YOU - Poem by Barry Tebb

“Remember, you loved me, when we were young, one day”

The words of the song in Tauber’s mellifluous tenor

Haunt my nights and days, make me tremble when I hear

Your voice on the phone, sadden me when I can’t make into your smile

The pucker of your lips, the gleam in your eye.

The day we met is with me still, you asked directions

And on the way we chatted. You told me how you’d left

Lancashire for Leeds, went to the same TC as me, even liked poetry

Both were looking for an ‘interesting evening class’

Instead we found each other.

You took me back for tea to the flat in Headingley

You shared with two other girls. The class in Moortown

Was a disaster. Walking home in the rain I put my arm

Around you and you did not resist, we shared your umbrella

Then we kissed.

I liked the taste of your lips, the tingle of your fingertips,

Your mild perfume. When a sudden gust blew your umbrella inside out

We sheltered underneath a cobbled arch, a rainy arch, a rainbow arch.

“I’m sorry”, you said about nothing in particular, perhaps the class

Gone wrong, the weather, I’ll never know but there were tears in your eyes

But perhaps it was just the rain. We kissed again and I felt

Your soft breasts and smelt the hair on your neck and I was lost to you

And you to me perhaps, I’ll never know.

We went to plays, I read my poems aloud in quiet places,

I met your mother and you met mine. We quarrelled over stupid things.

When my best friend seduced you I blamed him and envied him

And tried to console you when you cried a whole day through.

The next weekend I had the flu and insisted you came to look after me

In my newly-rented bungalow. Out of the blue I said, “What you did for him

You can do for me”. It was not the way our first and only love-making

Should have been, you guilty and regretful, me resentful and not tender.

When I woke I saw you in the half-light naked, curled and innocent

I truly loved you If I’d proposed you might have agreed, I’ll never know.

A month later you were pregnant and I was not the father.

I wanted to help you with the baby, wanted you to stay with me

So I could look after you and be there for the birth but your mind

Was set elsewhere end I was too immature to understand or care.

When I saw you again you had Sarah and I had Brenda, my wife-to-be;

Three decades of nightmare ahead with neither of our ‘adult children’

Quite right, both drink to excess and have been on wards.

Nor has your life been a total success, full-time teaching till you retired

Then Victim Support: where’s that sharp mind, that laughter and that passion?

And what have I to show?

A few pamphlets, a small ‘Selected’, a single good review.

Sat in South Kensington on the way to the Institut I wrote this,

Too frightened even to phone you.