Three Poems by Tim Liardet

from Petrarch Redux

13

Your cloudy Petrarch, says the ophthalmic surgeon, is in need
of urgent treatment for a cataract in his right eye and his left:
the left, in giant test-goggles, a whole lot weaker than the right.
When he worries moon-eyed through his pupils he looks directly
into the bright fog: when he speaks, he speaks of what he sees.
No wonder all he sees of edge, like Turner, is not edge at all.
What he thought was Laura was a blur in earnest blooming.
No wonder he mistook his own corneal limbus for a tenth
of face smeared away by a hand, with a smudge for a mouth;
no wonder he mistook his Laura for a view inside a cloud.
What he thought for sure was all of her was a storm coming in
or the droplets that clung to his lashes, when it was over.
There was imbalance, to which brain adjusted, not too well.
We cloned his specs, without the glass. They sold like warm bread.

21

Primitive, yes, the gallows were, but also oddly state of the art.
There was a staircase, no, I lie, a lift, to the platform at the top.
The trapdoor was square, or maybe oblong, maybe even round.
To where the ankles twitched, it was twelve feet, no, it was a mile.
The diameter of rope was half an inch, no, no, at least an inch.
Twelve, or was it thirteen times, we heard. Or thought we heard.
The drapes would veil the drop. Or were they doors? We didn’t know.
We thought we heard the bodies drop in space, but maybe we did not.
We thought we heard a crack. It could have been the second vertebra.
Eleven deaths we might have heard, or thirteen, maybe twelve.
Some said it was eleven Petrarchs hanged, others, only eight.
Or half hanged. One third hanged. Or hanged, or almost hanged.
Or out of twelve or thirteen deaths by hanging, not hanged once.
If twelve times he wasn’t hanged, he is twelve times still not dead.

26

Petrarch’s tenth death, the tenth of eleven, is the paroxysm
of his editor informing him that he has lost faith in his poems:
Ah, face-blind, Francesco, I’d say. At this stage of things, malapropos…
This is the place where the cliff-face rises, or plummets down,
depending who looks down from top or up from the beach below.
Do you hear the sea, Petrarch asks himself? I hear the crows
and the choughs that belch and truckle softly in the midway air.
The cliff is terribly, awfully upright. The sea way beneath it
tilts very gently side to side like a sheet of fine metal, he says,
the kind once used to make a thunderclap on the stage.
I look down from top to bottom, up from bottom to the top.
One wheel spins over, throws up mud. Whatever it is,
the thing that rocks in the breakers has been smashed to bits.
The moon is up, is not. I jump. I do not jump. I jump.

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.