Alistair Noon

Air Currents

Some things flutter to the ground,
litter both green and not green.
More than weight determines
what will sprint with the wind.

Kick, if you like, at the facts
of styrofoam, ringpull and fork.
For one brief look no oil stain
floats with a brook over stone.

Or watch sparrows rush from a drain,
their small shapes drown
into bushes, then resurface.
They’ll seem to fly faster
than a fuselage seen from below,
setting off across the bright blueness

A Sort of a Wilderness

A bottle slips on a pebbled shore.
A bell shines in the brightening air.
A carhorn calls, harsh as bark,
as a motor glides in the slow wind.

Chainsaws on timber, streams over stones.
A drill glares like the sun.
The peaks of a hammer move out of the clouds.
Any voice out here’s a dark lake.

For Valeri Scherstjanoi

The Moving Landscape

Sound, then ink, make hill and plain;
a name is a flower for a platform.
Mist around outhouses hisses
There, then where? through wet grass.

Morning repaints the soil.
Fields stripe yellow then green.
A line spins clock-hands forward,
then brakes them. Sunsets loiter.

Breath writes a journal on the glass.
Six days’ work at the window:
the conductor holds onto our tickets.
Pine sparsens, and streams arc briefly.

Clouds glint through girder and gantry,
or is that vapour granite?
We glimpse the loco as we curve
towards the approaching zones,

then carry our bags out to a name,
to typeface, this week’s hoardings,
the concourse that leads to the streets,
roads, tracks, paths, terrain,

up hills, among pine some pair of eyes
follows for a minute from a train.

Report for a Magazine

I began with the words on their own
as I pawed the earth for the unknown;

followed the air and its high-pitch news,
over hour, week and year. Off they flew,

the motley, chirping hints and decrees.
I was glad to be out in the trees

as I tried and tried to catch the air,
dug for the end, unearthed elsewhere.

Out of the Cave

Since the horses and deer in the dark
the clans have been out on the hunt,
scratching dreams in the dust,
sketching the lines of the strong,
the launch of a javelin, the heads
of decision-makers, then smashed
the marble noses and private parts,
laid out Versailles and municipal parks,
and stand under glass now
beside this high-speed train,
holding a silver box out
to paint themselves in a second.

In the West

The house looks lighter, redecorated in white
as the sun comes in over the potato fields
where the Brits did tank practice. It ricochets
off walls that beige never suited much.

Muslims! East Germans! Good thing not one of them
lives in this village with no post office.

Copyright © Alistair Noon, 2009