By ALISTAIR NOON.

◊

The Phonographic Commission

Can I read or write? No sir. Speak loud and clearly?
Yes. Can I sing my homeland? I tell him the hills
I left when soldiers made me a soldier.
Cigar Man nods. His nib moves on
as a blackbird addresses the camp from a birch.
My nib is the bow I play to the horn. The needle
marches along the wax the way we did
through Tbilisi. I sing and a doubling voice
tinges the note like ink in rivering water.
A third returns and voices leave us again.
Cigar Man frowns. He doesn’t expect the turn
of the tone or how our melodies melt.
We slow. We speed up and shout like goatherds!
My bow goes like a saw, and some of their eyes
turn into the sun or clouds that keep their showers.
Doors thunder and washing drizzles our beds.
We carve the names of streets whose puddles
we leap, and wait with flies at the-house-that-stinks.
Is it a rat or blackbird ghosting the bushes?
A nuthatch hops the trunk I once climbed up.
A flash, and they make us march the sand
with empty rifles. Where are the shells?
I doze awake. The dust is better than mud,
and pressing strings than pummeling nails,
a change from wages, grub and grumbles.
We help Cigar Man turn our tunes into paper,
but when we sing, we sing like this like that
and make up words for cigs to drop from his pockets.
“Scheiße!” We haven’t sung the song we sang.
He wants the song and the page to be one
with pages for men from Baku and Africa here.
Specs-And-Frock-Coat comes to smear
their face with white stuff, to tape my head
and sculpt my gums, to tell my tongue
to be still until I tell you to sing.
They want us loud they want us quiet
as flowers that crawl to the wire, Berlin beyond.
My eyes are binoculars crossing the heath
as a crow grows into an eagle. I search for summits,
trees on the skyline, ravines and falls,
ice floes down the swollen Tergi.
I sip my milk but kefir fills my gullet.
We cannot play them back the valley
where my chuniri’s tone once told the weather,
but sing and change the tune we sang.

◊

Maize

It’s a factory made of pines that go pale
as a gust goes through them. It seems for an instant
each plant’s as still as Corinthian pillars

and stands there clueless with spread green hands,
each leaf white-haired and a lacquered table;
below, the dim desert lacks ant caravans.

Next moment, the maize is a team of geese
adjusting shape to meet the air’s orders,
the offshore wind that shakes all fields.

Half-way down these humans and a half,
two testicles droop. At the field’s tight edge,
this sugarcane drops and lies there, parched.

Each fuel-rod’s topped with a miniature conifer
short of a star or brooch of angels.
But maize has moved more miles than a triffid:

with dissected seeds and ripped-up roots,
its botanical diagram rules our kitchen,
revealing the grain that feeds our roads.

◊

Municipal Season

The City, upper case, may plan its zones,
the lower-case city places its own.
It picks out microparks to use disuse,
guerilla-gardens walls. Spray cans curate
the ground where neophytes have tagged the cracks
and car skids leave their fossils. Tetrapaks
rise like Alpine peaks from the grasslands, faults
in cardboard boxes make their Eiger faces,
and like an iceberg, someone’s tennis ball
tests buoyancy out in the floes of foliage
that fill a pool beside the dark canal.

The living planet sets a bad example:
a birch lies back and fans its branches.
Beneath the metal mesh detaining acorns,
the mushrooms huddle like sprayed protesters.
Delinquent trees go dropping brown-curled wrappers.

But there are ways of forcing them from place
to place: the amber-blinking van that leaves
a swerving trail across this creeping snow;
the chainsaw, mightier than the trunk; the shredder
that’s quicker than the bud; the whirring grab
that whirls the earth to end the months of leaf-rot;
the pruning platform rising to the treetop
from a lorry that appears to levitate.

The orange people in reflector stripes
look less the captains of this airspace, though,
than ground staff in their headphones as they use
anti-hoovers to rove the grass, as if
for coins, and heap the leaves in atolls round
the trees whose summer was a mushroom cloud,
to make the grass once more an insect’s desert.

Colleagues in plumage come here by the season,
but Wolfgang Müller, may I call you that,
red-faced in glasses and overalls
from shovelling foliage and harpooning cartons,
how many Lucky Strikes are in your pack
to rise like nuclear rods and help you track
the days of the year from a flaking bench?

Where naked Spartans wrestle in bronze,
the autumn sports have stopped, and as the frost
leases the windscreen, grass invests in glitz.
Darkness returns in humvees for the chestnuts,
the plane and mammoth trees, the larch and beech
some tongues have told apart ten thousand years
and me since buying my quick guide to trees.

The plants are easily swayed by the sky,
as seasons wage their proxy conflict through
the shade and sunlight. While the hawk’s a-drone,
the blackbirds go on their bush-to-bush searches,
sparrow collectives change their line on winter,
as if, imbibing one more conference coffee,
these botanists pick through the risks to growth,
prospects for light, the pollination process,
and whether the seasonal rules apply.

♦

ALISTAIR NOON‘s recent publications include Paradise Takeaway (Two Rivers, 2023) and two further volumes of his translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam (The Voronezh Workbooks and Occasional and Joke Poems, Shearsman, 2022). Peter Riley reviewed earlier work in The Fortnightly Review. Alistair’s poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, The Guardian, New Statesman and World Literature Today, and he’s published essays on translocality and poetry, Wuhan Punk and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He lives in Berlin.