i.m. Peter Redgrove

The lithic who makes a pal in death
teaches me not to die so slowly.
“Many ways to become lineal” he says,
“to write The Sounding Book.”

Everything close as a finger thimble;
a lock of hair from Proserpine
the tropics in Technicolor,
drumcliff tapped by a solitary cloud.

You lifted a finger over Gogol,
Little Russia droned bee-like.
And when they fired you up
Uhland took you in his colossal lung.

*

I’ve arrived late, apprentice imp,
to where you tripped out on yoga visions
and saw the 22,000 year origins of art
insetted by a single flint;
to the Gale Chambers of the Vast Nose,
Cornish galleons tucked under the ocean like rain.

Who’s to decide between glass economies
or the drowsy pulp of the sea?
It ties the forensic squad in knots—

the way groundswell fattens
from a single rock, remakes itself
into delicate gemstone.

*

These days The Book of Thresholds
fits firm for a pillow,
it wakes me with an empire’s relish.

No identity preference, no thumb guide.
Only scent variations,
each murmurous, each perennial.

The footnotes appear Pythagorean
cupid seminaries/vanity carnivals
vs. GIGANTIC LABOUR.

No monument decision—
nothing on the slumberous reek
of a salmon polished by the sun.

*

We apprentice poets need an innovator,
“verbal haemoglobin,” not a casket key.
I repeat the only rule you knew as mantra:

everything is invitation.

Check out his excellent magazine, The Wolf.