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.

Bugged by Poetry

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This ruby moves: it is a bug
in an empty shotgun shell.
The shell has served the bug as roof and rug.
I gauge it serves him well.
The bug wants more. He comes outdoors,
flaps his wings, flies to my book.
He says a sonnet only bores
a bug too small to look
across a large and ink-filled page.
I give him praise and drink.
I tell him poems are all the rage.
‘That can’t be true. I think,’
he says. ‘A single shotgun shell
costs more than any ode.’
He bugs off then – it’s just as well.
I’ve stepped on his abode.

A Poem Accepting Footnotes

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Je commence à y voir clair.

01. I would have been nine had I been born on time
02. but decades passed and Eliot wrote on
03. and the plover rested, angel to the ferret
04. and left no stern atoned, no field untilled
05. until a footnote marked its pocking flight
06. and the ferret breathed in sulphur and expired. (1)

07. Le clair de lune brought clarity I wrote
08. and lunacy I lived for all my worth,
09. yclept out Ford my room and board to God
10. and tenancy my station while on Earth.
11. Not that it frangled. Rank was knot I pulled
12. and Gordian my gorgon, George B. praised.
13. As Cecil, a half brother, kept the B.,
14. I dropped mine off the balcony and braised
15. the ferret, nothing-waisted as their wont
16. is, though the hocks are tastier than rat,
17. and rats who walk on broken glass are prone (2)
18. to every corporal attitude except
19. that yclept as prone, and I’d lie if
20. I sold you squirrel as rat hand ewe wood stew.

Footnotes:

Je commence à y voir clair = I’m beginning to understand

La clair de lune = moonlight

I would wager that, given seventeen hours, bread, manchego cheese and three bottles of Navarra (two white and chilled, one red and not), I could write thirty-four pages of footnotes ‘explaining’ the references in this poem.

Thirty-four pages!

But I wood knot wont tow reed them <g>

Footnote 1. ‘and the plover rested, angel to the ferret / and left no stern atoned, no field untilled’ Cf. TSE (footnote 3) ‘CHORUSES FROM ‘THE ROCK, The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven’, lines 100-102: ‘Only the wind moves / Over empty field, untilled / Where the plough rests, at an angle / To the furrow…’

Footnote 2. ‘and rats who walk on broken glass are prone’ Cf. TSE (footnote 3, again) ‘THE HOLLOW MEN, A penny for the Old Guy’, line 9: ‘Or rats’ feet over broken glass’

Footnote 3. TSE = T.S. Eliot, a poet who wrote these incomparable lines: ‘In the room the women come and go / and talk of Michelangelo.’ (footnote 4)

Footnote 4. . . . – – – . . . – – – . . . Maybe you will continue these footnotes for me <S>

Cat and Pig Among the Pigeons

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‘I am old,’ said Pig Duroc. ‘I missed the last bus.
and I had to walk toting this carp.’
‘You’re myopic as well,’ said Cat Slynog, then shied
from the pig, and played Bach on a harp.
The music they made as they harped and they carped
seemed to pigeons that flew by great grief.
Then the carp joined in; all three flatted and sharped
till the end of the day, and this brief.

Gone Song

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I’ve been pushed away so often that I’ve left.
You don’t notice nothing missing. You don’t look.
And I left the music playing and the broken rocker swaying
and my heart there where you pressed it in the book.
The screen door slammed behind me in an off key
and the drums rolled thunder on the radio.
I looked back and saw you reading and I hoped I saw you cry
then I saw you pick the phone up, say, ‘he’s gone.’

Crocodylus Acutus

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The puerile croc up to his eyes in alligator flats
has polished off two kiwis: one cordovan, one black.
He much prefers, he leers at all, the polish to the paste
and says he bastes his choice more on staying power than taste.
Koalas smell of leaves they eat, and in the same way Croc
has belched himself an aura that locks vulture flocks in shock.
One fly-by of Croc’s lee side, they refuse to salivate
and chunder in their plumage. Croc waves and calls out, ‘Mate,
come down and swim with me and we’ll gobble monotremes,
amuse ourselves by snorkelling sharks and other creek extremes.’
The vultures retch incurably and curse big reptile geeks
as blithe as kookaburras with two geckos in their beaks.


Published in MÖBIUS, May, 1998.

Seeds

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I am not sure exactly who I am
nor precisely who it is that I am not.
We meet and mingle without smoke or sham,
then separate, but share a common lot.
Not empathetic any way that counts,
we are more a blurring of the borders books
ascribe to personalities: an ounce
of human-kindness traits, a pinch of rooks’
and God knows what. In forests I am trees.
On beaches I am cloud and surf and sand.
I am the universe each time I sneeze
and it is me each morning when we stand
on the bridge to all tomorrows, and the rain
comes down like prayer, and we begin again.

So Many Wonders, So Little Time

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A hot big-bang describes the start
of this our universe.
Does that explain why teeth feel pain
or why this tale’s in verse?
To say birds fly because they fly
is talking through my hat.
It isn’t wrong but unlike song
it’s both too sharp and flat.
If you were dumber I’d seem smart
but that is not the case.
I see you want to find out Why.
Why don’t we have a race?
Let’s start off slowly: physics first
then chemistry and math.
Their dinky hurdles are not tall
enough to block our path.
We’ll run by frozen accidents
that pave the way to life
and run uphill while force cements
complexity that’s rife
with run-on sentences that stop
most runners in their tracks.
They won’t stop us; we’ll set up shop
in logic and brass tacks
and when we tire of calculus
of how if ‘p’ then ‘q’
we’ll race to board an omnibus
to view the primal stew.
Description’s easy (well, it’s not
but I’ll let you explain)
so I’ll describe and you’ll tell why
and that way we’ll both gain.
This race might take all afternoon
so bring along your mind
to exercise it as we run
from Darwin to the kind
of husky question I can see
there cooking in your brain.
Let’s run uphill until we’re tired
then run back down again.

Ferretería

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(a ballad occasioned by my consternation on
learning that a ‘ferretería’ is only an ironmongery)

His four feet fastened ferret-style
upon the olive branch,
Raúl resents the tourist’s rude
‘If that’s a mink, it’s ranch.’

Raúl runs out the open cage
and up the tourist’s leg.
As ferret passes trouser cuff
the tourist starts to beg:

‘Oh, spare me from this maddened mink
or pocket kangaroo!
It’s not my fault. I didn’t want
to shop inside this zoo.’

Raúl, well in the dark by now,
is frightened by these cries
and charges on to private parts.
He can’t believe his eyes.

In general a ferret stops.
A major problem, see:
will Raúl, so incited, al-
ter corporeality?

The owner of the hardware store
can captain ferrets out
but doesn’t know where Raúl is,
or understand the shout.

The tourist turns bright green with fear.
The ferret gets stuck in.
You’d think he’s at the colonel now,
not only at the shin.

‘Ironmonger,’ screams the tourist, high
of voice and on fear,
‘Retrieve your beast, be admiral.
Protect my lone-star rear!’

The monger thinks the tourist mad
and telephones the cops.
The ferret’s met their dogs before
and so he simply stops.

Down trouser leg, he lopes to loo.
Tenant plans has he.
He’ll lurk there till the tourist goes,
or stops in for a wee.