By James Byrne.
River Nocturnes
i.
(Scrub moon requitals)
Gemming white flints pearl up
a transmutable necklace—
presage of jade
as if Ferris-powered
watercrowned / watercorridored
at the dock berth
the river’s black bell
snaked by a wash of marble
A plashed stone for the veinwork
to disembody—
jellyroll vortex of grey buildings
a face crashing
immemorially
into the shook river
ii.
Antiquated maelstrom in silhouette
(the self slaloming
ceremonially with the tide
—such psychical deceptions!)
Shadows refract under streetlamps
a bankside of mock Narcissi spur
the body as mothshadow—
its blackmirror outline
clinically disperses at the quay
Here light is fluxive
yet trainable
as any acrobat
scientifically (and non-scientifically) agile
once curiously positioned
it is barely tangible
iii.
Overly astringent
so as to hoodwink
into weatherlessness—
the sulphury harbour air
the smokish rain
reflect zenith distances—
water-fringed swale-markers
in a skyscape that is translatable
only as the mood turns
(vision to mind a language
on repeat)
But how to paint it in (the movement)
labyrinth-trails in a sonical stormlash
pronged overexposure of lightning
a skybull stamping out spherical thunder
The after-echo crackles off to sea
traded in the City
for pincered rain—
a pincushion under Greenwich causeway
How to paint it in
to annihilate the merest anchor-point
iv.
(Is she the supreme humanist
moving among inhuman faces
or a shivery pythoness)
Her gildedness concealed
by the Barrier’s silverrodded orbs
where an ashy cloud door hovers
like a brooding jury
until
verdictless
doubles open
Drink
Let’s have a drink and clear the halo of the glass
And clear the halo of watercubes from the glass.
I meet your eye and cheers and check for poisons,
Enemy, family, stool friend, Celtish at the table—
If genealogy’s all canker, mine’s a double-double.
Let’s drink to bloodscoot, the bonnys, the dumps,
With gold eyes lighting up in dark rooms, in secret,
Among scareheads who detonate the private cloud.
Who knew, so much in common, a body’s reservoir
Filled with pints of swampy, ragman’s enamel smile,
You are my animal, my brother in the grotto song,
Who, by fire’s tremolo, touchsight, frills my shivers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Byrne’s most recent poetry collection Blood/Sugar, was published by Arc in 2009. Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets, published in June 2012, is co-edited with ko ko thett and is the first anthology of Burmese poetry ever to be published in the West. Byrne is the editor of The Wolf, an internationally-renowned poetry magazine, which he co-founded in 2002. He won the Treci Trg poetry festival prize in Serbia and his Selected Poems: The Vanishing House was published in Belgrade. Byrne is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, an anthology of poets under 35, published by Bloodaxe in 2009. He lectures on English Literature and Creative Writing and was the Poet in Residence at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. His poems have been translated into several languages including Arabic, Burmese and Chinese and he is the International Editor for Arc Publications. His next collection is entitled White Coins and will be published in 2014.
