers and shadows

  In the creaming tide; and the church

  Bellows with song attempting to take off

  With the hymning engine of pewed people

  Throbbing to us across the waves.

  Stone is n
ot just such an inertia –

  Look at the little gymnast

  Swinging to music along parallel bars

  On those long bones; listen to the Tibetan

  Flute of bone and the shoulder-blade violin

  Strung with gut, and the creamy violin

  Held high in the claws of a feathered angel;

  The stone moon carved with a hare

  Swoops over the feathering sea

  That beats like the one tidal wing of the world –

  Pull the cold bone up to your lips, Trumpeter,

  Bark out with your angel-breath laden with spirits!

  THE CAVE41

  He stands under a bright sky

  With a rotten apple in his hand. It

  Is a winged apple, for it is full

  Of codling moths, and down the blackened

  And webbed paths the seed still hangs

  With its leafy corridors, its heaps

  Of autumn fruit. The wings of the moth beating

  Stir the leaves in the seed; the apple-egg

  In his hand is struggling to hatch.

  Every wing-beat is a new thought, then the thoughts

  Speed from his hand and the sky is dark

  With fringed wings and heavy apples, and the wings

  Dip and he hears the deep breathing

  Of the dead. After this, the conjurer in the head

  Can develop his act. In it the clothes

  Of the audience shall come to life, and strip

  Themselves off the sitters, prance and dance

  In the aisles, and the conjurer shall stand aside

  And the clothes shall waft on to the stage

  And clothes will pull chains of clothes out of hats,

  Clothes will saw other clothes in half.

  The naked audience, feeling their power

  Stripped from them, their talking clothes, their

  Eloquent masks and attitudes, shall sit

  Attentive, naked as pips, while

  The handless, headless, hollow clothes

  Shall pull themselves through each others’ textures,

  And pray with hollow sleeves held up, and sacrifice

  By unbuttoning and falling off the air, and fly

  Like moths and lie in heaps like leaves,

  The conjurer thinks of his act, holding the winged fruit

  In which the seeds sit watching the moths eat.

  FULL MEASURES

  I

  People sailing down the river

  In wooden vessels between the magnificent trees,

  Leafy cisterns of river standing in their own shadow

  Like avenues of barrels in cool cellars

  That grope up to feel green in the skies,

  River flowing upwards from miraculous bottles

  Of willow contentedly rowing the river to God;

  The true source hovering, blinding white, over the mountains;

  And it is moving with a note, like great brown lorries

  Of goods trains rumbling full of water, though it is

  Like one long umber room of sequent chambers

  Sliding through each other, which are pulses

  Echoed from the rainy source, the rocks

  It bounds down, the turfs that hold, one long room

  Broadening and full of sunlit motes

  And recapitulating ripples. Quantities have paused

  To fill the trees, to construct shady paths

  Before they volplane back to water in the flat

  Veined drops of autumn. Other water

  Pauses in its stages like passengers

  Passing in wooden vessels between magnificent trees.

  The sky’s bartender in blackening whitecoat

  Prepares his biggest drops, full measures.

  II

  On the boat made out of trees I drink my beer

  And hold it up to pledge the river; it matches,

  It is mainly water, and stays a while in me

  Rejoicing and transmitting visions

  Of where it’s been, some of which I see. The ocean

  Drinks at the river’s mouth, the sky

  Bends down to sup the waves, and water

  Runs invisibly up the wind-ladder

  Disclosing as it flies great ice-ships,

  Snow-rigged, spunglass frigates, until it is too heavy,

  Can go no further, and returns barking,

  A great hound of thunder. And on the evening river

  Under the leaves the water flies

  In winged drops with a sticker drinking

  Freely from all a special heavy beer

  Fermented in our veins for generations

  Travelling in our veins like walking rivers.

  FROM THE LIFE OF A DOWSER42

  Water is bad for him, much too exciting.

  He runs away to Cornwall and drinks

  From the sparkling well, Fenten ow Clyttra.

