Two Poems for Shelton Lea

Posted to accompany an article about Shelton for Poets United's 'I Wish I'd Written This'.


Yesterday

Yesterday

the book of your life arrived.

You're three years dead.

The author began the story

while you still had breath.

I am scarcely mentioned.

The first time we met

I showed you how to crush aspirin

in the bowl of a spoon,

inserting it through the wires

that held your broken jaw

as if I was feeding a baby.

This was at Mal's.

He showed you my poems.

You told me, 'Make the pauses

where the breath would naturally pause

if you were speaking it.

Shelley and Keats did that.'

I could go on listing anecdotes

piled up over twenty years.

But everyone has many yarns

of you, troubadour,

and most remain untold

except when old friends gather.

It's true I was not central

to your tale. Others, closer,

are also reduced to a line.

She has the essentials.

Still I find it strange

that you are dead and I'm gone.

7/9/07


Poems from a Peach Melba Hat

for its author, Shelton Lea (1946-2005)

I was tiny Abalone Press

operating alone from home

in the hours my kids were at school;

funded by Bill's diving money,

hence the name.

And it had a name by then.

You touted for ads for the end-papers,

a 19^th Century practice you revived,  

joyful to demonstrate

self-funding for poetry presses.

But two of the seven ads 

were Bill's and mine, ah well,

and one was your partner Christine's.

You wanted a matte pink board,

a delicate shade. You wanted

Joy Hester's painting

'Head of a Woman with Hat',

her splendid skewiff dignity

on your front cover. You got it.

And on the back 'Chloe' 

the famous nude 

from Young & Jackson's bar

with you, larrikin dandy, 

perched on the brass railing

protecting her frame.

The tenth Muse, you called her.

You came for two days

to consult on the layout

and stayed two weeks with pleurisy.

You thought to go straight back home,

all day on the rattly Gippsland train.

You thought it was just a cough.

Convalescent, you yarned with my boys,

explaining the shape of a fugue

and the reasons crime doesn't pay.

On both you were well-informed.

You were funny and wise 

and you heard them. 

They never forgot.

We argued over apostrophes.

Now I'd have let you leave them out,

but that was twenty-seven years ago.

I missed one, reading 'julias' –

personal name for a lawn, how quaint.

Till I heard you, too late, reciting 'julia's lawn'.

Some of the Establishment scoffed

at the excellent reviews,

insinuating partiality.

The street-wild poet, the very small press.

Who could praise so highly

and not be swayed 

by friendship or even lust?

We dressed very fine for the dinner,

the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.

You were short-listed for two:

Poetry and Australiana. No, 

you didn't win. But the reviewers beamed

most politely on those who'd sneered.

Three years ago now, a boarder

stole my only copy when he left;

inscribed of course. My son David 

found me another, signed, 

in a second-hand bookshop.

I open it up. It begins: 

'the day was fifteen bright balloons'.

It ends with the line, 

'beware the greed of time.' 

Somewhere in the middle

you're coming out of prison 

on a winter day, hearing the Beatles:

'love, love me do.' And we do.

Published All Travellers We (Montmorency, Vic., Eaglemont Press, 2007.)

27/10/07