Peter Riley Poems

The little valley in the foothills
tall birches and twisting stream
snowy crests beyond in sunlight
a marten runs across the road
first thin cherry blossom in the fields
a bell-tower at the crest of each village.

Later sitting on the station platform very cold
suffering pain from an oesophagal hernia
surveying the council houses beyond the track
so like home.

Cathar country, how people survive
or don't and leave a trace in the mind
that survives through centuries, a trace
of defiance, that the world is open, a blue book
wrapped in wool, clutched to the chest
over high and snowy passes.
...

Now she cracks hazelnuts on the floor
with a hammer and hands me the kernels
to eat, taste of wood. The town outside
is dark, people are at home. One or two
are bitter-sweet. Yes, some are good
and some are bad. There is music on the radio
by Orlando di Lasso also known as Lassus,
who once sat with William Byrd in a small boat
and they were rowed across the Thames at night.
And all of that is good.

Domini— exaudi
the cat seizes a nut and runs off with it
orationem meum
the pile of husks on the matting
is greater, at each entry

there is a purity, a goodness:
the generous gift given always calmly
that is my oratio, song and dance
counterpoint and harmony
we stayed up specially for this, it is
my dance tonight, my rhetorick to say
there is a purity which is a goodness
and the generous gift is calmly given
all the time, and I know that out of this
special place it is not given or calm
or good or bad but here it is so utterly
said and heard that it lives on.

The Mass is built on a popular song
which says "Since I have lost" and all the time
in all the specialness we can't omit to notice
that we have also lost, a phrase which is
never far away, tucked into the whole edifice
I am alone, I have lost, I am not what I seem;
indeed we have abandoned and lost so much to be
in this observance together the whole of the earth
and our good sleep, staying specially awake in case
a purity exists by which a gift is given not
necessarily to us but as a giving which exists and
we are forced to recognise against our loss
a constancy.

It is the material of this song, movement and time
breaking into the structure, symmetry encrusted
on stone, the whole theatre of what is set forth
"as if it were natural" reaching to an admission,
that it is ruined in time. The sculpture reverts
to the quarry face: we have lost, we have lost
so much by the time it weaves to an end
that we are hardly where we are and
have donated all our presence into a sung and
danced oratio which reaches its end. Over
the sea or Thames in some dark cave or quarry
is an inscription on a carved tomb
which says again that the utter gift is constant.
Post Scriptum: we have lost.
Appendix: J'ai perdu.

And the gift is of what, of what is,
the human being the person given
to the totality the commonality
given to the continuance over the air beyond
the person in a grand manner of perception,
and here also the enclosure of house, room,
group of two assuming ourselves into the future
by a child, so given entire with a clause in
small print: we also lose, we must, otherwise
these things made are of such
colossal beauty these masses tombs and
mutual percepts we might petrify on the spot,
we'd have nothing at all.
A particle, or seed, remains, "lost"
to the immediate city and
isn't this how we survive, how we survive
our own generosity and purity, isn't this
our mark of love?
...

150. Ekelöf's Dream
Dead hand in my hand responding, turning, dead taste in my mouth like stale rice. Histories of fear: How the king was dismembered. And when only an arm and head were left was asked, "Are you still sentient?" Yes: the big blue eyes staring out hard and clear to the horizon muttering She and onlie she /what shall I do without Che farò senza and where do it? — on what map, on what paper smeared with dismal farms. The answering silence

2. The answering enemy, the Warrior who tried to kill my voice but missed and struck a hole just above my eyes, black ticket to the cancelled future, small with insipidity and unresponse, caught in the dream unable to [wake, die, love] at the mercy of time's silence again — but also, "a kind of turning" [tillvändhet: to/from-ness] /these, who craved for life, and lie, like left-overs on a plate, rubbish in the street. Plimsoll altars, full of static, all the messages wrenched to a capsule, until the unfolding. Until the soul is called out of it (because someone needs it) — father, mother, wife, turn again.
...

I

Heaps of fruit piled up against the houses
grandfathers piled up in the ground
churchyard fruit, pears, cherries
travellers selling small bags of hazels

If all the world is to go the same way —
all one empire, all serving the one broker? —
a thin sigh in the fields, baby
where did our love go?

The house in the fields
breathes, its timbers
flex in the night changes,
the star wheels churn

Piles of apples outside in the yard
yellow and red in separate heaps
slowly, under careful control
rotting into the music.


XI

Open land, then forest, then air.

Leonardo Bruni said that the harmonious
workings of the institutions of Florence
derived from the beauty and geometry
of the Tuscan landscape.

A thin track, a line in the grass across
the pastures and over the riverside humps
everywhere worked, the shape of the place
carved from work, lines curving to meet,
leading ultimately homewards
...

A wooden bowl full of blue and red berries,
fresh from the bushes beside the roads, washed of petrol stains.
Take it: love with reason, their eyes say,
therefore hope, without reserve.
Take the gift, accept the reason, lever our hearts over the barricade
with an explanation.

