Four poems

By Alistair Noon

Information on your Booking

There is an island where they’ll kill

the visitor who strides ashore.

It seems to be the people’s will.

It seems to be the natural law.

You may have gospels, sheep or beer.

You may have medicine you could teach.

But in their eyes it seems quite clear

that you’re a demon on their beach.

They may have heard from other sources,

whatever your explicit pitch,

you’re really after their resources,

which means of course you can’t be rich.

Be happy when you click the code,

unlatch the box and take the key

to access this three-day abode

whose owner you need never see.

Yards

Doors to yards aren’t often open,

due to fears that things get broken

if you let the public in,

if you let them do their thing.

If one’s open though, then step

into someone’s London club,

greet the curvy plaster sentries

hired in some preceding century.

Pass the patterned tiles on walls

as if here be swimming pools,

as if every hall’s a bathroom.

And, if no one yet has asked whom

you’d be here to see, that’s good.

If they ask, you’re here to look

round the yard and then the yard

after that, which has a garden,

where a web designer’s loft is,

or the esoteric’s office,

yards where they would harness carts,

used today to flog used cars,

places, bright with fresh graffiti,

tidy suburbs think are seedy.

No you don’t live here, but yes,

there are yards to see here yet.

Note on an Albanian Beach

Dear absent subcontractor,

your loungers ever compacter

across this real estate,

your Med-defended enclosure

for solar over-exposure

has left us no free shade,

so we’ve plonked our jack in the sand

that you’ve now made into land,

and told the people hawking

the nibbles that we won’t pay for:

“Let’s divvy up the labour

of splashing around and walking.”

Our vault is now stone-pinned

and no more at risk from the wind

than a sapling in local ruins.

Our post is at odds with your deeds,

but it’s off the beach’s newsfeeds:

we’ll be gone before the flash rains.

The Valley of Joy

The Valley of Joy lies next to our flat

with vegetable plots and heaterless homes,

a fence generations keep staring at,

miniature windmills and well-ranked gnomes.

Loungers’ detachable cushions lurk

behind the hedges. In winter unhaunted,

the number-one lawns are weekends of work

for the spooks who return each spring, undaunted,

to clutter their summers with pots and planks,

unbunging the gutters, de-scumming the butts,

removing the goose shit, and get no thanks

from thieves like me. The gate, as it shuts,

clangs in my head. The sense as I enter

these flattened ravines at a hesitant pace

is the sense I get in a shopping centre –

not quite a trespass, not quite my space.

They’re a getaway, too, from slow-braised flats.

The tops of obligatory pear trees cool

the hoovered dachas of amateur bureaucrats

meeting each month to suspend their rules

from colourful magnets in glass displays,

the laminate glazing the hopeless font.

Read their decrees, you’ll detect their gaze

and feel more idiot than savant,

each line at least in italics and bold,

last words a finger tapped out in red,

to underscore the pre-emptive scold:

Ensure no waste remains on your beds.

Models of clarity censure offenders:

No dumping of leaves or unwanted logs.

Not to mention the icons for all ye who enter:

NO CYCLING. NO BALL GAMES. NO DOGS.

Even an evening of fun dictates

that chicken breasts be paid in advance

from 5 to 6, June 10th, to celebrate

eighty-six years of the neighbourly glance.

This is the place to recline with a thriller,

after the thrill of sprinkling the plants,

or even, why not, kick back with Schiller,

his line (I’ll be loose): No rules, no dance.

Or else get lost in Philosopher Rawls:

Only with laws do we know what’s allowed,

only then are we free. Which sort of recalls

more recent doubts on the brightness of crowds.

They play two games in the clubhouse: Skat,

the Bermuda Triangle of cards they say

requires the skills of Napoleon Bonaparte;

Schnaps, au contraire, the family can play

before they miscount the marks on the tab

and stagger back to the beds they’ve sown,

the sand on which they set their prefab,

incubatory ponds and a plastered home,

where next to the rose, the tops of the kale

rise like a rainforest, model macaws

observing the paths, and curling a tail,

the small cats rule with their natural laws,

and we run from the rain without our macs

past huts we were planning to stack with our quirks

one sunset, along these firm-paved tracks

round plots we agreed would be too much work,

but needing to rehydrate our senses,

unlatch the gate and walk straight through,

peer up at the cherries and over the fences

at tulips and irises, scenting the barbecue.

Alistair Noon's recent publications include Paradise Takeaway (Two Rivers, 2023) and two more volumes of his translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam (The Voronezh Workbooks and Occasional and Joke Poems, Shearsman, 2022). His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, the Guardian and New Statesman, and he's published essays on translocality and poetry, Wuhan Punk and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He lives in Berlin.