As so many of you have had difficulty purchasing “We Walked in His Garden” here at HP, I have decided to post the book in its entirety at Poetfreak (www.poetfreak.com). I do alas have one final request to ask of you all. As this project was initially intended to benefit The Matthew Talbot Hostel, a homeless shelter that was very dear to Paddy’s heart, I would ask that you please consider making a small donation to this worthy cause. The amount is entirely up to you.

Checks in any currency may be made out to the Matthew Talbot Hostel and mailed to:

The Matthew Talbot Hostel
22 Matthew Talbot Place,
Woolloomooloo NSW 2011
Australia

If you managed to purchase the book here, I assure you that 100% of what you paid will soon be on its way to them.

Well, with this I must say goodbye for a while. I have some personal issues to attend that simply cannot wait any longer. You have all been wonderful throughout and have shown that although we may have very different ways of looking at the world, deep down, we are a family that truly cares about one another. When you think about it, there can be no greater honor to the memory of Paddy Martin than that.

Patrick

Favorite word: “nymphet”, but no!
Halcyon, a kind of drug, you know.
Searching through the pages’ mist
And imagined deeds
Of poets’ needs…
I found my favourite word,
As asked,
Neither sacred nor profane
That describes the Venetian rain
In my beloved’s eyes
And the Florentine sun upon her hair:
“Auburn, russet, mythopoeic”.
Oh, it is not fair,
To liken an object
Of my lust and love
To anything as mortal as autumn air!
Nor “October’s orchard Haze”;
She had her own
Inscrutable, premeditated ways!
Rather let me say that she was perfect,
Though her eyes, pale and myopic,
Her shuffling gait and
Graceless limbs, to them Grace lends
Fey charm, the power to mend
My suffering and
Delusions of a poet’s end
As anything but pathetic,
(Her mother’s fondness for vague emetics)
And I left softly hanging,
On a girl’s new taste,
A tang of russet apples on her face,
But no, not that, the sum
Of my love, My Lo!
Then her bleak demise, partly by my hand
That none of you brutes could understand;
The pure love,
So sadly consummated,
Between a lover
And the one she hated
Yet loved once with inexplicable delight,
On one stolen, frightened night…
In which the two of us agreed
To satisfy a simple, yet maniacal need,
And then depart…
But I could not,
You see;
She was my life,
My love, my heart.

Humbert Humbert 1950

Sharon Talbot ca. 2005

As a child he remembered Cardiff as a city with red asphalt roads and yellow trolley busses. On a Saturday morning his grandfather used to take him in his black Sunbeam Talbot to the grand building of the Council of Music for Wales. There Charles Dixon presided over a large office on the third floor in which there were not one but two grand pianos. At seven a little boy finds one grand piano intimidating, two scary. He was made of fuss of by his grandfather’s colleagues and – as a Queen’s chorister – expected to sing. A very tall lady who smelt strongly of mothballs took him into what must have been a music library, and together they chose the 23rd Psalm to Brother James’ Air and Walford’s Solemn Melody. After his ‘performance’ he was given a book about Cardiff Castle, but spent an hour looking out of the windows onto the monkey-puzzle trees and watching people walking below.
 
50 years later as the taxi from the station took him to the rehearsal studios he thought of his mother shopping in this city as a young woman, probably a very slim, purposeful young woman with long auburn gold hair and a tennis player’s stride. He had just one photo of his mother as a young woman - in her nurse’s uniform, salvaged from his grandparents’ house in the Cardiff suburb of Rhiwbina. Curious how he remembered asking his grandmother about this photograph - who was this person with long hair?– he had never known his mother with anything but the shortest hair.
 
He’d visited the city regularly some ten years previously and he was glad he wasn’t driving. So much had changed, not least the area once known as Tiger Bay, a once notorious part of the city he was sure his mother had never visited. Now it was described as ‘a cultural hub’ where the grand Millennium Opera House stood, where the BBC made Doctor Who, where in the Weston Studio Theatre he’d hear for the first time his Unknown Colour.
 
Travelling down on the train he’d imagined arriving unannounced once the rehearsal had begun, the music covering his search for a strategic seat where he would sit in wonder.  It was not to be. As he opened the door to the theatre there was no music going on but a full-scale argument between the director, the conductor and three of the cast. The repetiteur was busy miming difficult passages. The two children sat demurely with respective mothers reading Harry Potters.
 
