The Pain Clinic

	THE PAIN CLINIC Part 1 Page One PAGE TWO Part 2 Page One Page Two Part 3 Page One Page Two
	THE PAIN CLINIC Part 1 Page Two
		Flow kindled willow from August's arched full, Well the long shadow outlasting night's hold, Space translated green, pouring a still hull, Stammering wind told, love left manifold. Love that you should be but form and willow, Bringer of that first eternal silence, To grow left over, sightless, heard as though Indifferent or beyond speech to sense A way forward. Youth, a solid new moon Clearing green dull stars and night's lengthened throw Downwards and the end opened wind to tune Moving space and leaf magnified and low, Stammering, wind told, love's first tolling slow And isolate heart, bewildered willow. Leafless either solitary or aligned, Outward and upward are inwards inclined, Indivisible the poplar ascends Its highest fingers outstretched, and descends From the reached isolate to horizon. Eliot gave thanks in exhortation For the lesser light and the Light Greater, A light which more than a decade later Burned on the cage at Pisa. Direction Impermeable, passing confusion, Nature in thinly placed uncompromise Is upward moving as Keats’ wild surmise, And distance, the heart and the hands wringing, And Pound finished told of the light singing. Let the poetry to come be as sleep After reality silent as day And night dissolving, random words to keep, The end and all its dreams folded away. Nothing remains to turn towards, waiting, But a lasting frail imagination, New sunlight raw on severed bark resting, Much as poetry's freedom lost and won Or intermittent as an endless saw Ceasing, only to gather its harvest, Charged elemental, time falling before And memory named alone rendered waste, The time of love that time cannot assuage And a poem will not accept subterfuge. Love has no beginning no end, although Existing in its own consuming late, Winter whispering green weave and willow Empty as this disconsolate planet. Love held by the spirit will not let go Returning unrealised to assail, Remembered and once high green thrown willow Strung with London's night, winter's open pale. Truncated still dark, strands a darker weft And the mind's shadow remains to the last, Fourfold the stripped tree pierces the earth's heft, Emptying firmamental from the past, Left over in St. John's Wood, willow fall, A girl lost in Karachi and Nepal. All summer long I watched a willow grow And bore to full arching its long sentence, For I exist only as an echo The makeshift sound of Nature and silence. What am I left after seeing you whole, Fragmented into bark, a saw's searching, That a poem is not within man's control, A thrown fan opening its leaf, lurching. How from an empty hand flared a green arc High as the hollows over willow laid, The grain snag sheer or upward veer and spark, A shower of corn-coloured rain and blade, Sunlight and aftermath separate old Strands of momentary young winter gold. And quietly before your window turned A landau, casually halting between The dark high and midday privet, I learned That beauty is not truth, truth is not seen. Wondering, an old man was without fear Quietly watching a waiting landau, Truth heard or imagined as pastoral On a Grecian urn is but time in thrall, And the constellation by which we steer Is time and is all any of us know. Life storms unstill an evening’s colourless Winter moving, black sodden with dry rain, Night trees disturbed receive a featureless Wind, a distance that will not hold again, And long as a kaleidoscope changing Black as smooth branched rain. Imagination, That fixed and single star still reflecting The brief high flare from a mirror broken, Must stand with the casual ease of youth And stare, when a poet would turn away. Rain vestigial over night wind and truth Whitens into bark and another day. The closed airless walls towards hold the drift Or drown of light along a mirror's shift. Since then I have learned not to be afraid Of silence, for love has its own terror Of loss, a poem out of the end is made, Choice and Chance, unavoidable error. A language alive involuntary, First drawn precipitate, an after cry Able to absorb light's lost primary Lasting and face alone unanswered why. And unknowing certain as words finished, A pause random and without origin, Earth's uneven echo undiminished, Distance, silence or circle yet begin, The return alone source enough to pare, Its aftermath the only arbiter. Without warning words unfaltering came, New with the emptiness of a moon's full, Before me unknown, the silence the same, Poetry's aftermath its own control. Gone the need to belong, a poem that man Between truth and beauty estranged and known And infinitely ordinary can Understand or words for the earth alone. Forsythia's level