Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  (1995)

  THE MOTHS

  Palpitations – the moth-beats

  Of the heart in the clambering weather

  Wrestling with itself.

  The moth lies down on the windowpane full of light

  In its bath of lights.

  I look out of the window past the moth

  Like some gigantic inhabitant rising from its unconscious mind.

  What does the unconscious mind of a moth resemble?

  The conscious mind of a devoted naturalist.

  That is why the moths come to him like inhabitants

  Of his unconscious when he lays his white sheet down in midnight

  Over the grass and shines his car’s headlights on it;

  They speed to their baths of light.

  And here come more moths over the estuary,

  They stagger over the roof of the house of light built without hands,

  And they settle in its garden of white lawn.

  Before he thought of blacking his face they came to him,

  To its whiteness, and sipped from the fountains in the pores.

  Now they come to his body-heat

  When he lies down in his bedsheet.

  They will eat him like candy even to the bones,

  He will fly away on their wings;

  None of the wicked will understand,

  But the wise shall understand.

  A SHELL

  The shell the skeleton of all the waves.

  Lacking a sea view

  I place it on the windowsill

  Which watches the drizzle along the canals,

  The chained doors of the Green Inn,

  And the commercial district where there are no theatres.

  On some magnetic points of the iron footbridge

  I thought I could estimate by a certain note

  The city river’s depth;

  During the demolitions

  When the copper ceiling of the theatre fell

  Bells sung in all the padlocked churches.

  They took it away for a military bandstand

  That green resonator. I return to my shell

  As though it were my wife.

  Was Lot’s wife, bones and all, turned to salt?

  She would stand there, a pillar, until the next shower.

  The old buildings are showing their bones in this leached-down city.

  I pick up my salt shell, and listen

  To its hushing tune like the city’s, listen

  To city-air tossed here and there

  In all its wave-shaped singing opus-chambers.

  CAT AND TREE

  There is a fragrant and spiky small tree

  In bud, into which the birds descend.

  It is the cat’s bird-machine.

  He stands poised with one paw

  Resting on the slender vibrant trunk, like a cellist

  Testing the hall’s atmosphere through his G-string before

  He starts to play.

  Birds descend and ascend, untroubled, pause

  On a bough a while to contemplate and mute

  Guano, they rise up having done so

  With the cat like a black shadow at the trunk’s foot.

  There is a detonation from the docks, and the birds rise

  And scatter like a black substance torn to fragments,

  The cat merely lays his head back on his shoulder and watches

  For the echoes to subside among the ship-machinery.

  The echoing birds slip back one by one

  Into his bird-machine; now they will scare less.

  He pushes his stare forward and enters the slaughter-tree;

  It is all cat now along every bough, as the spider

  Lays a paw to her harmonium of gossamer.

  PURE CHANCE

  The trees were dark as bears, and moved disturbingly,

  And made one think of uneasy bones

  Digging their way out. Indoors,

  The pretty wooden gospels, ludo,

  Snakes and ladders, that make visible

  The tiny throws of chance,

  The disposition of the powers,

  As the trees do, heavy breathing in the oaks,

  Nothing but green lungs and air. Are they

  The powers? They are very close to them.

  He takes his dice board under the oaks in the park

  To improve his lot; the snakes may glide

  Out of the boards and wreathe the oaks,

  The green snakes becoming invisible in the leafy ladders;

  Thus the pictures flat on the boards grow solid:

  Snakes and laddering branches, the snaky wind

  Coiled into the oaks, hissing. He walks free of them

  Out of the wood on to the meadows of pure chance.

  SEA-EYE

  He knew a clergyman he could say anything to,

  But nothing changed inside him; it was horrible

  That there was no horror,

  None of the horror that melted him

  So that his belly plucked like a saurian in a tar-pit,

  And if he melted deeper inside it was to white,

  To pure, liquid boy,

  His thick, secret sauce. This was what he wanted:

  Deep feeling; so, instead of the vicar he went to see

  The one-eyed old man with corded forearms

  On the beach who had furnished

  His entire cottage with chairs and tables

  And bookshelves washed up out of the sea

  And the boy brought him books

  And that made him friendly so he took out his eye

  Which scared the boy satisfactorily, and, staring at him

  With one dark moist orb and one cavernous gristle

  That old man further melted the boy to his essence

  With the horror of his tales that all ended

  With his losing his eye by the deliberate action

  Of a young boy who has come to listen to his stories,

  But the sea had rinsed that socket clean; and once

  They were rowing, and he paused on his oars

  And wiped his brow and took his glass eye out

  And rinsed it in the ocean and dropped it

  So the dark-irised ball went dwindling down

  And the boy jumped in and swam down after it

  And scooped it up just as it touched the sand

  And brought it back triumphant glaring in his palm

  And tossed it to the old man who caught it saying

  ‘Not Popeye but Sea-eye’; the diver felt the whole ocean

  Running through his clothes, undressing him;

  Sometimes the old man wore instead a smooth sea-pebble in his socket.

