Tim Liardet Biography

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.
...