Embedded Files
High Impasto
1.
Rubs purplish pigment with a sure thumb
smudge rising to grey cliffs on the spur.
Flaking elusive crests, feathers, and tatters
with smears of lead-white and megilps.
Raw palette’s cloudy mirror; scene to dip
a hog’s-hair brush in viscid emerald,
prising from the colour-box a landscape
like high-rigged ships from a bottle.
It sets like chilled honey, as the guillemot
drops in a globule of pasty grey and veers
into midday shadow. Flexed wings dry
at once in a sudden offshore draught.
2.
Not too runny now ochre and rose madder:
earth in canvas teeth sized and primed.
Scrimmed with paint’s flesh for a malleable
body to mix pastes of spermaceti wax.
Scuff the motif its high impasted pigment
stiffens pale or slumps to jagged moraine,
picking out the wave-tops’ juggernaut
to race with clippers and lightships.
Then loosens with turpentine for a thin
breaker in the distance: liquid cumulus
fluorescing off-white. High banks in matte
rest on resined blue soon brushed out.
3.
Textbook atmospheres halo the classic
scene reached by the tourist line—
routes cutting tin-rich combes with deft
swipes of a long-handled brush.
Alabaster dunes unknown to maps but ranged
with yellows ground in walnut oil. A powdery
salt haze. Conventional figures pressing
steps through cobalt rising ultramarine.
When challenged its souvenir aesthetic
belongs with the bathing machine
and home aquaria, framed by the colonist
of the postcard cliff and escarpment.
4.
Still pilchard-shoals drift mile-long
in dark water, edge against the steep
peninsula crossing seasonal currents.
A nimbus caught with an ad hoc wash.
To finish with composure, what coheres
to the eye overrides a sea-surface
stretched from end to end, embossed
substances forming a brittle crust.
It becomes the midday light, set apart
and plainly virtuosic after the water’s
steel mirror. Gunmetal, gimmicky. Ready
to kick up clouds of sand and ochre.
Mark Byers teaches at Newcastle University and lives in Northumberland. His forthcoming group biography of several figures in the English Surrealist group is forthcoming with Bloomsbury. Other recent poems have appeared in Shearsman Magazine, Long Poem Magazine, and Blackbox Manifold 31.
Copyright © 2026 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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