The children stare wide eyed at the strangers
and smile for ever. The day
moulded out of light, the mutual seed,
springs open in time it costs nothing but persistence.
A linking gesture across the border holds the ring dance open to
the hearth,
where the old ones sit.

Wisps of blue smoke rise from the houses
into the distance. The true moment moves among us,
everyone's work as it works everyone's
fault as it fails, held in the song's return, a hope
balanced on a point of flesh against fate's gerrymandering,
everyone's wish in your tear ever shining

And stabled there. Politicians and clouds
brush the fine heads of the children turned upwards;
a laugh, short and light, rolls down the land,
a reasoned hope in which they turn in the dance, hand on sleeve:
Welcome welcome, bird in the bush, fish in the flood,
futureless presence ringing the earth.
...

Now I put 500 books into cardboard boxes
And the boxes into the back of the car hoping
Springs and axle will take the weight
Then walk out across the town, the fox's
Lair gaily tarnisht today in winter light
The cubist garden, stone walls sloping
With and across. Walk to a purpose and wait
For that pause in the business and shopping
When a spark of world falls and locks
Itself behind the ear, a sky-connected fate
Capsule, small as a bee's sting, groping
Down the spine in search of a heart, down the throat
In search of a voice to say you make an art
Of these days among people, your prime state.
...

Dug into the edge of nations
inhabiting the frictions of light
keeping the sentences locked

Until they're needed,
keeping silence, Lebanese
wine in the cellars

Reserved for visitors
hiss of dust against white walls
the messages cased and locked

And passed from life to life in
silence, the syntax unbroken, the fruit
held from its fearful result.

Patience and fortune at rest
on a thread, a spring in the desert.
We repeat the text again and again

At first light and evening
because it is true because
it cannot be moved or pictured.

A stone breaks in the west, a bud
of dust on the horizon meaning
trouble as the sky crashes

Daily to our feet. Our transmission
is fixed and immediate, solitude and obscurity
make our beds. A stone breaks

In the east, wild truckers
scorch the horizon spreading
immense suffering and loss, the dust

Of their passage glitters on the floor.
We scoop it up and blend it with
goat fat to make a binding paste

For the books in the library
that we can't read. We bury
the dead, they haven't got time.

What else can we do? What is
left of us after they have all gone
is a body faithful from its centre

Further than it can see
as we toil at common tasks
absorbed in our procedures

Hardly aware of the uncertainty
and ecstasy hoarded under the line
the fuel in the cellar that

Fires our fate, to maintain
beneficence without object and virtue
without enemy and cry in the desert

For he is mine and I am
his again and again in
love and war. At night

The stars screen our orders
and the small fire in the clay room
burns prepositions. Edge-life

Squats, guardian tomb, all days
positioned and engaged, ensuring
that the only possible result

Be the exactly possible outcome
as the flesh line is held straight
and true here by the equinox, and whatever

Speed kills cells or wastes
earth with excitement anywhere, here
it is altered, it is given

Back before it can be loaded.
Heart levels cross at night
in the stone shed alone with love's answer,

True loves at war,
mine and yours. For we meet, serve,
and retire for good, as you know.
...

Grace and honour descend the hill, seeking
the human heart, brushing aside the wasps
and folding that knotted academy in clay hands . . .

Our front window looked out two miles over
pasture and woodland thick with the sheen of equity
that without a word edits thought against
greed and fantasy, pale emblems shelved
at the field edges, fading nightly into dream. We held
onto this like grim death, we sank our trust in
curtained arbours in a stone house and formed a child,
who mothered us through opening Sundays.

And two miles away was a great ridge, a dark
green mass strung with white stone walls,
at its highest point an ancestral grave, a circular
fate capsule of long stones. It was always there
though the light came and failed. At night the ridge
was a grey sleeper against the sky and white messages
flew into the front window, pierced the night and
focused the day, calling to the mind, calling
to the cusped heart, calling together
the kind forces that hunt us to death.
...

The reveille sang out in the yards of the barracks,
And the morning wind blew on the street lamps.

It was that time when a swarm of harmful dreams
Makes the dusky youths twist and turn on their pillows
When, like a bleeding eye that throbs as it moves
The lamp makes a red stain on the daylight
When the soul, fretted and heavy under the weight of the body,
Mimics the hostility between lamp and light.
Like a face full of tears that the breezes wipe clean,
The air is full of the tremor of vanishing things
And men and women tired of language, and tired of love.

Here and there the house chimneys began to smoke,
The women of the town, their eyelids pale,
Their mouths open, slept their stupid sleep.
The homeless old women, dragging their thin cold breasts,
Blew on the embers and blew on their fingers
It was that time when, what with the cold and the dearth
The pains increase of women in labour.
Like a sob interrupted by a froth of blood
The far cry of the cockerel tore apart the misty air,
A sea of fogs washed the buildings
And people in pain in the depths of hospitals
Let out their final rattle in uneven hiccups.
The party-goers walked on home, wrecked by their efforts.

Dawn shivering in a green dress with pink roses
Advanced slowly towards the deserted Seine,
And dark Paris, rubbing its eyes,
Reached for its tools, old working man.
...