February, The end ripened as the moon's first full near And Meaning and without apology Through Sylvia's blacks pulling clear of fear. Quietly I wrote how love seemed to me And life offered itself for poetry. A poplar spans the distance before me. Between the poplar and eternity The journey is an ordinary day, Or the simple words to redeem the way The light, from every moment lost and won, From rain, turns its leaflessness in to stone And straw and rain over London burning. And poetry is made from the corner- Stone of this world, enough to bear Nature Or to let fall a poplar and the end Enough for either betrayer or friend, But to tell of the straw petrifaction Of the poplar and of leafless high rain Or the grey stars over London burning. Before and after and the words untold And April's leaf dark halo to immure, But a woman become to walk the world With an isolate controlling rapture. Late wind a black tide smooth over branch moan April sepulchral bleeds magnolia Forsythia flames in blond abandon A night cut from stars and Primavera. While out of the languid featureless dark And London's high shadow, rain softly laid Its burgeon to colour first with night bark And day and passing seem and never fade, Ordinary, the way of poetry Or how impossible love waits on me. Or out of helplessness opening born, After the stir and wind found still of March, Youth with time's intolerance yet can warn How after or before leftover search And fail, when all the kept cannot console, And lost and given unremarkable. Time left to Nature's rapid near control, Imagination unredeemable Lasting once as only life will allow, Motley worn, a used cajolery cries, Words from nothing rendering then and now, An arc left to juggle and sympathise. Words offered first to the spirit until, Firmamental, earth's banks break blue April. And words from nothing turn and turn about To no end, leaving me headlong after The bewildered wake of their haste, without Knowledge and burdened with time's waste, the share In its end its abandoned disarray, And Nature's new full mute recognition When the spirit sojourned along the way, Days open standing in starlight's mention. Words have their destiny, an origin Of silence, who am I that they should come To me as love once enough to begin, And all its freedom known both lost and won. To harbour the spirit and magnify, The poetry was written to defy. Cut green from willow a star softly grew Over an abyss of bark and span of High shard, emptiness spared piecemeal and new Flowed full ungathered waters from above Floating closing windborne, an unsalvaged Willow hollowing out its last surface Even to the blade's thrust as through assuaged Shadow as day left in a willow's space. And under winter's natural smoke drifts A moon's first pale, the end and all that’s known Burning residual, a willow lifts An ebb of life night charred into a poem, Imagination to mirror or mar The willow's stump opening a green star. That the silence break, O God O April, From downward leaf as green and darkening Forsythia left over falling full, Mentioning the broken sun in passing. Rain, a slow smoke weighed down the wet layers Of ivy, softening young urgency Yet olive, rigid with poplar leaves, years And to the last leaf above me the sea Left splintering sand, sheer over its tow Below. Far white the tide's first surface near, Enclosed sunlight kept, April's abject snow When poplar branches ripened disappear, The surf's negative, let its darkness be Earth's full unmoving white transparency. April and terminal full letting go, Far out to drift the known, the word's order Darkening high forsythia's green flow, To bank the highest day with rank dolour, Trapped, the spirit's inexpressible slow Lost countdown to its own recognition And repeated last affirmative no. Poetry, the end already written, Yet over ivy briefly blooming seen, Vanished white and growing fragility, Life itself or the mirror of a dream, Rearing from near and closed infinity. April's passing ivy deepened livid Stalked red in iris, stray wild May orchid. Poetry is a green interstitial Night of November ivy brief with rain, And evening's late preliminary pall, Time's horizon nears and smokes into rain, Life or that featureless experience Found and left after words have come and gone. Then an emptiness of days and dreams once Besieges reality and time won, Unravelling syllable from belief, The spirit and its fast vestigial cry Mixing uncontainable silence brief With knowing unresolved, until and why, And Nature's meaningless philosophy Cast as death or the rhythm of ivy. Love that was resolved long before the end Of a willow yet remained forever Impermanent, outlasting the deepened Close green beads lost unravelling after, And once the space of an interstitial Shadow in low summation