Mathew Lyons

Linnaeus, intoxicated

He chased it all his life, through all the kingdoms of the world,
through each canton and republic, his mind cluttered with the thought it,
disordered as the house he left behind to be ransacked by neighbours.

He left them far behind too, preferring the company of strangers,
the language of strangers, the incomprehension of strangers
who humoured his talk of phyla and class and ransacked his bags

as he slept off his drink in the morning the way a snake
sloughs off its skin. It was the order of things now. Age slowed him
the way the mountain slows a glacier but he charmed new strangers

to pay for his notebooks, to beg for his wine. Farmers worried he’d drown
in their wells. Bankers wrote him off like debt. Here and there,
librarians took him in, found him a bed with their family.

He thanked them without words and showed them in his books where,
as a boy, he first intuited the thing he sought all life long to find,
this delicate, blue-winged thing, this species of the genus love.

Mathew Lyons is a London-based writer, poet and historian. His poems have been published by Atrium Poetry, Dawn Treader, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Reliquiae, and Under the Radar, among others.