Two Poems by Tim Liardet

A Cure for Wellness

When I met with the stern neurologist
first to be examined then wired up
then told to walk a line as straight
as I could towards a window fogged by light
When I used the words it taught me
when I tried to say what the body felt
I was told what I'd always thought
to be the culprit of my disposition
What I'd thought was a cue to hog
or otherwise a choice to smash
the chair to bits or stand on it to speak
was in point of fact a thing as three-
dimensional as the sternum bone
a thing that shaped, was shaped by, space—
The first monkey shot into space
was Albert Il, a rhesus macaque
Macaques for 300,000 years
have lived in the far north of Japan
Japan, circled by sea, looks small
on the curve of world in the atlas
Atlas, the topmost vertebra,
takes the weight of the cranium
The cranium keeps the gland Descartes
believed was pinhole of the soul
the soul's not gold but is perhaps
a sort of gold reserve of tics—
What I'd thought was tic after tic
was in fact a contract with the flesh
three pounds of nervous tissue
filling the cranial cavity, at work
in acts of impulse and sabotage
that make me not you, or you, or you

The Wildfires are not the Wildfires

They are named while they burn, baptised in the heat
but they burn, burn, burn unchristened—Atlas, Tick, Hog and Gold.
They will burn us back to the last bolts and studs,
the last nails without boards and the last blackened hinge,
the last spring to wag. They will burn the beautiful papers.
They’ll burn every symbol meant to be or represent them.
They’ll leave language for the charred, fragile sheet it is.
They’ll burn away their own names—Atlas, Tick, Hog and Gold.
It is the names, the names and the words, I bring home
like jade, like ivory, like spirit stones, like bas-reliefs.
I keep them burning like tea-lights, like flames in a pupil.
The pupil is not a pupil, flames not flames. The names
are threaded like beads of Fahrenheit—Atlas, Tick, Hog and Gold.
I bring them home in thoughts of yellow blistering my door.
I bring them home in an urn containing the blizzard
of cinders miles ahead of the flames. Words, like images,
are treacherous. The beasts aren’t the words. God is not God.
The words hanker, like a dream, do not participate.
The fires set themselves alight. Speak the word God
perfectly enough, it’s said, and the forest erupts like napalm.

Twice shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, for The World Before Snow (Carcanet) and The Blood Choir (Seren), Tim Liardet has produced eleven collections of poetry.  He has recently received an Authors’ Foundation work-in-progress award from the Society of Authors for his twelfth collection, Atlas, Tick, Hog and Gold, now nearing completion.