Grant Tabard

Five Poems

 

 

Bacchus as an Old Man

 

Life is a box of Christmas lights tangled

As eyes, as raving as maenads in fawn

Skins weaving ivy wreaths for lovers that

Do not come, betrothed with a swift breath curse.

This lethargic Dionysus pleads to

Be widowed, he wears a bulls head bloated

On the sofa, still intoxicated

With the dance, a bastard infixed as a

Vine. He becomes a congregation of 

Moths amongst a tangle of cardigans

Whose silence resurrects the allusion

Of rain, now threads of light come in a can.

He becomes a lion tamer without

A lion, a re-arranger of chairs.

 

These bodies hover

about me where streets

used to be my own,

 

white whispers tearing

up the pages of

a life lived unsung.

 

 

 

Little Ghosts

 

to George

 

I hear phantom cats

bells and out of the corner

of my eye, see them

 

scamper under the

Welsh dresser where there's no hook

that a Tom could squeeze,

 

and the sturdy pine

dead of night dining table,

a muddy cat paw

 

path that was more tea

rings than bare wood. Underneath,

the cats gold eyes are

 

winking crystals in

this quartz grotto. "Come out you

ghost! You afterglow!"

 

 

Mountain of Funerals to Be

 

I was born with burn marks

from the Sun's finger baptising me in hydrogen.

Mother fought off that old fool lion,

he'd have to pay an alimony of rattles and sparks.

 

I see stars far off, empty handed they scowl,

the sky is a slip of pink paper folded in two.

Mother caught me in dawn's redwood bough

she said it was Odin's leather soled shoe.

 

I am the great waterfall sewn

within soft blue stories and stitched cord stripes.

Mother had a cathedral organ as a hip bone

my sins dissipate in the whistle of her pipes.

 

It's all I've ever had,

this mountain of funerals to be.

Mother cushions death on a lily pad

and eats the church key.

 

I died when the time was right

to the chimes of all the church bells of London ringing.

Mother was tenderly singing

good night ladies, good night.

 

 

Dancer with Long Sleeves

from a dream

 

There is a dancer

in the wind leaving footprints

in the swirling dunes

 

in the numb toe night,

in this trapdoor night, in the

boot heel witching hour,

 

the turning head night,

only in the rhyming night

could women grow like

 

Dragon-fruit, plum red.

Chorus girl roiling in the

eddy of my dreams,

 

crept up why-go-on

and never was danseuse, doe,

go-go, line and tap.

 

 

Danse du Ventre

 

If she stays together

after her torso articulations

 

then it will be a credit

to rope and pulley.

 

A kiss to her natural isolation

of the torso muscles

 

in a dimpled concave curve,

a dance of coordinated lint.

 

Sinuous navel, suckling lithe movement

of limbs through space,

 

each alternate red satin beat

is a shiver, the wind in the wheat sheath.

 

Liberty embroidered in a fervid silhouette,

the sound of the notes sharply detach

 

in gold trim, creating an impression

of texture and depth

 

unshackled in a fervour

of blood shed shadow.

 

 

 

Grant Tarbard is the editor of The Screech Owl and co-founder of Resurgant Press. His first collection Yellow Wolf is out now from WK Press.