Two Poems by Monika Rinck, translated by Alistair Noon

spending a fortnight in a diving bell

slapping down cards in the chamber of dangerous moments,
then booting a ball around, boomadiboom, the fittings
one enormous clatter. all our bloodstreams
saturated with nitrogen. to decompress
is a daily trial. whole families doze in neoprene,
sorted by size. this waiting, while membranes whimper.
but once that’s over, further treatment with cudgels
fits between first and second tarantellas.
the straps in the gymsuits snap, glasses
mist up inside. between two corresponding shifts
the as yet undecompressed put in a game
of strip chess. but the aching, aging tissue desaturates
too quickly once more, and the pressure just won’t sink.



drifting accumulation

stick to the syllables. no doubt about it now
I’m subject to a takeover, whose aim is to remove me.
some creature launched it. a jellyfish perhaps, conglomerates
of jellyfish. enormous. the weight of it. it’s always inside.
it thinks there’s something to be had. I’m wrong: this
is no animal. depression has no lungs. neither do jellyfish.
its single property is weight. lava lamps, I think.
now they were a good drink, weren’t they. was it there,
back then, the creature that’s no animal but only weight?
we tried to keep the beat. did everything to stop from slowing.
until it cameth to us, spilt and down for the count.
pointless to ponder. it’s there, until it's gone.

==========

Monika Rinck was born in 1969 in Zweibrücken and lives in Berlin. She studied Religious Studies, History und Comparative Literature at Bochum, Berlin and Yale. Her books include Zum Fernbleiben der Umarmung ('to refrain from embracing', poems, Kookbooks 2007), Ah, das Love-Ding (essays, Kookbooks 2006) and Verzückte Distanzen ('enraptured distances', poems, zu Klampen! Verlag 2004). English translations of her work have been published in Shearsman, Litter, No Man's Land, and Atlanta Review, among other places.

Alistair Noon - Sonnet for the Birth Centenary of Seán Rafferty

(Feb 5, 1909 - Dec 4, 1993)

Old men and their mythologies. The line’s
Seán Rafferty’s, who walked into his eighties,
brewed poems for his dead first wife, sold wines
and beers, and never stood on stages,
no, never stood on stages, and had to say
some poet was important, what they meant –
as if pub rules were hung there to obey –
that a certain woman was intelligent;
instead of pulling pints six days a week
slide in he’d sat beside Octavio Paz,
that the poems of a paleskin from Mozambique
were African in their sense of jazz,
and with every birthday pint a lifespan affords
take slower, slyer steps across the boards.


==========

To mark the centenary of Seán Rafferty's birth, a short introduction to his life and work is available at Todd Swift's Eyewear blog, and further essays and responses in an e-chapbook published today at Intercapillary Space.

Alistair Noon - Four Structures (4)

Hill with Bunker and Flak Tower


Go on then, plan for the eternal
with cupola, column and arch:
we’ll number their metres from here, and etch
their shape onto a steel panel,

then tilt and fix it to the top
of this slope that the women who walked
out of the thick dark walls
mixed together from scorched rock,

coating it with soil and seeds
as their husbands advanced beyond the Urals,
sending footpaths up in spirals
like icing around the new hillside.

The sirens have stopped.
The nightshift crew looks up,
dancing to techno till dawn. An eruption
deposits cut green bottles,

thin layers of new rubble,
across a fossil of concrete.
This hill just won’t keep quiet,
but fidgets on the viscous mantle.

Alistair Noon - Four Structures (3)

The Berlin Nationalgalerie in 1960


We walked through the maw of this lion
that lay with its paws out: its grimace
all pediment, step and pillar,
the dirt from the nineteenth century.

We found Agamemnon inside,
marbling a wall, and Friedrich’s ascent
of the crimson stairs
to greet his generals in the snow,

children in headscarves and pinafores
scampering at an Alpine brook,
while farmers stoked an iron mill,
each face turned from every other,

and a lipless bust from the Renaissance,
stone become skin become stone
as it took its second glaze
when the Russians came by on a group ticket.

Outside in the black-and-white sky
no one is planning to build a Wall,
and thunderbolts might strike right now.

Alistair Noon - Four Structures (2)

Showing an Italian Friend the Redeveloped Potsdamer Platz

Si, si, it’s a piazza.
If cement and steel
perpend to the pavement,
sunlight in young branches
still tiptoes over it, as if
across a Florentine floor.
     Angular glass
throws back the blue sky,
and squalls falter,
     low steps lead
to flat-bedded pools
staffed by saplings,
and inside, the heaven
and hellward staircases
are fingers locked
     in a mobile fresco.
Open stallfronts
stand behind, above
     and beside us.
We excommunicate petitioners
and men in black cowls
who believe in no government.
No statues here but a sculpture
of upturned
     steel. Yes, we burn
these red drinking tins
on pyres beyond the city
or ship them to Cathay,
and snip the promissory notes
we buy voyages through the air with.
     Are you looking
for brushwood?
The Magistrati will be here
before you – a piazza,
a piazza, Savonarola,
such as the one
they strangled and burnt you on.