The next half hour was difficult as he realised that his carefully imagined stage directions were dead meat. They were going to do things differently and he had that sinking feeling that he was going to have to rewrite or at the very least reorganise a lot of music. He was then ‘noticed’ and introduced to the company – warm handshakes – and then plunged into a lengthy discussion about how the ensemble sequence towards the end of Act 1 could be managed. The mezzo playing Winifred was, he was forced to admit, as physically far from the photos of this artist in the 1930s as he could imagine. The tenor playing Ben was a little better, but taller than W – again a mismatch with reality. And the hair . . . well make up could do something with that he supposed. The baritone he thought was exactly right, non-descript enough to assume any one of the ten roles he had to play. He liked the actress playing Cissy the nurse from Cumbria. The soprano playing Kathleen and Barbara H was missing.
 
He was asked to set the scene, not ‘set the scene’ in a theatrical sense, but say a little about the background. Who were these people he and they were bringing to the stage? He told them he’d immersed himself in the period, visited the locations, spoken to people who had known them (all except Cissy and the many Parisienne artists who would ‘appear’). He saw the opera as a way of revealing how the intimacy and friendship of two artists had sustained each of them through a lifetime chasing the modernist ideal of abstraction. He was careful here not to say too much. He needed time with these singers on their own. He needed time with the director, who he knew was distracted by another production and had not, he reckoned, done his homework. He stressed this was a workshop session – he would rewrite as necessary. It was their production, but from the outset he felt they had to be in character and feel the location – the large ‘painters’ atelier at 48 Quai d’Auteuil.  He described the apartment by walking around the stage space. Here was Winifred’s studio area (and bedroom) divided by a white screen. Here was the living area, the common table, Winifred’s indoor garden of plants, and where Cissy and the children slept. As arranged (with some difficulty earlier in the week) he asked for the lights to be dimmed and showed slides of three paintings – Cissy and Kate, Flowers from Malmaison, and the wonderful Jake’s Bird and White Relief. He said nothing. He then asked for three more, this time abstracts –* Quarante-Huit Quai d’Auteuil, Blue Purpose, and ending with *Moons Turning.
 
He said nothing for at least a minute, but let Moons Turning hang in space in the dark. He wanted these experimental works in which colour begets form to have something of the impact he knew them to be capable of. They were interior, contemplative paintings. He was showing them four times their actual size, and they looked incredible and gloriously vibrant. These were the images Winifred had come to Paris to learn how to paint: to learn how to paint from the new masters of abstraction. She had then hidden them from public view for nearly 30 years. These were just some of the images that would surround the singers, would be in counterpoint with the music.
 
With the image of Moons Turning still on the screen he motioned to the repetiteur to play the opening music. It is night, and the studio is bathed in moonlight. It could be a scene from La Bohème, but the music is cool, meditative, moving slowly and deliberately through a maze of divergent harmonies towards a music of blueness.
 
He tells the cast that the music is anchored to Winifred’s colour chart, that during her long life she constantly and persistently researched colour. She sought the Unknown Colour. He suggests they might ‘get to know the musical colours’. He has written a book of short keyboard pieces that sound out her colour palette. There is a CD, but he’d prefer them to touch the music a little, these enigmatic chords that are, like paint, mixed in the course of the music to form new and different colours. He asks the mezzo to sing the opening soliloquy:
 
My inspiration comes in the form of colour,
of colour alone, no reference to the object or the object’s sense,
Colour needn’t be tagged to form to give it being.
Colour must have area and space,
be directed by the needs of the colour itself
not by some consideration of form.
A large blue square is bluer than a small blue square.
A blue pentagon is a different blue from a triangle of the same blue.
Let the blueness itself evolve the form which gives its fullest expression.
This is the starting-point of my secret artistic creation.
 
And so, with his presentation at a close, he thanks singer and pianist and retreats to his strategically safe seat. This is what he came for, pour l’encouragement des autres by puttin.g himself on the line, that tightrope the composer walks when presenting a new work. They will have to trust him, and he has to trust them, and that, he knows, is some way away. This is not a dramatic work. Its drama is an interior one. It is a love story. It is about the friendship of artists and about their world. It is a tableau that represents a time in European culture that we are possibly only now beginning to understand as we crowd out Tate Modern to view Picasso, Mondrian, Braque and Brancusi.