held and left Behind, love unknown was still and crucial And insubstantial was its bitter weft. How a familiar unrealised Willow was constantly allowed to grow More vulnerable with each fullness, prised From the earth its last decade, the same slow Way that sawn off at the stump each time drew Star green willow miraculous and new. Across time and water on Dover beach I entered from where there is no turning Back, earth had stained its colour into each Remembered stone darkening the leaving Sea, a sound left over of the wind's still Burning, grained unloosened under night smoke. Silence, a sleepwalk unclosed fast until I lay down as a stone sea and awoke, Voices receding toiled whispered among Stones and under the sea to no avail And stone that flowed in hell itself, a young Moon returned to float high a windless sail Lost to the world I am become its mime, Mahler, Ruckert, alone with wasted time. THE ROOF GARDEN 1 Autumn, a fugitive guest inhabits The garden, enclosing disconsolate Summer, its folded unquiet limits Deepened far with an opened green mandate Where spring's torn orb web remains forgotten, Lifeless and loosened, floating tightened wind Over ivy, a dry smoke blown as rain Or something left of life itself, the end Of a garden where high picks break the thread From its mooring, its fast aftermath of Tar. Winter driven, with the seasons dead Before, leaves bringing nothing to behove, Random beneath infinity untold, An orb web's full anchorage to the world. I wanted to be nearby, for the end 2 Was my own, day and night lay unravelled Underfoot, here the spirit can attend The outlandish youth of conifer felled And laurel bough in winter leaf awry, Nature is the pathway of the spirit, Can London's massed and tangled garden die, Piled, banked green, its laurel awaiting yet A Grab-Loader, Muck and Rubbish Clearance. No one knows how the garden came to be, Forty years of flourishing self-sown since, Or a child's first snow before poetry, The conifer's cross-stitch was tapered far As Nature under London's new laid tar. 3 I'll not weep for the garden, its laurel Despoiled, subsumed before the thunderous Heartbeat of an empty Loader, the pall Of conifer trailing over London's Roof thrown, yet upward borne kindling dry leaf, The distant trees turned to smoke disappear, Forsythia remnant bearing beneath Raising the conifer to a green bier. Time overturned from the black soil receives Soft December rain piled beside cypress Rusting tindered arched towards outstretched leaves And left prone in green imprinted witness, Outlasting the words Nature falls between, The end is no more than a poet's mien. -------------------------------------- EASTER 1994 1 What am I left with now that spring has come And after the moistened leaves unopened, Each day memory walks through my hands, won Away from its own past, and a garden And rain enough to smoke through the empty Air, that suddenness of March bark breaking In to April's light green suggested tree. Night's nimbus, the outer leaf opening And spreading day's brief black downward halo, Where are the shadows that struggled to live, Yet poetry's eidolon will not go Away, inviolable, fugitive. While forever through my hands Nature falls Between, life held lasting warm from time stalls. 2 From the aftermath of their animal Life left over with unfaltering fear, To my departure, I am unable To see them as I watch them disappear. And Lill was a calm and sunlit sea and Told me gently just to bring them, nothing Remained here but a morning and England Approaching Easter, the hell of trying To protect them without hope and the end That was near. I placed each into a cage Through a grill I could neither touch nor tend Nor covers closing over could assuage, Condemned when they were forbidden to roam, Blacky Heathcliff I cannot call you home. 3 They never came out of their low covered Wire cages, the kind used for transporting Cats, the hours, before their end, were conferred, Heathcliff was incapable of turning Round. I sensed their last quiet trust before I left as soft shuffling wondering, each Draped face crouching abandoned and no more Than waiting to be put down. When I search, Shadows lengthen through the hollow garden Between still reality and surface, Moving their bewildered days now open Towards memory and unenclosed space Only to roam the garden at their will And where time itself waits on them until. ----------------------------------- Out of the untongued stone as day immured I stumbled long after and poetry, The end of years from every fear was cured, Its harbouring circled me entirely. Towards, and yet I had journeyed all my Life, when the birds round Wellington Square brought Me into their throng, an unserried cry, Primary through green hewn of air unthought, Unfolding leaf leading