Issue 31: Mark Byers

late spring (east wood)

i

late era of the hellebore

& the upstart crocus –

yellow scales sheathing

the perimeter wall –

the common technics        

of the catkin & the con-

voluted fungi – (enough

is enough…) – moss

in the tumbled stones

where a fir leans

against its categories –

marbled cloud-forms

behind a screen of trees:

ii

listening to the crow’s

disassembled

lyric

iii

                                & Rhododendron hybrids

                  arch-Victoriana

                              their bony syntax

            spreading

                                          in the understory

                  roots in the acid loam

                                              of Sichuan

Gavrinis

restring the lyric’s torque and jabber

                         to the guillemots’ angles mort –

               a beeline around the menhir

                                      where the angle of sight

takes in the oak over the cairn

                its tablets engraved

                              with croziers, zigzags,

                aurochs and whales –

while the boat struggles out in the passage

                          from subject to object

              and the cased wings of the cricket

                                  are the granite lines

carved with tools of quartz –

                          a rough crossing, un-

           navigable in places

     between the still and the stilled island

                     currents –

Points Bridge (25 April 2023, notation 4)

the sand martins are beside themselves again —

                                                   saltimbanque & antic

                            neither here nor there

manoeuvring between struts of wrought-iron

                                       to flit & fret :

            call it exhibitioning —

& below them the red campion & the lungwort :

                                                                 the indefensible

                        ethics of the leaf litter :

                                         pollen & bone meal :

             the mini-demesne of the nematode

crossing dandelion country

                on our predictable wayward course

Dunstanburgh 12.2.23

the anvil of the song thrush

the shallow arc of the tern ::

butter-yellow gorse

embers by the jamb’s

clutter of snail debris

who is it that sees through the marsh-grass

& sea-holly ::

the bladderwrack & underfoot amber periwinkle

not me –

:: a difficult observer

saying the language of the lyric

is set to autofill

abstruser speech

:: a blunt instrument

this vocabulary of salt & weathered stone

Mark Byers teaches at Newcastle University and lives in Northumberland. His first book was Charles Olson and American Modernism: The Practice of the Self (OUP 2018). Other recent ‘notation’ poems are forthcoming in Shearsman Magazine.

Copyright © 2023 by Mark Byers, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author

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