Tim Liardet

Strange how the dropped crockery does not break
nor reach the floor, and no one notices. Here in this place
of locked cells and of lines kept reassuringly straight
...

Because wasps disregard the razors of the prison fence
when they drift indoors, drawn
by the confusion of odours
...

Outside Florence's walls in the hissing grass
the olive-pickers snooze, under the olives;
...

Body and world were never the place
for you to live in. There was climbing, though,

climbing not out of the body but out of world -
in the fork of the tree, so high up it seemed

you'd already got to the sky and I was gravity
in your shoes. I kept you upright by somehow

contriving to be the counterweight far below
as long as you swayed up there. And as your arm went up

mine sort of pistoned down. As your arm reached down
mine was slowly raised, Dodya, and you started back

towards earth with caution, a kind of guardianship
exercised by every nerve tensed for falling

in your body, and placed the sky-egg carefully
between your teeth; you placed it there so tenderly

and eased yourself down backwards as if you were
responsible for bringing down to safety

the rarest and most susceptible outer shell
of life's longing for itself — so pristine and so sky-blue,

perfect, but for the faintest freckles of blood:
don't fall, I shouted up to you, don't fall, don't fall . . .

Now you fall through time, if not through time and space;
and the darkened freckles survive, are everywhere.

They are on your hands, on mine. They are on your shoes.
They were on our mother's wedding dress before you were born.
...

Through what might be
the earpiece
or some grainier,
more primitive
instrument, brother,
or perhaps
the miracle
of the auditory
nerve, summoning
some signal,
a ruched pinhead
of decibels,
I imagined I might
be able
to hear your voice -
it would be faint
and strange,
belonging
as it does now
to another age,
the pauses
between it
prolonged by the whelm
of distance,
the static of water:
instead, the
soft voicemail
kicks in to say
you are
unavailable
to talk.
I had something
to say, I had
something
to say, I say
to the tape-hiss.
...

Pity the police officers whose task it is to tell
the truth of the mysterious dying. They are pale
and gamine, they speak in unison like twins and might

be either men or women. One writes in invisible ink.
Mystery prospers, they say, when the eyes and the mouth
rest. The deceased's toenails had not been cut for months,

so long, they continue to grow now he is dead.
They're living evidence, say the officers, shoots of nail;
they arc in slow motion like the couch grass gripping

a plough that's blunted and abandoned. Is this a human foot
or some unusual specimen sprouting brambles,
sprouting sickles, until they hook right round

and scratch at their own footsole? This is what the truth
does, they say, it tickles itself to laughter at
our attempts to uncover it. His toenails force back

their cuticles like buds and might've hooked him bodily
back into the world just long enough to tell us
what happened in those final hours. The toenails are like the case,

they say, dark and horny, growing beyond our reach:
they grow and they grow, they flourish like clues
and curl back into accusation. Was he murdered at a height,

who could not stoop to tend them for himself?
So far below, wild and tapering, the toenails might
be protesting against the body's extreme inertness,

say the officers, they might be forming parabolas
of suggestion and still-growing questions or trying
to tell us the culprit's identity, like Nosferatu's
fingernails scratching a name on the air.
...

I very gently drew out your brother's tongue
and placed it back again, said the coroner,
but began to feel it might have done it by itself.

Through the stethoscope, through the sternum, I felt,
he said, I could hear all the way to the sea bottom.
The eye with a torch shone into it - uninhabited.

What did he die of? That's the question I'm very glad
you've asked, he said. Ah, bodies - so many! Each one
more wiped, more stony-faced than the last,

pulled out in the drawer with a label tied to its toe.
Your brother might've died from drowning,
stroke, Septicaemia, a shot from a range of half a mile

or, to put it another way, he said, the common cold.
The liver's bloated gland sifting its silts of salt
like moraines, like pond scum. Or spots on a tonsil.

