Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  Blackening the white garments

  in order to transfer

  their radiance inwards;

  Covering himself with estuary mud

  in order to achieve the inner glory;

  clothing the soul

  In its shining garment

  by defiling the outer:

  he is changing skins,

  He strips the old filth off,

  the radiant new season begins;

  the reek of fruct and filth

  Was unbelievable and its look

  unpredictable,

  the monster-look,

  The shambler clothed in tree-shit,

  balsmic cascades,

  the body-of-smell reborn;

  Nevertheless, the clean twin still visits

  drawing-rooms, not in his Hyde

  but in his snowy Jekyll,

  But an invisible forest enters the room too,

  Hyde concealing himself

  in bushes and swinging

  From tree to tree;

  silent Hyde; from his seed

  spring great oaks.

  THE PARADISE OF STORMS

  Pepper and salt stubble, little

  white crystals mixing with

  tiny black ones, this crystalline

  Scum expounds into its beard,

  the waves of beard

  flowing out of the skin

  Ceaselessly, day and night, registering

  by a small agitation of growth

  as the trees do

  The presence of women

  and the growth-properties

  of the weather.

  Thus the beards, and the trees:

  this one knows that a woman

  waited under it for an hour today

  During the rain; if we took

  a slice of its trunk

  and looked carefully

  At the fattening of the cambium

  which registers the shower we would see

  a small figure with a furled

  Umbrella. In a man

  that would be a barbarity.

  Can I read that lady

  In the unfurling of my beard?

  But the tree-rings should be read

  without broaching the bark

  For the perfume of a tree

  compiles its experience

  as it matures …

  The great detective pauses

  under the tree full of eyes

  in the garden of the murder-house

  And the name of the butcher

  passes into his mind

  like a whispering witness,

  He lays his hand on the culprit’s shoulder

  whose beard reeks bloody murder

  and an at-last-I-am-caught-and

  Can-rest blend of scents. Now

  the paradise of storms passes on,

  showering in every skin.

  MOTH-ER

  A sudden rose-garden in the bedroom.

  I pad my way

  through this labyrinth

  To where she is.

  As we kiss and touch our quick

  windows open to the sky,

  Which signal to her, finish.

  Every dusk she eats a moth, it is

  a winged key to the invisible,

  It trembles on her tongue,

  accepting her

  as though she were the night

  And the stars would bloom in her mouth

  when this tiny

  giving-of-all was enacted,

  By moth-kiss, by moth-death. This

  was her sin,

  she had got her sins down

  To this small murder

  and the eating up of this

  little star-map …

  Her figure reclining in violin shape,

  a little bonfire on the tongue,

  her dozing body pulses

  As though the skin were moths,

  their tones. She

  sees through her skin

  With a moth’s eye and with

  its radio tuned to moth-death,

  the final broadcast …

  Completely insupportable,

  the quicksilver-flutter,

  the burst of rank juice

  Like a turpentine, like tasting

  a painter’s brush in starlight …

  Which paints stars

  arranged in their cupolas

  like whispering galleries

  Crowded with white-faced watchers.

  She licks this brush for luck:

  the stars

  Painted across the moth’s back

  reappear in heaven.

  Now her skin is soft

  As as many moths as she’s consumed, fitted together

  in galactic designs of touch;

  this is the secret she gives to me,

  The winged jewels built into a temple,

  with her last breath

  as conscious mind and the unconscious

  Rush together, and the stench or perfume

  in her last breath seeks above

  its constellation of the Mother,

  Moth.

  NUDE DESCENDING72

  The Saint has multiplied her limbs,

  every thread of drapery a nerve

  feeling into each corner of the room

  As she descends the stairs, the nude, clothed

  only in her vapours, her great

  power-sleeves, even

  In the banal condominium

  now full of grace felt out

  by her;

  With each fresh step a new set

  of feelers is created, or wings, for her

  auric fields resemble

  The gold grain of a moth-wing;

  if we did not know that here

  is a nude descending we would believe

  We were in the presence of a queen of moths

  and her perfumes which were also light

  like clothes

  And provisional ears and muslin

  radio-dishes. Since

  this gracious passing-through,

  Epiphany, was mediated by the odours

  we do not now need

  any contrived pomps,

  For each breath of air,

  each lung-full,

  is a palace.