  FAMILIAR

  The cool seriousness

  Of the cat’s gaze while the stars rise

  And dry leaves catspaw past the windows,

  Contented maestro who proceeds

  By ritual gestures, his eyes blazing

  With that interior self-monument of gold:

  Linked with all tigers, striped

  For their passage through the long grass invisibly,

  Voiding immense stalings that are volumes of passion

  At the four corners of the green garden;

  Like an enchantress too

  Walking her battlements passionately

  And chucking out her chamberpot at the four castle-corners,

  Familiar with an angel

  Who has pouncing wings and the miaow

  Of a choir of ten thousand from the one pair of catlips.

  XXIII

  ASSEMBLING A GHOST

  (1996)

  ESHER60

  The two suns,

  The sun in the sea, the sun in the sky:

  The bicycle of summer.

  Do I deserve it,

  Shirt open to my breastbone as I ride?

  My shirt billowing like more lungs,

  Like sunny clouds

  On my summer bicycle
,

  The dawn wind

  Smelling like a scrubbed deck.

  Later, the sky of an uncolour –

  Pale as a grey cat’s fur,

  Or ancient glassware

  Rubbed misty in the desert.

  Do I deserve it?

  The garden birds flow up out of the lilac,

  The gulls

  Hang up by one wing and wheel around.

  The bicyclist with all Esher

  In his shirt, kept

  Warm and sunny there.

  BIBLIOPHILE

  Because of Falmouth

  He has more Bibles than he has shirts.

  He will search out Jerusalem with candles.

  Falmouth seems undersea,

  Or it brims with the understructure of the clouds,

  With invisibly salted water and mist

  Which webs everything into one great mansion,

  A mansion turning all the time,

  An invisible manor-house greater than any human home.

  Staircases, dungeons, great slam-gates,

  Sequent chambers, draughty galleries, speed past me,

  Secret passages disclosed, lifts on their hawsers,

  On their salt ropes ascending

  Momentary high towers whose shafts

  Exclaim with sunshine and open to the foundations.

  What does the Bible give to an unbeliever?

  The Bible has fullness.

  Fullness stops the mind being wiped

  By Falmouth, that is my prayer

  As I shut my shirt to my chin and open my Bible

  Every time the clouds

  Blow in from the East, on that East wind

  Which has holes opening in it, bible-deep.

  DAVY JONES’ LIONESS61

  There was a siege of dreams

  Of needing or wanting

  To buy a new watch; almost

  It slipped away as I paused

  By the Xmas display of actual watches, spoke

  To the woman serving in dark suit

  And pearls, of the beauty

  Of the pearl display on dark velvet

  (Meaning herself also)

  We agreed they were pretty

  And what a pity it was

  That men did not wear them. I informed her

  I had gone out in the heavy male

  Serpentine beads and they interested the women

  Just as they liked my sporting

  A pigtail, and she said

  She could see that, and why had I

  Not put them on to visit her? this was unspoken,

  And now she paced

  Like a small dark lioness,

  Her movement round the shop

  Had been increasing, I could not

  Keep track and she seemed

  As she moved to roar subsonically

  Through the open maw of her black suit

  While I told her that a stranger

  In the pub had kissed me because

  I wore beads and she did not know

  That men could, and I said yes,

  As you see, they can; but,

  Said the dark lioness, does that

  Include pearls? she was pacing now

  Up and down the jeweller’s stairs while I

  Looked again at the watches, remembering my dream

  Of needing a watch and she watched me

  Because it was a dream in which

  I had remembered my dream, and this was why

  She came and roared at me

  Soundlessly in her dark. The bijouterie

  With its beauties shedding

  Their light everywhere was now charged

  With the subsonic breath of pearls;

  It was like lions in an aviary,

  It was the singular oyster-shop of pearls,

  Of pearls and glittering innuendo;

  The slime of the sea necklaced round

  The long neck of the dark assistant,

  The cabinets full of ticking salt

  Sea-jewels telling me the tide was rising;

  This was Davy Jones’ Locker

  Full of ivory-treasures, tides and gems,

  That is the watch of watches, and she?

  Davy Jones’ Lioness from the Orient

  Now wearing pearls that gathered

  Like rain under the sea.

