Three Poems by Tim Liardet

Versions of the Non-dominant Hand

…forgive the characters the loops the slopes the verticals
a giant O about to tip or roll
the grasses that scrawl on white the soul’s graffiti
They will try to write the scriptures of the brain
like the scratches scratches scratches of the the styluses
They are bold in their shaping they face the wrong way
before the facts of growth are understood
Ask who speaks and they’ll reply M-I-N-U-S
Forgive them they are ungainly in their steps
and cannot stand up straight they splay their feet
so far from one another Oh, the longest these beanpoles
are a dream of baby muscles growing in the wrist

Versions of Oedipus [The Phantom Thread]

Though to sew was agony, though you raged in the fire pit
though the needle stabbed at your fingers
you cut from a scrap of tartan cloth
a suit you hoped your father would be proud to wear
Your sobs were misread, they were your fury
when he turned to your mother laughing
…It is no bigger than my hand, it is too small to wear
Had he no knowledge of how long fingers
even when they stopped sewing continued to sew?
Did he not know a moving object’s length
is measured to be shorter than its proper length?
Had he no idea of the size of your father?

Versions of Divination [The Lacrimosa]

A tear-duct dwarfed by its own emotion
(…according to the latest update) is not there
It is not there but it imagines that it is
Though the dust in it itches, the update says, it does not
the itch, much like the tear duct, is not in the eye
While the update waits for an update
the mean diameter of a tear-duct’s bony canal
dreams of the many minuses of a drought
All there is to be done is to imagine
a tiny hole perhaps way ahead and dry as dustbowl dust
or a lost aquifer a pinhole wraith at which
nothing rises nothing flows nothing blooms

Twice shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, for The World Before Snow (Carcanet) in 2015 and The Blood Choir (Seren) in 2006, Tim Liardet has produced eleven collections of poetry to date. He has also been longlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, and has received several Poetry Book Society Recommendations, a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice, an Arts Council England Writer’s Award, a Society of Authors Award, a Hawthornden fellowship, three Pushcart nominations, and various other awards. In September 2019, he received an Authors’ Foundation work-in-progress award from the Society of Authors. From 2015 to 2018, he was a Poetry Book Society Selector and is currently Professor of Poetry at Bath Spa University.