Hi
This site provides links to my poetry, translations and reviews on the internet. Thanks for your interest!
Alistair
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.
Earlier versions of this poem appeared in Shearsman and Tempo.