‘There’s definitely a story here’, she said that evening over the telephone. They’d been sitting in Trevelyan Square in Leeds. He’d brought a picnic lunch so they could sit in the sun. When he arrived at the station she wasn’t wearing her glasses and he thought, I only see her like this in bed or . . . and he stopped that thought immediately because she looked so very lovely and he knew he would only have a couple of hours as her companion before work and children reclaimed them both. They’d sat on a bench eating his salad confection, apricots and nectarines. They forgot about the rock buns he’d baked the night before. Just in front of them sat four hounds, four stone hounds with staring eyes and  very large paws sitting in a circle, four Talbot Hounds with water gushing from their mouths, four just larger than life-size handsome hounds commissioned by Joseph Edwards for the courtyard of his mansion at Castle Carr and, when the house was demolished in the 1940s, had disappeared. The hounds turned up in the 1970s in a stone-mason’s yard and an enterprising architect – building the Open University’s northern HQ - bought them for Trevelyan Square. As he sat there, with the water-spouting dogs, it was only her gracious, lovely self that occupied his attention. Why does she captivate me so ?, he thought. Why do I always feel with her like I did as a teenager, so unsure of myself, so overwhelmed by the female presence (he thought as he wrote this how often that word overwhelm came to mind when he wrote of her, and so checked the Thesaurus . . . hmm. Besieged, snowed-under, inundated, beleaguered, weighed down, beset? No, overwhelm was the only word he decided – she whelmed him over as a wave rises up and cresting falls and turns and rolls the swimmer beneath it.). It was, he considered, her femininity that was so particular and just embodied everything he’d ever dreamed and fantasized a woman might be, could be for him. He knew he’d thought and written of this aspect so often, and yet today, here with the sandstone dogs, there was a intensity, a vividness enlivening his senses. Without her glasses he could see the lines, indeed a shadow of fatigue, under her eyes, simply too much time with the computer perhaps. So she looked older, always wiser, and oh the joy of her freckles, the faint down on her cheek. And when, later, saying goodbye, he didn’t just kiss her gently as a good friend would do in a very public place, but brought her to him in an embrace that something outside of his usual careful manner required. He had hugged her with a passion and a joy and sadness all in one. On the train, a text, and he had suddenly to hide his tears that it could be so. He would write about those hounds . . .

I don't cry,
My eyes leak                            You don't cry,
                                                          You freeze up
I don't love,
My heart breaks                      You don't love,
                                                          You desecrate
I don't think,
My mind creeps                       You don't think,
                                                           You illuminate
I don't act,
I just live                                      You don't act,
                                                            You write the scripts
I don't guess,
I know you                                  You don't guess,
                                                            You feel it out
I don't survive,
I only sneak                                *You don't survive,
                                                            You outshine

Half a mile downstream from the crumbling bridge,
The river began to break up too,
Into washouts and rock-bound pools.

Aged promontories, sandy shores, from
Primeval rivers, compressed by time
From granite, stood sentinel over the rush.
Against these broke hurtling, grey-green waves,
Spitting high in defiance at the rocks’ impasse,
Slowing but briefly, swirling angrily
On their way back to the waiting sea.

Upon a high outcrop, I took up my post
Rod in hand, watching the helpless worm
On his way to death, by whatever claimed him first.
I had not put him there, being squeamish,
“Mindless flesh,” a poet friend had dubbed them.
Still, my companions rigged him on the hook,
In exchange for keeping their joints burning.
Not smoking, I thought, but taking puff after puff,
As my bait was laid on the rack for sacrifice.

We scattered after all our poles were baited,
Claiming ancient pools and all inside them as our own.
I stood highest, near the fiercest waters that shook the rock,
Braced in the March air against the icy spray.
I was there, I told myself, because two men
Needed to catch a fish and prove themselves.
Yet they faded like ghosts into the gloam of evenfall,
As absorption overtook me, and I began to care.
Cast after cast into the roiling waters
Just where the waterfall fumed and broke.

Soon, it was only my goal, and nothing else,
To wage an age-old war against a artful foe.
Each strike brought me hope and each loss determination
Not anger but resolve to outwit them at a game
Invented eons ago by humankind,
And learned by trout to save themselves.
What happened after was of no concern to me,
But let me catch them for the sake of having it be.
The contest alone was all to me, it seemed,
Yet winning the only outcome I could see.

I had pulled three young trout from the churning water,
Energized despite their mediocre size,
When there came a tug just beneath my perch that taunted,
Promising the battle I craved.
So I cast the remnants of my sacrificial bait
Upstream, where currents swept it beneath my feet,
And there he was! No doubt the oldest trout in the hills,
Lingering below me to tease my newfound lust.
I set the hook well, so I thought, and reeled him high,
Fifteen inches long and heavy as he twisted in mid-air.
He thrashed like a madman above the rock,
Just beyond my reach,
--Then was gone…

When all was over, I had three fingerlings, not much,
While my helpful companions had none for all their work.
I told them not to fret, that it was merely luck,
But I knew better. When they asked me what I did
To catch the few, wee fish who now sizzled in the pan,
I answered haltingly, already memories fading of my quest,
Finally telling my rivals that I knew not why
Capturing a fish meant so much on that day.
“I do,” said one with a laugh.” I asked “Why?”
“It’s easy to explain,” he said…”you were high!”

