Tim Liardet

Side by side

THE GORSE FIRES

I very gently drew out your brother’s tongue
and placed it back again, said the coroner,
but began to feel it might have done it by itself.

Through the stethoscope, through the sternum, I felt,
he said, I could hear all the way to the sea bottom.
The eye with a torch shone into it – uninhabited.

What did he die of? That’s the question I’m very glad
you’ve asked, he said. Ah, bodies – so many! Each one
more wiped, more stony-faced than the last,

pulled out in the drawer with a label tied to its toe.
Your brother might’ve died from drowning,
stroke, Septicaemia, a shot from a range of half a mile

or, to put it another way, he said, the common cold.
The liver’s bloated gland sifting its silts of salt
like moraines, like pond scum. Or spots on a tonsil.

The puckered arc of rips, he said, inverting
the flesh of his back like tiny gunshot wounds grown over
that could’ve been caused by a stave of three inch nails

but, you must understand, they’re merely braille.
Some bodies, he said, catch hold of the lies of the dead
and must be slid, unkissed, back into the drawer

while the outer world bursts with lively evidence.
The gorse fires blaze across the moor and kissing is
in season. But look at his mouth when a square of mirror’s

held over it – nothing. It reminds me of a sign saying privé
at the gates of consciousness where no one had
trespassed for many years. Look to the living, he said. They should
be kissed and kiss often and live to be a hundred.