to a garden Where at last I have put my shadow down. How many the times without hope often Still following, wondering and aground, Waiting unable to die or to live, There is only the time left to forgive. The end is now as the day I began, Isolate and become necessity Keeping a vigil, imagination Wayward erring, approaching destiny, Layering reality and its leaf, A reparation startled from the earth And the single unknowing of belief Existing after knowledge brought to birth. Involuntary, poetry's echo Follows before and what road it comes by Or where it goes, sometimes Sylvia's low Smokes prepare a way, an answering cry, Imagination melting into snow, A world more high and white than I could know. Earth's surface shallows towards or before, Morning's darkest utmost unbroken sky Levelling alive the topmost thrown shore Until lime and leaf are colourless high Reality, wrought after emptying Divested air nearing full summer leaf As dreams lose a shadow's deciphering In the sun unfathomable beneath. In cities where I run from pursuer, Falling or hiding, searching always for The end, a cry to the last sign from air Stifled and closed, where words written before Language, outside translation, through dream's mute Mirror reflect the lime leaf absolute. Evening lowered June's unending shadow, The century outspread, unearthed its deep Beech floor, thickening layered dome and low Close leaf and rain. Hazed full, forged seasons seep, Hollowing time's sodden and closed dry breach Where branched unfaltering fast cathedral Height and fallen lasting subsuming beech, Or the leap of infinity in thrall. And May weaving fragile unbroken web Unopened, at reach to its last open Firmament, whispering the smoke and ebb Leaf reared in utmost eclipse of Heaven Where earth and darkness were emptiness, each Silence underfoot, full still husk of beech. A mute sorrow lies at last too deep for Tears, the heart's sword plunged so far that no one Can remove it, nothing survives its core, Love ebbs in vain for a prodigal son Who will not return, our lives over glass Revolving the doors of Wellington Square. Time left adrift, short, the crucial days pass After light's white sear, love beyond repair Reflected on a window's negative, Turning, turning love so far, love become A name's anonymity left to give Memory abandoned, turning time won, Each silence departure a waiting guest, Absence arrival turn and will not rest. Nothing can console, not experience At the end of knowledge, only the cost Is left to fray, time dissolving and once Held constant and sure is now as a lost Anonymous son or a life mask of Itself, a loss enough to be afraid Of loss alone, as love come to this, love, The last covenant poetry has made. How lime from young impenetrable dark And intensity of dying leaf sears Its first green surface in an Oxford park, August's disparate yellow tolls my years, I struggle loss and Pasternak, yet know Akhmatova's levelled Tsarskoye Selo. You came to Wellington Square for the last Time before I left, approaching, a gift In your hands, darkness framed the evening's fast Held fragmented light, low nearing at shift Of shadow, dimensions within a dream, And windless emptied air without echo Or distance, soldering horizon's seam And open neon with a last stalled throw Of shadow closely miming your return. For those few early minutes and evening In the garden, a lifetime left to burn Incombustible, holding everything In its place, inscribed for your visit were Your words for a birthday the day after. Wind ruffled still the ochre leaf and brown Pale of lifted feathers, chance and sudden Alignment at source burned leaf and robin, Orange incombustible as choice won, Charred dry and its first fast fallen colour, The winter red transubstantiation Of a bird melting with last leaf before October's lost rigor and windless rain. Proximity and pageant, no more than Poetry's far insomniac silence Could keep Zhivago back from the rowan- Berry, or a motorway in ordnance Of pine, a bird's young song at the end where The Grosse Fuge's heart was an answer. Why have I no answer, what road did we Come by that the way is lost forever. In a crowd at St. Giles’ fair without me, From a crowd I saw you as your mother While you walked among them, a space so small Lay between us, at the century's wane And colossal sound how impossible The simple words we cannot say again. Distance I crossed as a child, its threshold A lit kaleidoscope, reality On every side was what night neon told From a fairground's enclosed infinity. Unremembered words the heart cannot hold, Such a space yet vanished in a crowd's fold. So that the lime tree absolves my sorrow, Let me live but long enough to return Its first consoling symmetry and know A towering last leaf was not in vain. I who amount