  MY PRINCE

  His name translated meant

  Infant Snow, Babysnow,

  The Japanese Prince;

  He was almost a young man, with

  his olive oil skin

  and his charcoal business suits;

  I wanted him to be transparent,

  and he was trying, not opaque

  or too Japanese,

  Since I was sweet

  on his sister the Princess

  which seemed to be plain sailing

  In her mind: it was our uneasiness,

  the young man’s and mine, which remained.

  Would he become my friend

  or would he stay completely

  a Prince of Blood with no affections,

  I would have liked such

  A courtly friend; and what I had to offer, why,

  his sister was sure of what that might be, even

  if I wasn’t, and I was to

  Marry her; why should the Prince

  suspect us?

  All we did, she and I

  Was to sit together in one of the palace

  halls, it was wonderful.

  XXVIII

  THE HARPER

  (2006)

  BALL LIGHTNING

  A waterfall in a vaporous glade,

  Ladders of vapour

  propped against the apple-trees

  Everywhere.

  The devotion in the old dog’s face

  as he gazes round and round

  His mistress’s garden.

  The pleasant, salt-silvered

  old house.

  The loaf on the slate shelf,

  the patient ferment.

  An agate ball of
lightning floats

  Out of the charged orchard

  like an apple-ghost

  offering itself in turn

  To our lips: house,

  dog, lover, woman,

  out of the girdle of trees

  Shedding their windfalls

  in shining cascades like waterfalls;

  she got a look from it

  That now she wears

  random and swamping,

  and so do I

  In the smell of apple-mortality

  which is sweet,

  there are tears like windfalls

  Dried on our cheeks;

  this apple-mush, these tears

  the real home of all,

  Fruit, dog, woman, lover,

  ceaseless waterfall and ancient house,

  vaporous stairs that

  Wait for our ascending.

  CORNISH PERSEPHONE

  The little Christmas tree asserts

  its pagan presence

  aglow with electric bulbs

  In the shapes of flowers, dew, castles, St Nicolas,

  all of them bursting light from within;

  then, suddenly it takes hold

  And becomes a person;

  the pine-perfume lovingly reaches

  out of it, soaking up

  A tincture of radiation

  from the small light-engines.

  It is as though

  The fairy on the peak,

  the star welding at the tip of her wand,

  has created the foliage

  By rolling her green dress down,

  and stands there,

  with the tree her whole garment,

  Gifts about her feet,

  the star fissioning on her wand,

  visiting us

  In a green shape at the steep year’s end:

  the Giantess in her lair,

  the Cornish Persephone,

  She spends the dark months

  struggling towards us

  with her light held up

  Like a Christmas Tree, light-bursting.

  She is away, or so it seems

  during the New Year –

  In March and most of April too

  she is struggling towards us

  through the mineral mire,

  And through the oiled lakes underground

  and through the cities of ore

  more capacious far

  Than the small towns of our Duchy;

  our underworld is a Birmingham of rocks

  through which she toils

  Emerging at a mine-tip in flowers

  on Goonhillie, St Day,

  and as she rises it is like

  An electricity you see because you feel it;

  When she is with us

  people live in sunlight

  As the blessed do visible and invisible too

  for the seven other months –

  all trees shake their presence out:

  Leaving her consort in the living rock,

  she rises learned

  from her imprisonment.

  THE RAINBOW

  The great reservoir

  hangs up inside itself;

  it reflects a sky

  Corroded like zinc,

  in its pewter-coloured surface

  a small squall

  Patches the water

  into roughened metal:

  you shall perceive

  All the colours of the world

  in the cold gust crossing:

  to sip

  At a tumbler of its water is

  to set open a glass of dream.

  A clew of sunbeams hangs

  Suddenly in the brimming glass,

  sipping this water at her lips

  charged her

  With its reflections,

  moistened her yoni

  with nude water,

  And she felt a rainbow

  of pleasure

  shining through the squall

  Within her,

  up there,

  and in her reservoir.

  TRIAL BY MALLET

  He was lean, fast-moving,

  darkly-handsome,

  wore white-and-black

  Like me; I had to fight

  this younger man

  in the long and arch-roofed room

  Like a storm-drain, ancient brick

  scrawled over

  with white lime crusts

  And hedgehogged with pencil-stalactites.

  It was raining solid rods,

  water-curtains muffled

  The entrance-arch, inside

  the shelly pendules started

  to drip clear water.