  As he lifts the tin cup he wonders,

  Trembling like the water in the cup,

  What it will show this time, after so long,

  They have boiled his water, made him drink tea,

  That is stunned water, but he believes it thinks

  As it tumbles over rock, breaking white,

  Or streams into the high air, breaking white,

  Or lies below its lintels in old stone wells

  Pondering like some long transparent god

  Waiting to be consumed and joined to more of him.

  The Dowser believes, looking into his cup

  Where air-bubbles in the water cluster

  On sheer mirrors like silver tods of grape

  And feels like that god about to drink

  Some vineyard that is moonlit. He shuts his eyes,

  The water is cool, and tin-tasting,

  A spectre of earthy darkness brushes by

  His throat, and disappears. There is nothing more.

  He gets up from his knees and brushes them, regards

  The avenue of long grass in which he stands

  That burrows into the hillside with at its end

  The stone lintel to water like an open wardrobe

  With clothes of light flung about the grass

  The dew-sheen and the spidery coronets

  Which shiver like those bubbles of the well,

  And a triple stone head on the cross-beam leering.

  Still nothing more. Maybe this

  Is enough to dig a well into the hill for,

  To sculpt it and process, to make pilgrimage,

  But then, why here, when everywhere

  I break some slate in a damp cutting and water springs,

  Whenever I dig my garden down into the water-table,

  Prod five finger-freshets in the ferny turf.

  Water is everywhere, and I think with it,

  And remember with it, inside this rock

  (And raps his knuckle on his brow),

  And speak with it, as the clouds make scenes

  And scrolling pictures, like a god

  Opening his mouth and bellowing through

  Lips and beards of water, water streaming

  Through him like a fall or force, when

  The frowning clouds in white coats came for him

  Like falls walking and he forgave them. Now water

  Is still in him, and well, and pondering.

  GRIMMANDERSON ON TRESCO

  A pocket Moonbible by the lacy shore,

  A Ladybible of God the Mother,

  Of ultimogeniture: the lad

  Freshest from the womb inherits

  Nothing but fortune’s favour

  And extraordinary companions

  On the electrifying adventure.

  These are not wrinkled scriptures

  In fly-dirt size on india paper

  Crisp as a fly’s wing; it is

  A story-teller’s stout handbook

  Of basic situations: the old king

  Needs a wife, the great toad like
a wasted moon

  Waxes Queen aboveground; the battered soldier

  Steals a tinderbox, and has

  Dogs with piercing sight at command;

  A white snake tasted from a covered dish

  Imparts to the breakfasting king bird-speech.

  You do not cling to the scripture,

  You improvise with spirit.

  On a rock above the delta where I read it,

  A fruitfly shares my apple with me,

  Tastes my fingers and walks about my palm

  With its bicycle-pump tongue.

  It has a horny frame

  Dwindling delicate as a tropical shell;

  It is the self-same shell-stuff

  As those beautiful thin million ears

  Listening inside the Atlantic fetch.

  It has cobbled spectacles it cannot take off.

  On this dry day my friend

  The painted conch with wings,

  Sips, sips at my sweat-beads,

  As thirsty I puncture my apple’s skin,

  Drink its fountains of juice stored up for me,

  Read Grimm’s bible by the spumy shore

  Where fruitfly swaggering like an inheritor sups

  Sweat-apples of my palm’s seamed thoroughfare.

  RENFIELD BEFORE HIS MASTER43

  (Renfield was the lunatic in Dr Seward’s asylum who assisted Count Dracula during his English expedition, and who loved to eat flies.)

  I

  He was eight when he started earning

  His living in a silk factory;

  The big bales, corded with twist,

  The incipient peignoirs, the feminine slink.

  Was he a spider at all, once?

  The managing director nipped the nub

  Of his silk-web, at his shiny long table

  Sipping at telephones, and his workers, caught,

  Buzzing and gossiping

  At the endless benches of their lives along which

  The silk slid in thin rivers.

  II

  He liked bouncing in the bales, sneezing into

  Their dusty canvas hides like crabby shells –

  Lying outstretched over them

  Gripping the cordage with one’s hands

  And one’s feet braced, one’s loins

  Buried in some special penknifed silken gash, and one was

  That male spider with a bellyful of silk oneself.

  He would watch the canteen flies,

  All possible silk, and at home

  He kept in a pearly bottle choked with gossamer