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.

Letternijen

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This poem is for Manuel van Loggem
who gave me pleasure with his meagre book
Letternijen that I read in from time to time
even some evenings before he died.
I liked his provoke-verbs, his sour tales,
his animals, and his japes at literature.
While they survive him in his book, perhaps some Where
exists where Manuel learns whether curse or prayer
worked better. As to which, I wish him well.

 

Manuel van Loggem in his 28-page book Aforismen en andere letternijen, uitgever, Deventer, Ypse-Fecit, 1989, 300 numbered copies:

‘Ik: Is er een leven na de dood?
God: Kom maar, dan kun je het zelf zien.’

Translations:
1. Me: Is there life after death? / God: Come on, you can see for yourself.

2. Yo: ¿Hay vida después de la muerte? / Dios: ¡Vamos, usted puede ver por sí mismo.

Beach Busker’s Ballad

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Come visit me alone, for one’s enough
that any quorum lacks to vote defeat.
Come visit me in Cadaqués. We’ll hide
out basking on the baking rocks and poach
sweet views of pulchritude.
                           The octopus,
as sturdy as a horse except no bones,
inks out its living in the open sea,
and I eke mine on land.
                          It’s marginal,
my living, but, like me, sufficient here.

I catch up passing tourists with my song
and share with them their wine and daily bread.

Unlike the octopus’s prey, mine live
to warn the others, though they never do.
They boast instead they stole away my song.

They sing for years the tunes I have forgot.
I misspeak verbs in languages they learn

in later years, the better to esteem
the wisdom of the octopus we eight
or was it four flushed. Come visit me. We’ll hide.

Seven-Up Ages

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Shakespeare’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’ monologue from AS YOU LIKE IT wrings well the rungs of lives’ ladders.

Here I attempted, birdlike, to make a deposit on each rung. Consciously choosing limerick form to lighten the Bard’s message, I ended up finding it all too sad for words. As did Shakespeare, perhaps.

Although the resulting limericks made me grin. Wryly.

To the bairn in the puked mules: You’re spraying
with no notion what your pa is saying:
You’ve no choice but Start,
so change diapers, gird heart
for the lead you’ll be ever less playing.

To the lad lusting after his teacher
while avoiding the lash of the preacher:
Your learning will swell
should you stay past the bell
and cosy up to your muse, should you reach her.

To the lover: Lad, be less remorseful!
Get a life. A cold shower. Be forceful.
Eyebrows serenaded
have been trimmed or they’ve faded.
They’re not marks of the brave or resourceful.

To the soldier: You seek reputation
in a bubble of blood that a nation
offers every so often
to winnow its soft men
and harden survivors they ration.

To the justice: You’ve just et a chicken
with a quickness that followers of Wiccan
would deplore had they store,
but they don’t, anymore.
Since you sentenced them all, they’ve been stricken.

To the old: In your dotage you’re trilling
and your edicts which we once found thrilling
are unseemly at best.
You’ve become a weak pest
with a whistle inheritors find chilling.

To the oldest: You hang there forgetting
yourself and the bed you are wetting.
Missing teeth, misting eyes,
a lost sense of surprise.
If you knew, you would find this upsetting.

© Alan Reynolds, 2016

Squirrel Larder Trek

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The squirrel of I Ching, incongruous and slow
(for a squirrel (from the cold)) walks briskly on the snow.

‘A grey squirrel in a snow bank,’ says Lord Flea.
‘If he cannot find his acorns I will freeze.’

Flying foreign sky rats, cold too, coo in pidgin,
‘If he finds his cache, will he let us cage a smidgen?’

The snow crust breaks. The I Ching squirrel chutes through
to his larder stashed with acorns. He eats two.

International Trophy Hunt, Shangri-La

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‘C’est un acteur usé,’ says rich old Ron.
Or might have said. His paunch shakes and he mumbles.
He leans against his guides. Then, winded, wan
and sick from altitude, Ron turns and stumbles
the path down to the village he has hired
as base camp for the party he has fixed
to celebrate his prowess. Those who’ve squired
him up the hill, and watched him wound the ibex,
will spend tomorrow searching for the beast.
Ron shot it in the stomach. Shooting stars
attend the dying ibex, leaking yeast
from guts gashed by Ron’s dumdums. Any scars
will not get time to form. While Ron’s in bed
his guides will shoot the ibex in the head.

Published in SOMETIMES IN BALANCE

Carriage House Parables

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This carriage house, two-storied, brick, and topped
with soft-red tiles festooned with spiders’ webs,
boasts to me, ‘For centuries I have stopped
the rains and winds, and known that both have ebbs.’
We humans, it says, know but one phase: floods.
We call it ‘life’ and think no ebbs exist;
but buildings, at least old ones, know that buds
must also wither — and always persist.
The carriage house, who learned from its own bricks,
as they learned from their water, straw, and clay,
assures me no life forms are monostichs,
and all of them, and we, forever play:
‘As long as time spins space, and space spends time,
we stand and fall and stand again and climb.’