  ENÝPNION62

  A bee in the library

  Of elm books and oak books,

  Holly shelves,

  Ivy shelves,

  The drowsy-house,

  The dreamlike slumber in books;

  Polishing the windows

  Of the drowsy-house

  That open to and fro

  One sees out of the leaves;

  I open the book and its honey runs over,

  The supple binding polished with beeswax,

  The dark-veined pages,

  The whispering leaves

  Inscribed with sentences that hum

  In the amber twilight,

  A gentleman’s library

  In which to drowse

  That is full of Virgil

  Who has retired,

  Who has finished with all

  Heroes larger than beesize.

  LEATHER GOODS63

  I feel emptied by the thunderstorm. She

  Looks as I feel. He takes me behind the shop

  To show me the source of the leather with which

  He makes his wonderful supple skirts, waistcoats,

  Tabards, luggage, including doctors’ bags. I must

  Conceal the origin, he says, handing me her skin

  Perfectly tanned, hanging it over my arm, it is heavy

  As the ulster of a big man, the hands bear nails

  Which are as fresh as any person’s living,

  I cannot see the expression, her hair

  Brushes the planking. He tells me

  It was a pleasure-steamer wrecked

  Off the Manacles and the bones

  Gently rolled out of them and their leather

  Brine-tanned in a volcanic undersea stream

  That was sulphurous;

  ‘The diver into that wardrobe,

  She came in one evening, when I was closing,

  With a beautifully supple Gladstone bag, out of it pulled

  A total body-suit with nails complete and a zip

  “I can deliver five hundred,” she said;

  “The leather breathes, but is warm still

  In sub-arctic chills,” “There’s

  Little call for this degree

  Of warm clothing here,” I said,

  ‘“Then shut your eyes,” she said. I felt

  A little soft cool hand steal

  Into my own, it was comforting. “Let me take

  Just the hands, six dozen at first, see how they go …”

  ‘Under the sea the teeth rolled

  Away like pearls as the gums rotted, scoured

  Into white sand. The hair

  Continued growing all those years, hiding the wreck

  Like a head of hair itself, with full tidal tresses;

  Out of that undulant harvest the diver plucked her fortune.’

  from ASSEMBLING A GHOST64

  MS POTTER

  A smile painted red

  Signifying mastery of oral sex,

  Teeth white as the Moon,

  And an amazed ‘Oh!’

  From the warm blackness –

  Having shown that chord of colours:

  Red, white and the deep

  Black of her spoken merriment;

  Now she sits down at her wheel

  In her death-clothes

  Creating the algorithm

  Of the Potter who made us all

  With her belly-art, and winks

  And throws down clay

  With a slap on her spinning

  Wheel, and she catches it

  With her fingers as it

  Shoots away in loops –

  And i
mmediately form rears up,

  A low vase of hers spins in

  Pulses from shallow to deep

  And back again, storing darkness

  In the bowl of the vase, then

  Dismissing it, thumb-forcing

  The shadow out of the bowl in

  This messy cave with

  Its mud-splashes, puddles,

  A hissing tap. Her smock

  Is filthy-stiff. There is a streak

  Of clay across her cheek while

  The zinc perfume of the stinging earth

  And high velocity mud shoots

  Off the wheel-rim, this makes the place

  So real that almost every gesture now

  Hypnotised by the wheel falls

  Into the ritual,

  The vase deepening

  Like the night-sky forming

  In the potter’s thighs

  Her fingers digging

  In the spinning void

  That falls exactly

  Into the tall vase-walls:

  Central night, with stars of wet clay;

  I needed to spin my heirs

  On her wheel

  Like a meteor-swarm, the children

  Pushing and shoving to get in

  The stout thumb and the gracile fingers

  Opening the door in her death-clothes

  A door is opened

  To the yard and birds

  With the cool faces of virgins

  Pace over the threshold, pick their crumbs

  From the bread-rolls tall as vases.

  I sit patiently on the uncomfortable

  Stool made of a late-mediaeval

  Crosshead; the heiroglyphs are swarming

  Again as she peddles at the wheel, the hypnotic vase

  Pulsing with shadow, then shallowing

  To a vibrant bowl; she is interested

  In the brown and carrot-shaped

  Amphoras made of Nile mud; this is how

  The wines of Egypt were transported;

  She, by chucking and spinning

  Has constructed just such a bottle; I cannot help it –

  I picture her at her wheel of light and shadow;

  It needs to be oblivion wine from such a bottle.

  NUDE STUDIES VI: THE HORSE

  She is in love with the canoe-faces of horses,

  Their violin smile. Riding them

  Naked skin to skin

  Is to sail close to the symphonic brink of the known world.

  It amazes her that entering the pub

  Of kisses, basket meals, stout decals, accelerando