Issue 26: Alistair Noon
Field Trip to the Post-Holocene Coast
To revisit the vision of ants,
we examined the amber dunes:
our heels and toes became Jains
as they cratered their grainy advance.
Somewhere must be the nest.
In the dunes’ dystopian aloneness,
we scurried the route of pheromones,
our instruments obsessed
on the second before the sun sank.
Pioneers recalling the rooks,
late-afternoon alders would creak
to the hawk-owl sirens. The ant
prefers the sharper gradient
to ramps whose bends are invisible,
the escarpment of leg-slipping particles
to the trail that zephyrs have laid,
brings back what it records
to the colony, leaving no print
in the peer-reviewed sand, a glint
in the vapour above the seaboard.
Reading the IPCC’s 6th Report while Crossing the Müggelsee
Lead clouds reconstitute reptiles and scythes
above the grey lake, but the rain is irrelevant
where the motor-raft moves and the tension seethes.
Where rocks once rode the ice sheet,
the fish note a new instability, flies
take cover, white socks get splashed.
Airy crocodiles and turtles peer down
as a Maori war boat centipedes the water.
Paddling the dusk, the ascending din
of small constellations mapped for a second
whose naphthenes grind over birches – ow –
into my ears and the land they’ve skinned.
Around us the weekend banks that greened
as the freezer truck beeped into reverse.
Although the ions report to the ground,
nobody here goes short of a rainbow,
its capsized keel a locked horizon.
The atmosphere hemispheres a brain
where the feedback of clouds remains beyond us,
and the lawyer suggests we engine around
the regulations for local amphibians.
Then through the haze a slab of perspex
erupts, upon that dripping display
a Samsung Galaxy A7, unpacked;
on its fractured glass, fresh in their soil,
a forest of oaks and ferns; and among
the aggregate uncertainties, I see my selfie
as bacteria the off-run deposited wait
for the heat to craft-brew this season’s algae,
and industrial skies keep sieving the water.
From the Esperanto
Some Latins are short of a church
or wavelengths aligned into flags:
in the Hapsburg currents, their words
are lithe Carpathian logs
tumbling and swerving past oaks
that weevil generations holed,
that spiders style for a week,
where ash crowds in the bole,
and the bark has noted the score.
They seek a route to the open,
their meanings as frank as a fly.
Let’s meet at Hotel Europa,
where you might find me staring
at the flickering chandeliers
that structure the lobby’s air,
wherever that language lies.
Alistair Noon’s publications include Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015), both Nine Arches Press, and a dozen chapbooks from various presses. His translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam, Concert at a Railway Station: Selected Poems, appeared from Shearsman Books in 2018. He lives in Berlin.
Copyright © 2021 by Alistair Noon, 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.
