TRIBUTE TO GRANT TARBARD

This loss hurts: Every poet leaves behind a husk of words — a vivid, ephemeral shape that might be beautiful (and often startling) but which is nonetheless as dead as the mind that spun it out of ichor and microscopic feathers. We (readers and friends) can fill that chitinous corpse with our living breath and send it flying off again — not alive (oh no, not that) but as an effective simulacra of the life that was— a screech owl, or a spirit moth. In this way, the dead rise again. 

Grant Tarbard is dead. He's dead, and all of his lovely words have skittered off, with their wings cut. It's up to us to gather them again. It's up to us to keep his many books free from the dust. Here are a few: As I Was Pulled Under the Earth (Lapwing Publications); Yellow Wolf (Writing Knights Press); Loneliness is the Machine that Drives the World (Platypus Press); Rosary of Ghosts (Indigo Dreams Press). He published much more than this, and everything he wrote deserves to be both enjoyed and remembered.

Grant was among the first friends I made when I moved to the UK. He published a few of my poems in his online journal (The Screech Owl) and we spoke together often after that. I told him things that my husband doesn't know, and he returned the favour. The man was an exemplary poet, but his poems only encapsulate a fraction of the man. He was witty, funny, inquisitive, and deeply moral —not in the dry only-on-Sundays, rigid as rigor mortis, closed minded sense that is usually meant. He had the generous, expansive morality of the true artist. He loved his family. He loved his son. He loved watching football, and listening to Nick Cave. He loved so damned much of this sad, broken world. And he wrote about it in a way that saw and loved its brokenness, even as he asked for more. 

About a week before he died, Grant asked me to provide a blurb for his upcoming pamphlet This Is The Carousel Your Mother Warned You About. I hadn't had the chance to finish it before hearing the news of his departure. Let me tell you, it is a muscular, powerful book. His poems tore the paintings from the walls and rendered them as personal as a traumatic brain injury. I hope that it will still be published.

This is an excerpt from his poem 'Beguiling With A Gallows Jig':

At that wink the world stopped with dizzy games,

stillness in the grain stack ingests cities

beguiling with the iron scent of rain,

dancing a gallows jig on the nostrils.

That's as fine a note as any to end on. 

I wrote a poem for him, too:

Screech

For Grant Tarbard

Askalaphos knew the jig was up

when he saw the blood of the pomegranate

glistening on Persephone's pale, drawn lips.

He counted the seeds

(onetwothreefourfivesix)

and flew up, through the dark cracks in the earth,

the mantle of his sky,

to deliver his message to his Lady's mother.

The world was frostbitten, scorched in the umbra

of Demeter's desolation.

She didn't take it well. Breaking Askalaphos' sharp brown wings

and burying him in a limbo of rock

was not taking it well.

The story moved on without him,

of course.

The story moves on, regardless of the stupid shit

that happens to us.

The stupid shit we can't escape.

Death, and the grief that always follows it.

And we're shrieking 'Come back, come back!'

at the top of our lungs.

Bethany W. Pope

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