Shearsman 58: Alistair Noon: "Slight Things"

Shearsman 58

Alistair Noon

Slight Things

Landscapes hang there, highways in the air, curl upwards, sideways, to the base,
intimate mists coil around outhouses, hiss in the grass: There, then where?
The eye names hill, plain, is a flux-map, a flower for an evening,
invisible lines launch clockhands forward, or
jolt them brake, sunsets loiter;
the globe as an orange, its prised-off segments.
Morning repaints the land, not hill but plain, not plain but pine that stabs the crumbleground –
yesterday red earth, today brown, tomorrow blue?
Hills roughen and smoothen, fields stripe green and yellow, carnival faces flow –
city observes country, pixels on a screen,
our breath condenses to a journal,
the ideal pine, the real heights and diameters, the rule and its pig-trough of exceptions,
glimpses of a loco, pine sparsens, the brief arc of streams –
across ridges and oceans, landscapes to guess at.

Alistair Noon lives in China, where he works as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language. He has translated from, amongst others, August Stramm, Gennadi Aigi, Mayakovsky and, more recently, from Classical Chinese. Poems have been published in magazines and anthologies in Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Russia.