Author Archives: Alan Reynolds

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About Alan Reynolds

Poet born and raised in North Carolina and now after a sojourn in England a long-time resident of the Netherlands. More than 4,000 poems, many published in US and UK literary magazines and on CD and in books.

Passing Through

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I go through a wall. It’s easy if I don’t think,
‘Holy crap, I’m going through a wall!’
I come out in the kitchen, in the sink.
I hop down lightly, and I quietly call

her name. She turns and looks at me, surprised.
She says, ‘I didn’t hear you. Want some tea?’
‘No, thanks,’ I smile. I quickly improvised
a reason to say no, so she won’t see

anything I try to drink go slipping through
me this ghostly way. I try to cheer myself.
I know from trying that my feeling blue
is something I can tuck upon a shelf.

We gaze at each other, watch each other’s faces.
‘I’m running late.’ I wave, walk out the door.
A photographer might catch two smiling faces,
one fading like a shadow on the floor.

Gloves

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Robert Browning breathed an hour in our house today.
I was reading his poems loudly when I heard his spirit say,
‘Close down your fusty office. There is naught in here to keep
an adult’s full attention. Come outside, where there are sheep,
where magpies mime and mock us, where fat rabbits hide in dunes
and foxes follow secret trails. Come outside and hear the tunes
the lorry wheels go chirping as they stress the cobblestones.’

‘Live your LOVE!’ he added. ‘When I had life, my hobbled bones
were happiest those times I dared. When I was thirty-four,
my dearest (six years senior) made a pact with me: we swore
to live the years we’d somehow got, no matter long or short.
I bid you, lad, to do the same. It will na’ help to snort
and say that you’re too busy, too august. That’s juvenile.’

‘Thanks for reading,’ he appended. I was silent for a while
then I kicked the office door shut, slammed it hard and something broke.
In the hall I sought my rainwear. I was surprised to find a cloak
on the jacket’s rightful peg, I took it down, and wrapped myself
in old, soft-coloured plaids. I also freed the cloakroom shelf
of leather gloves I didn’t recognise. Had they been left for me?

My lethargy recalled me: ‘Don’t exert yourself and be
inveigled into going out. Stay sitting on your pride.
You expect work’s enough to see you out. Your oh-so-precious hide,
for years unhindered in its old and hibernating habit,
objects to trips to seek the fox, to look in on the rabbit.
You rattle sabres in imagined wars, and think you look for stars.’

‘Leave unknown loves to Cupid. Leave walkabouts to Mars.
Life’s not been kind to you, this week, nor even this whole year.
You fantasise heroic deeds? Your ‘actions’ don’t come near!
Ebenezer’s role is one that fits you better than does this antique cape
that you imagine gives you style. In fact its woollens drape
you in the guise of a forlorn don. Sit. Rest your bones awhile.’

This nagging doubter, an inner self, the one that acts so mild,
almost brought me down. I would have sat, but right then my cat
bristled down the hall and through the door. With my cloak but with no hat
I hastened after her. My steps guided (I had the notion)
by something today more purposeful than lazy Brownian motion,
I almost cantered, approaching the sea. My cat stood already there,
conversing, I’d swear, with a darkling lady whose abundant hair
blew away all doubts I’d ever had. I felt elated in its breeze
when I heard her friendly call: we both spoke Portuguese.

My lady (yes, she is now that) and I both like the cloak.
On darkling evenings, in what is now our home, I hang it up and stoke
the fire and think my reading caused that phantom ‘Live Your Love.’
I see ‘our’ Maine cat smile at me from her perch on Robert’s gloves.

An Almost Crusader

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He’s the last one I wanted to find, that Savonarola,
even now, when my life’s blandness draws first blood
like the smooth sharp stones that scrape the soles of waders.
It is Savonarola. He finds me. We stand in mud
and look past each other at the surf
out near the curved horizon. Neither speaks
but we both know that the first who does will lose.
He wants the soul I claim I do not have,
materialism being my chosen poison.
I want a cause, not his, but one as fiery
and consuming as the flames that took his life
in Florence, when Rodrigo Borgia won.