?
Sharon Talbot

not exactly a poem, sorry.

The turnkey was the fumbling sort, the sort that could be taken advantage of, Carver never thought about it more than a passing fancy. The kind of thought that was dangerous, it wasn’t a ten-year stretch after all. Popping the old guard and making a break could work, would work.  A couple of years is nothing in this joint, they told him, once you get a few connections in the yard, get on a baseball team, two years is a breeze. You might even miss it all. Carver was hesitant to heed the trappings of these old relics, they were just counting the days to nothing. He knew that very well might’ve been their prerogative, but for him there would always be that something. A lonesome post-office box, containing the culmination of his life’s worth. They didn’t know about it, none of them knew, his brother, his slick-*** lawyer, not even those rats, those ******* rats that got him in here. At the time he resolved that he would part with that secret of his post office box for no less than his life. Whatever dissent had marked him as the fall-guy passed him by. Complacence led Carver here but it would never happen again. No more concessions next time.

Cellblock B wasn’t devoid of small charms. The periodic mewing of this crooner or that, with what seemed like a common intonation amongst them, all tapping from a collective unconscious. The window with a view of the yard, although mostly obscured by another cell block, was still something. Lately he had been privy to comparative bliss, his erstwhile roommate having to nurse off in the infirmary the sepsis resulting from a shiv wound after an ill-judged altercation in the mess hall. The daily motions had long since become routine, Carver thought that in many respects, this was not too dissimilar from his army days. Avoiding the unsavoury types was the key to surviving both.    

Conversations which abounded lacked privacy and tended toward the trivial, but listening in did occupy a sizeable chunk of Carver’s day. Someone, Carver was fairly sure it was Fuzzin two cells down was wondering why he was growing more hair in his right underarm compared to the left, and was resolute in uncovering the mystery. Sal in the cell to the left was perpetually reciting his conquests, ****** or otherwise, to anyone that would listen. “I was in Maine for a year and a half. Lobstering up there. I mean, what else is there to do. In Maine....” A collective murmur took the cellblock suddenly, stirring Carver out of his reverie. Sal dutifully motioned and whispered “cell inspection”, Carver did the same for his neighbour. The deputy warden for cellblock B was a short rotund man Williams, who as appearances go, looked like he should be better acquainted with ledgers and stock tickets than prison walls, but was a lax sort, permitting what modest allowances someone in his position had the leeway to do. I have heard harmonicas and guitars chiming after meals regularly, unheard of in any other cellblock. Thomson’s mattress was tossed down the way...of course every now and then a few examples had to be made to appease the warden, Thomson’s codeine addiction not doing him any favours by way of effective concealment. I exhaled a sigh, not so much in condolence as boredom, as even the strewn mattress and its assorted artefacts was becoming as familiar as the yellowed walls and the evening chill.

It was the 14th and Carver was due for a visitation. 9:30a.m. and already in the throes of being worked up, he was sure to be getting worked upon soon enough. Carver cracked his knuckles against the edge of the table in the visitation room, an apparent thick black line bisecting the table with ‘hands behind the line’ mirrored on each side. “Hello Maurice.” Carver winced, knowing that she was purposely diving into ways to put him ill at ease, commencing with the upperhand, by calling him Maurice the name he hates, not Maury. “How’s life treating you?” The smirk barely contained in the pinstriped pencil skirt, her hips less so.  “Yeah okay, it’s okay. Great to see you here.” And he meant it. Not that her presence normally roused anything like that sort of sentiment, their domestic life was a burned out cinder even before he was busted.  But there was a particular warmth in her notes, just an untouched civility foreign in place like this, tending to be drawn out from the inmates one gesture at a time, often for good. Carver thought to 8 months prior, camped at opposite ends of the house, their wares might as well have been labelled ‘his’ and ‘hers’. Evenings were carefully orchestrated, where arcs in their lines of vision only merged for the briefest of instances and only as a measure to avoid any dreaded physical contact. The prospect of *** was a joke, Carver well aware that she was ******* at least the grocer and his broker, but felt better for it. One less unfulfilled expectation he had to relieve. “I’d ask how you’re dealing with the weather, but I guess you’re keeping pretty warm these days.” She half-stifled an involuntary scoff, “You know I don’t need to hear this now, Sam is due for the dentist at 2.30 and I want to get him all washed and ready, I’m not here for your games.” “So who is it today? Talbot? Someone from the club?” Carver questioned without a hint of animosity. She breathed a defeated sigh, “You know I’m not going to talk to you about this here.” Carver jolted, the seat raised an inch or two on the linoleum, “I’m just asking if you’re ******* around, and you don’t give me a straight answer so what do I have to assume huh?” The guard was giving allowance more than he had any obligation to, but Carver’s voice was raised enough to disturb a few of the surrounding groups. He moved his way over, “Hey, what’s the ruckus here Carver, keep it down okay. What’s this box up here, move your hands back, c’mon, you know the rules. Diane piped up, “It’s just a taint, sir.” The guard prodded it with his baton, quizzically. “hmm oh yes? I thought those were seasonal, okay just keep it down.”