to nothing, awhile have Been lifted high as the topmost unknown And narrowing bough where far fugitive Leaf engulfed wells imagined upward hone, Loosened lasting tidal levels over- Flow utmost ruin, oppressed unhewn spring Spans green glass to origin and surface. Before the Old Man of the Sea, over, Piecemeal, large tardy leaves are hollowing, Standing beyond him in first bridal lace. I watch the rapid leaves begin to fall, Turning full the helpless air and downward Moving space of its last diagonal Green spoke, an undersurface turned towards A far light untouched by the sun, its raw Lime calm hurts yet vulnerable and new As a white shadow, sorrow's metaphor. Such a space and white sear of leaf how few Will remain leaves to the end of winter, Each white leaf exposed white arching spoked thrall, And memory I knew as a mother And a poet, the sword strokes were mortal, And every leaf was overturned surface, Brief as May snow or lime's last carapace. Impossible want waits on me, autumn Is almost over before it began, Vanishing with everything I have known In the whitened low shadow of its span And calm irreversible surrender, An open surrounding emptiness left When tired memory can go no further And waits as an abandoned child bereft. A train in a dream derailed, or the way An outgrown silent mother hesitates, And before the world unable to say How birth's vestigial hour remains and hurts. To walk the world alone and bowed with blame As once she held life to bestow a name. Hurrying dreamed and startling towards me Through Wellington Square, how before you reach Me the dream is over, after, empty Derelict space where I remain and search No longer. And sometimes in dreams I write A fugitive blueprint out of nothing, Where vacant listless insomniac light Written and trapped, an uncomprehending Babel resembling the reality And open sleep-walk of words unwritten, Yet resolved, as the end of a journey. Tired words only the heart can awaken, The heart that gives its life for Nature's mime Is after found alive and lodged with time. Emptiness assails, fallen forever, Days as leaf gone from me yet remaining Unsubsumed far dissolving, easier To write poetry before lime passing, Anything than trying to speak after. The banked day floods over only to drain Away, my children become chimera, Nothing is left, emptiness beyond pain Curls slow low leaf and settling abandon. At the sea's threshold a gardener's rake Gathered each unmoving leaf, there wind-mown, The low sea mound of memory awake Branched high darkened layering horizon And curled among leaves, stillness weighed as stone. Love was never like this, now no longer Am I needed, or yet necessary, Or even remembered, as a mother. What have I done that only poetry Has dared to come so far and still steadfast With my name, before and until are known, Memory's earliest words will outlast Derision and address the world alone. No longer a mother but an outcast, And a journeyman's words wares for the earth, How I named you beheld aloft from vast Time and a lonely deliberate birth, And you cry delivery from evil, Dealer in words, ‘What did I doo to all?’ What am I left beyond an empty page And the ceaseless endless reordering Of what cannot be put right, words assuage, But only in the lifetime remaining After time has gone. Always an empty Page to the end unrecognisable Before it becomes my own, and every Familiar line, sometimes casual With the unrelenting formal stammer Of my life. Words unknown until and torn And time left, Lacrimosa and desire, Mnemonic as a tree overwhelmed, borne On the wind's confrontation, memory Yet young with truth struggling into beauty. There was no warning no last dismantling, Only a memory of what had been, And effortless emptied air denying And altering everything I could mean. And after, almost unremarkable, As long since passed and unnoticed love, there Was nothing left or recognisable. A willow unmissed taken from the air, Felled from the heart, where rapid airless earth Overturned at the root and open wide Gape, closes over with a willow's worth Leaving nowhere to escape to or hide. Once a miracle's last reprieve, a year Left to stand and quietly disappear. Why have I held back so long, unable While the willow was before me, to reach Out and touch its first green beaded struggle To survive, a branchless stump and beseech Of light alone for brief curtailed beauty, So many times flooding your last decade With a fixed young transient urgency, And mixing lumberjack and willow blade In refuge and desire. I had to write When there was nothing left, not a shadow In its existence and seasonal night, Distance or space from memory laid low, I can no longer look back as a child At love, the end is still a willow wild. And fire was still burning high on Primrose