‘How was it then?’ I ask, gasp when he bares
unfleshed teeth. He says, ‘It hurt. I won.’
He wades waist deep. I follow. Shore birds wheel
above our tracks that the flooding tide erases.
‘You may ask me where we are going,’ he appends
to his first speech. We walk further. It’s less cold
but clammier than I’d thought from books it’d be,
this seaweed-troubled water. He starts to swim
while I who have forgotten, try to float
past a giant jellyfish with tentacles that reach
between us and beyond but do not sting.
It looks like a pope we both once vaguely knew.

‘That’s my mirror fish, my fluid crystal ball,’
he says. I know to answer but have lost
my volition. I dumbly bob and roll
in the current as he leads me on and dives.
We plunge through roiled green water into mud
and through that too, through rock that melts to magma.
Less hot. Less cold. Less everything. Less life.
Savonarola stops, says, ‘Welcome to my world’
and disintegrates. I am totally alone
with the thought that I wish I had followed once in life
a cause with meaning, known a crusade’s glow.
Even Earth’s iron core cannot inflame me.

Tipping Point

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The tectonic plates shift unceasingly beneath
the patter of our striving.
True to deeper dictates, the plates merge
motion into directions
each opposing the other—in a slow, mad whirl.

On the surface we chase happiness
as if it existed
in skirmishes won, in profits gained
at anyone’s expense—if we can bend
their wills and means.

What we call parties of politics
mirror the bloodlust shared
by men and rats
blind drunk on dark passion
when it suits them.

Facades of civility long nurtured
erode along a road paved
with short-term everything:
money resounds loudest when flung
after bad.

Climates of creeping entitlement,
promises made when it was easier
than not promising
come due, then overdue,
and are then exposed as shams.

New Himalayas, scaled to fit
our swollen views of self,
raise themselves among us
blocking all possible views of
shared humanity.

The solving of problems, always last
choice among us when empowered,
gain purchase and are then
discarded in orgies of name-calling
for what we dare not name.

Dreams purchased on the never-never
come due, and dilute, then,
into reappraisals
of what survival will entail
as we all buy guns.

The tipping point of a species,
this time our species,
breaks on the edges—
the conflicting, searing edges—
of the churning tectonic plates.

Losing My No-Claim

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King Arthur strides the camel lot, his pointy shoes besmirched.
His thoughts had been on Guinevere; my dromedary lurched,
and he, descendant from lost kings, had cannonballed in mire.

His crown, when found, warn’t one to wear—
till hosed off, and cleansed with fire.
Perhaps it were a mite still warm;
my monarch has scorched hair.

No airy heir, no hirsute hare,
no night’s disordered garters
appease my king, who cries he’ll fling
my camel on the dump.

The bishop hastes to intervene:
‘Harrumph, it’s but one hump,’
but Arthur’s mad as when a lad
and Merlin called him Wort.

I’d remonstrate had that a chance,
but should I head him off?

He might then think of ‘Off their heads’—
the court might lose a toff
I’m passing fond of, seen it’s me.

We’ll trot to Coventry,
my dromedary and my cat,
my bagatelle and me,

and wait the king’s displeasure out.
Who knew he wore her heart,
crocheted in silk on where he sat?

I’ll send him Spandex hose
in the hope that they and passing time
will end this morning’s spat.

Hitchhiking Nigel Gets Florida Holiday Ride from Psycho Patti

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Nigel, thinking full frontal means lobotomy
and wondering should the church oppose free sects,
walks along the highway from Ochopee.
He looks for where the tarred state road connects

to take him down to the Everglades. He sees a wind tee
and guesses where the airport intersects
the flat horizon is where he wants to be.
A Dodge Viper, kicking gravel, disconnects

him from his thoughts, and he looks in to see
a short-shorted, tank-topped driver who erects
her middle finger at him. ‘You mean me?’
he asks. ‘See any other derelicts?’

Psycho Patti pouts. ‘Do you want a ride? It’s hot?’
Her décolletage makes hot, tired Nigel mute.
He jumps into her car before he’s got
a glimpse of the Glock she points to show the route

to the Everglades. She offers him some pot
and things go well until he says, ‘You’re cute.’
Patti’s eyes pop red. She brakes, makes Nigel squat
at gunpoint and duck waddle to the boot

of the Viper and get in. She bangs it shut,
She’s sweating, knows this time she can’t be late!
She races fate to reach her swamp-edge hut.
She wonders how long alligators wait.