GRANT TARBARD

 

Grant passed away Monday, 4^th April. The following were published in The Lake between November, 2014 and January, 2022.

 

 

The Sacrament of Falstaff

 

We sieve through our yellowing photographs,

curled at the tip like railway sandwiches

to see who is keeping what memory,

picking apart our conjoined lives like bread

loaves to feed the park birds. Do you want one

of me being Falstaff in the day ward?

Take all the pictures of yourself, you’ll be

an impression of a face I used to

love, machine printed as I see you typed

across my eyelids. Photographs aren’t made

with straight lines, they are a hugger-mugger

of half-truces, dancing with faked delight.

They are a way of seeing into the past,

a spiritual journey captured on film.

 

 

I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine

 

Separate the fractures of my day, I

pout a concert of birds between breaths as

an impassive whistle through gritted teeth.

I make my silence an amalgam of

feedback and teary-eyed sing-a-longs, a

mug of beer and a stick to bite down on.

I write these suicide sonnets, one a

day murmuring to the iPad screen, like

I owe a debt to a lost argument,

arrows ripping through a dead horse’s flesh.

Why do we bind meaning to this feeble

animation? We are all ghastly pith.

The answer to life is simply this; food

is either coming in or going out.

 

 

Tabernacle

 

She felt the grim maul of a surgeon's 

thumbs cat-eyed inside her, nodding out plum

feathers of gas and air. Wince the downy

hush of needle into spine, riddling pain

across the dispatches of her skin. We 

held hands as the tabernacle of her

contractions acquiesced to the point of

reward; one more God among many schemes.

In that Lilliputian room there occurred 

a transfiguration, your pink tissue 

origami’d, a forge making new breath,

I thought the world no longer belongs to 

us. And I was right, it just took decades 

for you to be just a rumour to me.

 

 

I Had A Whirlwind Life When I Was 8

 

I wanted more excitement. I took a trip round the world,

haggled out of my pocket money at a rug market in Istanbul

 

culminating in taking peyote in a Manchester bus station, 

like all bad nights when I was eight. My organs were animals 

 

fighting each other, digging my spleen for a late night shish kebab. 

I gambled on my natural teeth hindering my pleasure intake. I kept 

 

it closer to home, cutting my hair during sleep. No, I’d have to invent 

a machine for that and I didn’t own a functioning pencil. I changed 

 

my name by Deed Poll to Big Dick Daddy Yum Yum, which, at 8, 

I thought was funny and my motto was A Boy Needs A Pencil, 

 

which now is somewhere buried murmuring 

through a dungeon of throw cushions. 

 

 

Boleyn

 

From within the clamour and tonnage 

of court life I, warmly fearless, a restless 

grandiose, did assure the king of my purity. 

 

As it turned out the curtain had already fallen, 

salvation raised its eyebrow too my youthful grace 

that was regarded as a blackbird, a bad omen for England. 

 

My placid character was found to be unacceptable, 

one long season of rain disconcerting my king’s advisers, 

their words form themselves as a fog over London. Lord, 

 

preserve my shadow for tonight the grave shall not have me, 

I swallow my voice as a jewel, I fear I will be a pseudonym 

for a bloody end. Am I the wife homogeneous, an imitation 

 

of her obscure ribboned veins, her low violet hook into him, 

sophisticated as flame. I will become transparent, whispered 

arms, a hush between the legs. I will become a conspiracy 

 

of nudity’s kiss where the kingsmen exam the bath water. 

I am alone, I am scrutinised and his true nature forged this 

precise moment, in my solitude. And this, the way women 

 

wish for beauty only leads to him removing my charming 

delicacies and an absorbing abyss of labor pangs. What magic 

will shine in this freckled vacuum, far away from his want? 

 

My weak contents fund a terrible shortness of breath. 

 

 

Luggage

 

The writer grumbled,

donned serious glasses.

A Fez was considered.

 

He takes with him

only the vinegar of his kiss

wrapped in brown paper.

 

The luggage of a writer

is of juvenile memories-

sitting by the window

 

and watching all of Man

as the sunset burned

into the thirsty pall.

 

Beside his muddled socks

dreams are kept in rings of smoke,

with any troubles his feet tickle.

 

In his baggage there are women,

their look — wire stiff and redhead.

They kept the strangest flowers,

 

murmurings of lotus-eaters,

under the weight of their fabric.

The writer is a collector of fibres,

 

his thin appearance between

buttons seals him in a plumage

of masks and strung up hands,

 

little wrists like nightingale skeletons.