  A third man in formal dress was present,

  he carried, for the coup de grâce,

  a lunar penknife blade,

  Its small scythe flashing

  in the ambiguous light

  of two torches

  Struck flaming in iron brackets.

  We each grasped

  the thick stems

  Of the iron-bound mallets;

  it was Trial by Mallet, I could see us

  as we would be

  If this duel began,

  crushed bone creaming

  in the black cloth it rent,

  Two men moused by the cats-clawed mallets.

  One of us demanded

  a limit on the tally

  Of blows, our umpire

  grinned like that cat

  and shook his head,

  We could almost see the pleased tail swish

  under his tailcoat;

  this shared glimpse

  Made me remember

  that my opponent was also my friend,

  near to a brother,

  By trade a pilot

  full of strategies, vitality, navigations,

  so why did we plan to fight

  In this storm-drain underground,

  whose body was to be flushed

  out to sea on the flood?

  My friend, I thought,

  the storm is coming on, with thunder, soon

  we shall be fighting

  Knee-deep in its torrents.

  I caught his eye, and as one man

  we turned towards the umpire

  For answers, the mallets heavy

  as our children’s heads.

  TRUE WASP

  On the twentieth of this November

  I noticed wasps

  eating a toad flattened by cars –

  They were tearing away

  strips of toad-skin

  braided to the asphalt;

  Later the same day I saw

  a dead mouse opened by its own gas

  with wasps studding its backbone:

  It was their season,

  turning horror to vigour;

  turning eyes downwards

  I saw wasps pinching

  fine ginger crumbs

  from a reclining dogturd;

  By the sweet hum of the small power-station

  I was caught in our mother the rain

  and still the wasps came weaving

  Between the drops slow as syrup,

  never struck and always steady,

  entering the machinery

  To collect light from the cables,

  winged vessels distilling sharp venom

  in the great wasp

  Nesting hum of the transformers

  painted yellow and black, separating

  bitterness from light.

  CORE

  We cannot hear the voice

  of this machine,

  they scan the unborn

  With ultra-sound –

  Will the foetus not be bonded

  to this song,

  Will inaudible whistles not

  become its mother?

  Is whistling at girls

  With ultra-sound not wrong?

  A transparent window opens

  suddenly in their bellies

 
Disclosing a buddha-face

  in shadows on a VDU

  semaphoring its arms

  Below the belt:

  through the swiftly-transparent

  muscle-skin walls

  A sudden clear glass appears

  and suspended there

  the star

  Of fivepoints shines

  within the apple-womb

  weaving her fingers,

  Beating at her temple walls:

  the Core;

  or, the sixpointed male

  Waving to us

  through the skin and flesh.

  AUTUMN LOVELETTER

  The skin-of-the-earth-shining

  as you walk towards the tree

  which has exuded

  A sheening envelope of sap;

  it is like a door

  opened in the trunk

  And, inside the door,

  something to drink.

  I move closer, and think,

  After Bunyan:

  ‘In this Land the Shining Ones

  commonly walked,

  Because it was

  on the borders of heaven.’ The aroma

  and the fragrance of new thoughts

  Were perceptible in these designs

  of balsams and barks …

  What is a Grail-Winner?

  Why, any man who frees the waters

  in the woman by her consent, which means

  he is a rainmaker

  As she is. He knows

  from a bad temper in the sky

  that the rain will soon

  Come down here: irritability

  above the barley-fields

  seldom persists, it relents

  In heavy and opulent showers. The barley-beard

  pierces every drop that falls …

  A bird fighting its shadow

  On a whitewashed wall,

  coming at it

  with beating wings, stabbing

  Beak and claws …

  that apple-tree’s fruit

  with stars in its mansion

  Shall serve as meat for all;

  the thrush energetically

  excavating the last ones

  In the tree,

  taking boxer’s stance on the apple-domes

  and stabbing into them

  With swift wet strokes …

  at Maenporth the woman

  climbs out of the plasm,

  Out of the darkened tabernacles,

  and there is

  the golden-glow

  Of the heroic skin, alive

  with its inexcusable hazard. She

  drops her soiled robes

  As she comes, the black

  off the golden glow,

  the mudworks full

  Of emergency eyes

  that marvel at her form …

  the nectar of the tree

  Is flowing from the doorway

  under the shining lintel:

  any tree, mound,

  Standing stone

  can take you thus inside, if you have