Hill when a water carrier hosed out The fast held November flame, stone billows Raked into low smoke swelled propelled without Heat and resembling disintegrating Willow, sparked through London's night haze, an arc Firmamental and driven, spiralling Unencompassed darkness. A single spark Charred wind and rain, and a willow's bark sawn, Mimed its last upward arching mimicry And flowed brief sparks of ripened willow borne Downward with sudden blond infinity Among green strewn and precipitated Willow, young full welled to pietà felled. You did not try to go away, you just Did not come back, there was nothing sudden At first, only longer silence. I must Unravel how I went wrong, how often Somehow failed to see that I had lost my Son, yet almost impossible to know Where to begin. Memory’s endless why Stalks my dreams staggering early as though Always unanswered and more so out of Sight, behind ahead as shadows I reach To from the nowhere of abandoned love, *As why* left at utmost echo and search Holding everything in its place, nothing Is near at hand anymore, answering. I would not have missed being a mother For the world, each day now the broken still Along an open triangle after Perspective exposed a rail of light, shrill Knife-edged and diminishing to the end, Somewhere at the core and itself a closed Circle, a pool of light, earth had darkened With its ore, and mixing oil and rain hosed Through the shadows perpetual surface. The same way as dawn appears leftover Sometimes with late stars, unreflected space Between permanence and illusion where Memory alone reaches full circle, And light breaks unconjured to a last still. But it was not your growing up so much As your growing away, and to the end I'll never understand how slowly such Sudden judgement, your worldly needs opened Wide memory's store and you walked away Leaving a childhood behind, forever Cocooned with the agony of the day Without you, of unfinished days after And nothing new to go back to or why As only an echo to go on. No One who has not lived this enough to cry I am your mother, yet will ever know Her pathway's permanent illusion where Sometimes dawn is late with stars left over. IN MEMORIAM STEPHEN SPENDER 1 I never knew you, only the poplar Towering into night air the last ten Years. From Abbey Road it seemed to be far Nearer to you than to me and once, when I passed by, it did not occur simply To look up at the poplar, though always Wondering that the streetlight I could see So bleakly to Loudoun Road, through the day's End, and sometimes just sufficiently near Was also a beacon as I turned by Your corner carrying shopping and fear. I'll never know what distance from your eye, Casual as the news that you had died, With you the poplar on the other side. 2 Yet I live and feel nearer than before, Somehow I am able to speak to you Now without time's usage between us, or My own dereliction every day through Which must pass intermittently those who Were truly great. They pass alongside those Who lived inflicting hurt, the hurt a few Disparate voices left behind that chose Never to forget, and time as witness. The barriers are down, I walk the space Towards you in St John's Wood, years oppress My heart, presentiment I cannot face The far side of a poplar and a friend Waiting quietly rehearsing the end. 3 I am accustomed at last to my own Silence and the endlessness around me As a world-weary traveller alone Surrendering to anonymity, Awaiting the wind's direction and yet No longer at the helm, knowing only The limits of a poplar leaf to set A course by, or that full momentary Cerebral calm over an engulfed shore, Enough to uphold, and after survive The spirit shipwrecked, words lost at their core, And unattended breathe again alive. In aligned tradition a decade once, Midway a poplar was the difference. ---------------------------------------- For Gloria and John, for helping me to write again 27th April, 2004 I’ll not stand in your Election again Nor nurture from another century, What lay between us then, the long drawn pain, Poetry in its own ignominy Lost, yet buried alive in an unknown Grave and left bound about in fast endless Silence laid. From an origin unshone, Anonymity signals a distress, A Morse of airlessness between the years, The darkness since then, in dreams that survive In their scaffolding. The waste beneath sears Through the surface depths, struggling still alive For a name, for a last identity,** ‘My country has failed to take care of me.’* 4th May, 2004 * After Elaine Feinstein’s translation of ‘Homesickness’ by Marina Tsvetayeva I sent a four-page e-mail to every one of Oxford’s 1,250 dons asking for the 11 nominations needed for Brenda Williams to be considered for the Chair of Poetry. Not one replied. Barry Tebb PAGE ONE BACK TO TOP