Barry Tebb Poems

I sat on a low stone wall

Watching the blue blood of the azaleas

Spatter on Haworth's cobbles.



A seamless transparency of rain

Lowering over the turning trees

My thoughts drifting to Claudel's

‘Five Great Odes', to the stone marker

To the swathes of heather.

I stood on the moor top

Where the tracks cross

The fellside green

The fellside ochre,

Shifting reflections

Of Cйzanne's last winter.
...

The Poetry School, The Poetry Book Society, The Poetry Business:

So much poetry about you'd think I'd want to shout, “Hurray, hurray,

Every day's Poetry Day!” but I don't and you don't either-

You know its flim-flam on the ether, grants for Jack-the-lads

Of both sexes, poets who've never been seen in a little magazine

Then gone on to win the Oopla Prize and made baroque architecture

The subject of an O.U. lecture.



Seventy five pounds for a seminar on sensitivity in verse;

A hundred and fifty for an infinitely worse whole weekend of

‘Steps towards a personal fiction in post-modern diction';

And the inevitable course anthology, eight pounds for eleven

Nameless poets Pascale Petit and Mimi Kahlvati carefully selected

From, well honestly! Who cares? God only knows how banal they're

Bound to be. Budding Roddy Lumsdens, (Has anyone read a Roddy

Lumsden

Poem?) “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” his first collection short-listed here and

there -

The sheer hype's enough to put me off for life.



I still write at bus-stops and avoid competitions like the plague.

I'm not lucky that way, I've still to win a single literary prize.

Is there one for every day of the year? And as for James Kirkup,

My mentor of forty-odd years, his name evokes blank stares; but

Look him up in ‘Who's Who', countless OUP collections, the best-

ever

Version of Valйry's ‘Cimetiиre Marin', translations from eleven

tongues

Including Vietnamese. Is there nothing Jamie can do to please?



I help one poet to write and one to stay alive;

Please God help poor poets thrive.
...

Arriving for a reading an hour too early:

Ruefully, the general manager stopped putting out the chairs.

“You don't get any help these days. I have

To sort out everything from furniture to faxes.

Why not wander round the park? There are ducks

And benches where you can sit and watch.”



I realized it was going to be a hungry evening

With not even a packet of crisps in sight.

I parked my friend on a bench and wandered

Down Highgate Hill, realising where I was

From the Waterlow Unit and the Whittington's A&E.

Some say they know their way by the pubs

But I find psychiatric units more useful.

At a reading like this you never know just who

Might have a do and need some Haldol fast.

(Especially if the poet hovering round sanity's border

Should chance upon the critic who thinks his Word

Is law and order - the first's a devotee of a Krishna cult

For rich retirees; the second wrote a good book once

On early Hughes, but goes off if you don't share his

‘Thought through views').



In the event the only happening was a turbanned Sikh

Having a go at an Arts Council guru leaning in a stick.

I remembered Martin Bell's story of how Scannell the boxer

Broke - was it Redgrove's brolly? - over his head and had

To hide in the Gents till time was called.

James Simmons boasted of how the pint he threw

At Anthony Thwaite hit Geoffrey Hill instead.



O, for the company of the missing and the dead

Martin Bell, Wendy Oliver, Iris and Ted.
...

for Brenda



Both had come with no gardener but the soul;

I had myself expressed them in weariness,

Like the last drop of milk from your tired breast.

The red rose was no rose for me.

My black rose shone in a silver dawn

In the throat of the wind.



On the tongue of the wind

I taste your spirit;

I will bear you on my toes

To the roof of the world.
...

I

Living in a land

Where only the dying correspond

I am borne on the wings of love



II

I cannot join in a poem

The interstices of clouds

I watched a lapwing

Hover in the air

Glide in an arc

Veer from the sheer cliff



III

Who shall I meet

On this journey to eternity?

Alone and yet not alone

The dust of immortality

Lies in strangers' eyes

Girls in all the beauty

Of their youth, old men with sticks

No one afraid of anyone

‘No strangers here

Just friends we have yet to meet



IV

‘Angels Fine English Lace'

This was the post office

In the time of the Brontes

Here the famous manuscripts

Were posted.



V

Perhaps I'll meet on the pebbled road

Michael Haslam in elfin form

Shape-shifter or leprechaun



VI

One of a gang of Keighley girls

Going clubbing in Leeds put her arms

Round my neck and sang “Won't you be my lover?”

Eternities beyond Winnicott's ‘spontaneous gesture'.
...

(May I lie in peace)



Let there be grass and trees to blow

And fold me in their shadow

Branches to shake and leaves

Turn brown, fall and lie fallow.

Let there be moorlands swept by wind

And raked by rain, purple splashes of heather

In autumn and sturdy boulders our forefathers

Carved their names on, emerald and slippery with moss

And pebble-strewn sheep-tracks crossing ditch and dyke

Where sudden rills of hill water strike free from

Hidden meanderings with the splash and rush

Of sudden laughter.



Let me lie with the sighing wind for choir,

Moss and lichen my only cover

When my earthy days are over.
...