The writer is a jacket of beauty annoyed,

words teething in a head of rags.

 

 

Letter to a Funnel-Web Woman

 

If, say, you were on a train pulling away

I’d smell the scent of your fresh kill. The blood,

 

its distinctive iron would pull me like a magnet

onto your balled fist carriage. Would I sit

 

beside your carapace packed neatly away?

I imagine your eyes would regard me as prey,

 

would they recognise one you loved once

if it was only the time it takes a spring flower

 

to wither? Cocooned in silk rags over lamps

making the light take a gulp of breath.

 

If I did see you would you echo my hellos

just for an ambush to add my limp sequence

 

of cells to your catalog of skeletons? Your eyes

are opium, they anoint and anaesthetise me —

 

the absence of physical sensation allures my pain,

as if I were in a burning house and you were water.

 

If, say, you were on a train pulling away

I’d miss you as if you were the air in my lungs.

 

 

Pretty Boy

 

Capturing the present seemed inconceivable 

when young as a babe that was never meant to be.

 

As a child without veins I faded the skies,

forever I rose in my hospital green best 

 

humming the waltzed melody of witches

and the scrupulous language of doctors.

 

In between conditions I lived in deletions, 

down a supine close lay my father's brute hands  

 

abrading my skin with cut price soap.

And I, cushion belied, was a disappointment,

 

a shivering choreography of breadth 

regurgitated out of mother's umbilical sewing box.

 

Youth was an entanglement of clenches, 

pinned down in confused toilets, sex in his unwanted breath.

 

Youth was a flushed kiss on a gymnasium mat 

stretching those nervous fabrics, full of God.

 

The sailing hazel branches of her wet hair

exposing Aphrodite brown nipples through chlorine,

 

her slit visible as she attempted star jumps in the pool

with me as her brace. I kissed my cracked lips to her elfin name. 

 

Capturing the present seems so serious now,

the dust grows thick between gnawed ribs.

 

 

The Scenery Built Around Silence

 

The baby fusses for its mother’s sour teat

turned to salt in this balmy April

afternoon, in the theatre bar where I now

rest. She re-enacts the phantom movements,

 

an exhausted mime migrating 

her raw chalk breast to the beckoning babes 

unplucked lips, new as a grass shoot. 

Hush is on tick, drifting as fog. 

 

The powdered lull, as lyrical as a waxen flower.

You’re a lucky one the mother intones 

look at that man there, 

the one with the belly of a gull, grizzled straws 

 

of hair, pallid man, he doesn’t have a dahlia

hidden in his pocket I can tell you.

The old man, with a face like an unmade bed

just curled the edge of his newspaper.

 

 

The Conceit of Me

 

There's no dignity in me, I'm laid bare, 

stripped carcass pummelled with needles, small cock 

wrapped in cottonwool like a tooth for the

fairies. Take out my stomach, expel it

from the sour of the morning, my red raw

splayed carrion tutting in my bowels. 

I was a shoplifter, whooshing rugs out 

of supermarkets, that beautiful me 

has been an act of philanthropy, these

loose boards are stuffed with stolen mice to feed 

us through the fainting linen midwinter,

conceited me that bloats our hamlet's tat.

And me is bare skinned, me is a sealed box,

me feet have changed shape to sow my stubble.

 

 

How to Be the Air

 

I am from nothing, a beak’s whistle of 

cloud, a piece of November intended 

to be oxygen with time’s vehement 

salt white rhythm, insubstantial as blown ash. 

Imagine buoyancy with a flushed cheeked

smoke of a vanishing terrace of spent 

cigarettes, variations of ribbons 

of silk spooning in the ventilation.

The problems arise when one wants to land,

mistrusting finger joints, for how can one 

grab at the aerials on the rooftops 

when one is air about the slain light’s room,

snatching at the tobacco tins of my 

grandfather’s loose nails to fasten me down.

 

 

All His Summers Would Belong to Her

1952, outside a youth club in Havering Road, Romford

 

The outside was bare,

an avalanche of nothing.

All the tress were scratched 

 

out, all the houses

were skinless drums waiting to

be mended with hides.

 

On the altar of 

dereliction, rapture has 

a dress rehearsal,

 

he looks at her through 

a fug of Frankie Lane and

Mario Lanza

 

and the outside was

suddenly Technicolor.

All his summers were

 

ripe for the picking.

Henceforth, all his young summers

would belong to her.

 

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