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). 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.

Treecreepers

Grubbing for information,

I quiz these insect-eaters:

“Are you short-toed or Eurasian?”

Both 12.5 centimetres,

---

each wields a well-hooked bill

that picks away down low,

and then ascends the trunk until

there’s no trunk left to go.

---

Each has the woodpecker’s tail

to balance its battle charge,

a breast that’s mottled and pale

or else in total camouflage.

---

They share their creepy name,

each a keen treebug killer.

Side-on, they look the same:

though Certhia brachydactyla

---

and Certhia familiaris

are non-identical twins,

the difference from afar is

that of two beetles on pins,

---

or a pair of red-vested leapers

the crowd can’t tell apart.

With short-toed treecreepers,

one bad place to start,

---

counter-intuitively,

bunkered under their feathers,

is the toe that none of us see.

Frequenting identical weathers,

---

these rock pictograms differ

just in their thirteenth stroke:

one likes its trunk far stiffer

and shuns the beech for the oak.

---

The birdbook’s tint of bark

reveals their distribution

overlaps right here. Remark

the gap in their elocution,

---

but the ear’s as bad as the eye

and gets it just as wrong –

they warble or chirp at the sky,

but some can sing both songs,

---

and note the short-toed ’creeper

has a Maghreb population

whose tune’s a whole tone deeper.

Why do the taxonomization?

---

One puts on a great sleep-in,

one only sleeps alone.

One sleeps in its species’ safekeeping,

one would not share a bone.