Alistair Noon - Four Structures (1)

The TV Tower on Air


A minaret on the skyline, silent in the haze
that unscheduled rays don’t penetrate. Songbirds

elope with its pollen to rooftop pistils.
Action and mind will bud on screen.

Too tall for shrivelling leaves to smother:
storm the Palace and there’ll be sport on.

Its signals are flares that tumble through the air
to vanish on overcoats, a trail of pawprints.

======

The TV Tower on Air is the first of a four part sequence by Alistair Noon entitled 'Four Structures', and Gists and Piths will be publishing it serially over the next four days.

Sean Rafferty @ Intercapillary Space

Intercapillary Space is currently hosting a symposium/revue on the work of Sean Rafferty, edited by Alistair Noon. Click here to check it out: it features contributions from, among others, Kelvin Corcoran, Peter Riley and Edmund Hardy, whilst Mr Noon himself contributes an interesting article reading Rafferty in relation to the work of WS Graham and Basil Bunting.

Extinction by Alistair Noon

So Diplodocus stood above recumbent T-Rex,
whose three-pronged avian claws and thalidomide armlets
pointed upwards. Triceratops charged into thin air.

Evening sun must have flitted through the treetops,
and from the opposite, leafless riverbank
coal wharves whined and clanked.

:::

As the permafrost fled from Alaska
and the icebergs hailed New Zealand
– hell, how must the mammoths have felt –
autumn blizzarded in: beech and sycamore leaves
made low-level cyclones, jets graffitied slow lines
in the over-bright October sunlight, that year as last,
and pine needles lodged into the keyboards of laptops.

The last dog of the Western World, they say,
looked out of its shaggy hair:
Elohim, are you sure you know what you’re doing?

:::

Friday at five, we’ve read, among the iBooks
and interlocking lozenges of the retro wallpaper,
the double espressos and mineral waters,
a young man would puff on his Lucky Strike,

leaning back in the corner, beneath a triple lampholder
with its brown lampshades and yellow light,
turning page after page of the book he was reading:
PRODUCTIVE WORK / DESTRUCTIVE WORK.

One email relates how male journalists at barbecues
would explain the aphrodisiac properties of tofu
to vegetarian women. It’s believed that birth rates
rose around Thai restaurants.

And experts have been comparing the lettering
on Lenin’s and Mao’s mausoleums
with those words on the wall whose sense eludes us:
“motörhead. new album”.

:::

What else has come down to us?
That someone called Anthony strummed
as somewhere burned.
That Herod said Bring me the head
of Saddam the Assassin.
That there was no doubt about it,
it wasn’t no emissions
but Satan stoking the fires.

:::

And Yahweh had said:
Here’s your light, here’s your dark.
They raised the all night Tescos.

And Yahweh had said:
Keep an eye on these beasts.
They put microchips in the heads of sharks.

And Yahweh had said:
Leave off murder.
They put heat ray guns on trucks.

And Yahweh had said:
Mind what you munch.
They fed their cattle their own brains.

Right then, Yahweh said,
you’ve got yourselves a flood.
You take a rest, they said,
leave it to us.

:::

So Apocalypse didn’t take seconds but a century,
and needed no fire or ash.
Wet, warmer, with the atolls underwater,
they became the Etruscans, not quite
the nameless generations with scripts of bone and stone.
The tiger did not thank them, nor the bongo antelope.
We call them the Terminatores.

:::

Southwest of Penzance our engine stopped,
clogged with pumice and ash, the sea’s new algae.
The sail kept still in the tropical darkness
till the current changed and we tillered to safety,
glimpsed shapes in blue light where, like a diver
ascending metre by watery metre,
lava had added again to its seabed cairn,
one more stone on the orbital image,
where insects and arachnids would float to on logs,
gulls nest, seeds and spores in their feathers
and flags take root on the next moon we would land on.

:::

What else, before the ink faded and the Great Crash?
That a squirrel would scamper in and out of parked cars.
One day a sweeper might find it, send it to a landfill or incinerator
or leave it for the circling birds. That at night the rats would run
around the toppled reptiles.


::::::::

Alistair Noon has been based in Berlin since the early nineties. Recent work of his has appeared at Litter, Jacket, Eyewear and Great Works (you can find links to these poems, as well as links to reviews and articles, via Alistair's myspace page). This June he will be guest-editing an online symposium on the work of Seán Rafferty at Intercapillary Space.