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Jacket 19 — October 2002   |   # 19  Contents   |   Homepage   |  Catalog   |
This issue of Jacket is a collaboration with Verse magazine



Peter Redgrove

Preliminaries


Like a dog
  the house shakes itself awake,
                                            the premises present
Once more, of the sailing ponds
                 and the long straight irrigation;
                                         and the gossamer threads,
Their flights like a dew
                   arrowing in the sunlight;
                                                 fast as I awaken
The flying sages
                                   soar back to heaven. . .
                                                  There is a storm coming,
As a spider breaks
                          her bed before bad weather
                                                I slam doors before the storm
And shout at myself
                    in the innocent mirrors,
                                                  howl at the innocent mirrors
And at the miasmas that are arriving. . .
                                                                         the hot air strokes the seeds
In the little grass-summer
             of the day’s beginning,
                                             and they ache for rain;
The cat sneezes
                              delicately as a debutante;
                                                the autumn arrives
In all the gardens at once
                        in the weather-rockeries
                                                  that change hue
As the seaweed alters in the landlady’s hall
   of the house where I have
                                                 such innocent thoughts about you. . .
The fractures of ore
           are dreaming in each boulder;
                                             heavy rains rise
And mysteriously fall
                               out of the thinnest cloud
                                                 as though everything
Desired to grow heavy
                           as rock; and in the fissures
                                              of the black rock-garden
Lightning; in these granite stones
          there is a quiver
                                                         of fluorescence as the ghosts
Of storm pass
                          freely into the stones
                                                    and out again;
Robing the stones the mists
                           pile up in the morning; the sages
                                         of the lawns arrive
And stand, willing grass
                         out of ghost,
                                                             having made rock
Out of ghost.


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