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.

Modus ponens

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The squirrel was demonstrating how to build up all logic gates just from NAND but the visiting pair of jackdaws wanted to move on and discuss Shelah’s classification of countable first-order theories. We did that for long enough (35 seconds) to see that none of us had any idea what we were talking about. The husband jackdaw noted that darkness was approaching and the wife jackdaw pointed out that negations, such as darkness, can’t ‘approach’ or in fact ‘do’ anything. I was wishing we had met outside instead of in my study, birds not being noted for being continent. The squirrel sensed my concern and asked, ‘Is that the cat behind the sofa?’ Both jackdaws flew out the window but they will be back at first light …

Candidates from Hell

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The candidates from hell stand tall and say
they want to build a wall around the troubled land
that they claim their vengeful god ordained for them.
Their heaven — they will turn it into hell —
will be a land of evil where they wrap
themselves in flags pretending what that means
is that they care about the people they are scaring
into hating other groups so they won’t see
that they vote away their chance of living free.

February Fine Day

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Bright sun, sharp wind, the ferry nearing Marken.
What better way to start this afternoon
on the edge of what was once the Zuiderzee?
No bathers on the beach, no fighting ducks,
no economists dissembling spurious truths,
just neighbours neighing nostrums to each other
and a solitary man I thought I knew
once long ago who scribbles in a book.

.

Marken is a village across the water from Monnickendam.

Flat Report — L’Alfàs del Pi

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A cormorant is fishing my front porch,
a shelf of small stones sloping under sea
so clear I see the trace at thirty yards
each time he dives. The surf sounds subtle here.

A gathering of gulls lights on my left
enhancing the blessed solitude I feel.
No human in my line of sight that way:
just tiny surf, and dozing gulls, and hills.

Sharp hills, that turn to mountains as they climb.
White gulls fly over, checking what I write.
The rest remain at rest; we share some sun,
and comment, in our ways, on how the wind
is lighter, and how ozone smells so clean.

More rocks revolve with every single wave
than men have years of history on this earth,
and each rock tells a story seagulls hear.

I hear the stories too, and, like the gulls,
take comfort I don’t understand the words.

Costa Blanca

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The sky has disappeared
or is it me
who ceases when there’s
only sea
and grey horizon
lightens into white
identical to sky?

When every sight:
the mountains, buildings,
and the trees;
the plastic medlar covers,
the hives of bees;
hill-climbing coughing trucks
filled with wet goats;
through-wetted web nets
and the wakes of boats —
go missing, mingling,
mixing in the haze.

Are they what’s gone
or am I in a daze
to think discernment
matters in the theme?

Today all Costa Blanca
is one dream.

Deathless

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Here’s this Death’s-head Hawkmoth travelling solo,
high up, slowly. Banking on solar-guided
day flights, tracking lunar beams through the dark in
honeycombed flight dreams.

Up from Egypt, confident to her wingtips,
desert sunsets lighting her port side. Nights flown
on the same course. Gauging the safest glide paths,
dreaming the touchdown.

Fog-bound days logged over the slate-grey sea chop,
sturdy thorax beating down square-rigged breast strokes
till Swiss cantons stand in for whitecaps. Cruises,
pressing up wing loads.

Light rain welcomes flight’s closing leg to refuge:
vespers’ vistas. Death’s-head knows honey beckons:
bulging golden beehives awaiting her drop-in.
Drills down to get some.

Two months’ perfect homing is paid in sugar.
Sweet with fuel needed for last feat: laying
eggs in garden plants’ shade. Each egg grows its own
honeycombed flight dreams.

Reveille

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I lie in a tent on a sandbank in the river
and wonder would I hear the water rise.
The otter’s snoring serves as metronome
for the heartbeat pace of words the moonlight limns.

I wake and all realities retreat,
except the one that’s standing watch today.

In the south of France Lucindas lean on trees,
or dance. For me. For joy. Up here the rain
leaches colour from the just-turned falling leaves.
I shall never see MacArthur Park again.

I see a shimmering line, a lifeline or a serpent,
undulating in the inshore moonlit current,
so close by I could touch it if I woke …

Downstream, or up, a church bell counts the hours.
Four chimes. Clouds mass. It is so sudden dark.

A priest of gentle parentage gets shriven,
or knotted, now for naught his pack of genes
that travelled aeons to arrive in him,
cold on his perch, before the furnace door.

Cold breezes stir the tent. Up high: the jet stream.
Clouds thin. They go. The smuttily full moon
invades the damp sand, wakes the snoring otter.

It caught a fish for each of us last evening.
I called mine sushi. The otter ate both heads.
We spoke the way that mammals do cross-species,
before it slept, of whether there’d be weather.

I need deep sleep, a day of dry, a boat,
the fun of congregations without creeds.
The otter wakes. It watches where that snake,
or pliant water plant, hangs in the current.
We fantasise together it’s a god,
our refuge for describing what’s unknown.

We wish for more fish. I wish for a fire,
and the otter for a thing I do not know.
I shall never see MacArthur Park again
or the reality that has the watch tomorrow.