Tim Liardet

Side by side

THE CONSTABLES CALL

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.