Carver motioned to the box, “Why did you need to bring that here? I don’t need you parading my taint around. You know I’m trying to get parole in three months? What have you done with it?” “It’s just a taint.” “Yeah, but what’s with all this purple and green stuff here? All these spiky bits, I don’t remember that.” “Well, two months ago you asked for the taint and I’ve got it here, so what else do you want from me.” Carver listened to her speak but looked passed, to the frosted glass, wishing that a window was all that really kept him between here and there. “Christ, I’ve had enough of this, I come all the way down here, spend fourty minutes caught in that dratted excuse of a highway, and you won’t even thank me for bringing your stinking taint along. AND, just last week you were all taint-this and taint-that, why do I bother.” She flung around just slow enough for Carver to observe her figure it in all its majesty. A drop in his stomach, as she moved off with authority. “Wait!” He flung himself towards her. “Please...I’m sorry....please....just...leave the taint.” “Here just take your **** taint, I hope you’re thinking of it when Sam and Eliza are eating that canned **** and asking what their father is doing so I can be sure that I’m explaining what a worthless **** you are and be accurate about it.” The words fell on heedless ears, Carver and his taint. The taint and Carver.

Fuzzin was moving back to the cellblock alongside Carver, “Buddy, your wife has some ***, you better hope my parole don’t come through before yours.... say...what’s in the box.”

How many heroes have chosen this path,
Of least or no resistance?
In the face of overwhelming odds,
Or staring at cubicular, corporate submission;
Elect instead the stance
Of simply
Doing
Nothing?

Victorian ladies thought it amusing;
20th Century Centurions and Puritans condemned it.
The spoon-fed rich live it and lose nothing.
Russian aristocrats sometimes recommend it…
When spurned in love & up against it.

Oblomov, for instance, whiled his time away,
In bed, or staring out at the wood,
Writing meaningless letters and ignoring the day,
Yet it still did him some good.

Marat in his bathtub, Proust in his bed,
Still accomplished SOMETHING
Or we’d have forgotten them instead.
Is there still no virtue in doing nothing?

Against the tide of corporate work,
Aquarians rebelled with dance.
Later on, Generation X
Came to work in a greedy trance.

Peter Gibbons was hypnotized,
To escape his lifeless job,
Destroyed the office as it was downsized,
But was promoted by “the Bobs”.

Some lesson there, for those who strive,
That work alone is not enough.
Attitude is more important to our lives,
That revolt by nothingness is not that tough.

Abbie Hoffman was thrown through windows,
While preaching peace instead of wrath.
Despite nobility of cause, does humanity still go,
The inexorable way of sloth?

Sharon Talbot

Hello, my dear friend.
We meet once again;
a unique sting of longing
do you never fail to produce in me.

St Leonard's red monolith
stands atop Church Street Hill;
ever a friendly face before night's backdrop,
oddly menacing in the artificial light.

The two churches rise as we approach,
over the bridge which begot your name.
St Mary's stares longingly towards the other;
St Leonard's stands warden looking ahead.

We swing past The George;
those same folk are ever making merry.
Though their hair ever greys and thins,
the same can't be said of their love of mirth and ale.

Up Squirrel Bank; it feels steeper each time.
The Bell and Talbot has changed hands so often,
its once merry hall now sits doubtingly,
sheltering a few with stories of their own.

I'm back in my home; the silence is deafening.
The hearth is cool, no-one is in;
a chilling reminder of days gone by,
before we grew elder, seeking thrill far from your eye's reach.

I've breathed in the freshness of your fields;
I've felt your soil upon my face,
your water up to my knees,
and your birdsong in my ears.

I know not how many more years you will be 'home',
but by name or by heart, you always will be.
I've seen your warts and all of your sorrows,
but you, sweet Bridgnorth, will I always love.