They have vanished, the pop men with their varnished crates

Of Tizer and dandy, American ice-cream soda and one percent shandy.

The clunk of frothy quarts dumped on donkey-stoned doorsteps

Is heard no more, nor the neighs of restless mares between the shafts.

The shining brass of harness hangs in bar-rooms or droops

From imitation beams.



Gelded stallions no longer chomp and champ

In stalls beneath the slats of shadowed lofts with straw-bales

And hay-ricks as high as houses lazing in lantern light.

The ashes of the carts they pulled have smouldered into silence,

The clatter over cobbles of iron shoes and shouts of “Whoa, lass!”

Hushed in this last weariness.
...

It was Karl Shapiro who wrote in his ‘Defence of Ignorance' how many poets

Go mad or seem to be so and the majority think we should all be in jail

Or mental hospital and you have ended up in both places - fragile as bone china,

Your pale skin taut, your fingers clasped tight round a cup, sitting in a pool

Of midnight light, your cats stretched flat on your desk top's scatter

Under the laughing eyes of Sexton and Lowell beneath Rollie McKenna's seamless shutter.



Other nights you hunch in your rocking chair, spilling rhythms

Silently as a bat weaves through midnight's jade waves

Your sibylline tongue tapping every twist or the syllable count

Deftly as Whistler mixed tints for Nocturnes' nuances or shade

Or Hokusai tipped every wave crest.



You pause when down the hall a cat snatches at a forbidden plant,

“Schubert, Schubert”, you whisper urgently for it is night and there are neighbours.

The whistle of the forgotten kettle shrills: you turn down the gas

And scurry back to your poem as you would to a sick child

And ease the pain of disordered lines.

The face of your mother smiles like a Madonna bereft

And the faces of our children are always somewhere

As you focus your midnight eyes soft with tears.



You create to survive, a Balzac writing against the clock

A Baudelaire writing against the bailiff's knock

A Valйry in the throes of ‘Narcisse Parle'.



When a far clock chimes you sigh and set aside the page:

There is no telephone to ring or call: I am distant and sick,

Frail as an old stick

Our spirits rise and fall like the barometer's needle

Jerk at a finger tapping on glass

Flashbacks or inspiration cry out at memory loss.

You peer through a magnifying glass at the typeface

Your knuckles white with pain as the sonnet starts to strain

Like a child coming to birth, the third you never bore.



All births, all babies, all poems are the same in coming

The spark of inspiration or spurt of semen,

The silent months of gestation, the waiting and worrying

Until the final agony of creation: for our first son's

Birth at Oakes we had only a drawer for a crib.

Memories blur: all I know is that it was night

And at home as you always insisted, against all advice

But mine. I remember feebly holding the mask in place

As the Indian woman doctor brutally stitched you without an anaesthetic

And the silence like no other when even the midwives

Had left: the child slept and we crept round his make-shift cradle.



At Brudenell Road again it was night in the cold house

With bare walls and plug-in fires: Bob, the real father

Paced the front, deep in symphonic thought:

Isaiah slept: I waited and watched - an undiagnosed breech

The doctor's last minute discovery - made us rush

And scatter to have you admitted.



I fell asleep in the silent house and woke to a chaos

Of blood and towels and discarded dressings and a bemused five year old.

We brought you armsful of daffodils, Easter's remainders.

“Happy Easter, are the father?” Staff beamed

As we sat by the bedside, Bob, myself and John MacKendrick,

Brecht and Rilke's best translator

Soon to die by his own hand.

Poetry is born in the breech position

Poems beget poems.
...

To Simon Jenner



NO ARMITAGE (I'd like to see his rage)

NO DUHIG (one dig long overdue)

NO GREENLAW (M & S might sue)

NO IMLAH (ditto the TLS)

NO CRICHTON SMITH or JAMIE

(Tuma's not haggis-crazy)

NO CONSTANTINE (who'll miss his donnish whine?)

NO LONGLEY (the QMP tick didn't do the trick)

NO PORTER (long overdue for slaughter)

NO MAXWELL, MORRISON or MOTION

(to miss that lot I'd swim an ocean)

NO PATERSON, NO BURNSIDE,

NO SWEENEY or O'BRIEN

(triumphs of criticism by omission),

BUT WHY DID PRYNNE REFUSE TO BE IN?

-wilful obscurity, hidden grandiosity-

-what is this Prynne idolatry?

All those New Gen poets

Thwacked by omission

NOT EVEN PAULIN IS IN

NO DUNMORE OR DURCAN

O'DONOGHUE or BHATT

-you can hardly do better than that!

It really made my day

Pity it was too late for you

To review in ERATICA TWO



Note: QMP- Queen's Medal for Poetry
...

I sit inside the train of tears

The station mellow in shade

Unoriginal phrases air-brush the canvas.



Puzzling minds I wonder

If all are like my own

Closed to stillness.



From girders hang the acrobats of gone

Pearl grey Whistlers. We sat on

A train like this once, you and I,

Face to face but travelling

In opposite directions-

Or was it you alone I watched depart,

Stood on the platform edge, anxious and alert?
...