The puckered arc of rips, he said, inverting
the flesh of his back like tiny gunshot wounds grown over
that could've been caused by a stave of three inch nails

but, you must understand, they're merely braille.
Some bodies, he said, catch hold of the lies of the dead
and must be slid, unkissed, back into the drawer

while the outer world bursts with lively evidence.
The gorse fires blaze across the moor and kissing is
in season. But look at his mouth when a square of mirror's

held over it - nothing. It reminds me of a sign saying privé
at the gates of consciousness where no one had
trespassed for many years. Look to the living, he said. They should
be kissed and kiss often and live to be a hundred.
...

What got you there - laid out in a cot, in a diaper -
was the scrum of punched nurses and policemen
who tried to restrain you as long as you flailed.
What were left, in the loose flesh of your arms, were

the bruises, as blue-purple as plums, like the footmarks
of the struggle that broke, flapped open and snatched
your mind. What I thought I'd heard was something
opening very abruptly and shaking itself out

in a rustle of ancient bodices and ballgowns
and corset bones which creaked. Whatever had flapped out of you
seemed to have taken with it the last of sense.
Whatever had flapped out of you, and gone its way,

had dumped you hugely on one side, one arm
laid limply over the other, oblivious to your visitors.
Whosoever lingered at the cot-bars - like the faces
in a Doré nightmare, uncertain of who stared at whom

and who stared back - you looked straight through
to middle distance, chewed on the cud of space.
Your son swayed away - this was too much for him.
By then all you could do was address your self;

as if to say you could not be reached, brother,
and we felt like we were shouting and shouting
through layers of thick glass. We hoped to draw your mind -
by that I mean the wholly disembodied self

which might have hovered over you -
back towards the light . . . but had to leave, instead,
to the sound of your voice spinning in the dark
at the slightest touch, at the slightest touch.
...

What you brought home to our mother no longer resembled
a human face - every follicle magnified
among the kick-marks, a Galapagos of kick-marks;
one half of your head swollen to twice the size

of the other, like something trying to get out,
something misshaping the cranium from the inside;
the upper heavyweight lip split open
like a plum into halves - the slit of the eye glimmering

under the monstrous lid. She laid out your body
and placed her hands into the water of the bowl.
Her name for you, she said, had stuck in her throat
like a wishbone that wouldn't go down and wouldn't come out,

and your legs so hairy, obdurate and bowed
would have to be shaved, she said, shaving smooth inroads
into the crop-roots of your body hair. That noise.
She removed the rags of your vest, like the hands

attending the holy body - she ploughed you through
with wild protective love, and you lay there,
saved. She raised your arms to wash them, and vowed
to go out into the world, that moment, to find the man

who'd pummelled and kicked you to this shape
and break him in two like the laws of forgiveness
and have him hobble and limp to the left
as her lumpen darling limped to the right:

and she was the snarl amplified at such a distance from
your mouth, and it was a snarl for a snarl.
It was furious steel capped boot for steel capped boot,
you might say. It was meat for meat.
...

When the gulf widens between them
these two young men reach out across it, hand to hand:
the skin of the pulse protests,
...

When their largely unused bodies slump
at desks, one yawn sets off the next which sets off
...

The snowstorm came down, it blew across Boston,
it said all roads behind you are closed for good;
when mass collides with mass and crawls lower,
...

Madame Sasoo, sombre, but determined
to overcome her nibbling inhibitions
and have the warm Indian Ocean lick
...

It's said that drowning can be beautiful
(…though the ones who said it were not the ones who had to drown).
The surrender, perhaps, to the arms of water
...

The two spaniels leaping and flying
like shadow and leaper, like leaper and shadow
sent in wider and wider circles,
...

When it came to Conrad's map it wasn't the expanses of red
or the areas of green or of orange or purple,
I was going into the yellow. Dead centre.
...

Down, down, deeper and deeper down, entering
the prison's underground chamber where fear is a sort
of aloe sapping the tongue, on the brink of zero hour:
...