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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.

On-board Prospecting

The watched horsehead dissolves, not needing eels.
It is just his coffee grounds dried in the cup
and while rinsing out the mud-hued mug he feels
as if redemption were stress-free as waking up.

But it ís not, he remembers. Memory sucks
him from this morning to one years ago.
The cup breaks where he throws it. The cat ducks.
The brilliant day has many hours to go.

Outside two suns are shining, one reflected
from the lake that’s calm as glass. He wants to fill
his cup, but it is shattered, cat-deflected
from the sofa he had aimed for. The light chill

of last evening says goodbye, goes up in smoke
and the cat slips off a-birding and the suns
merge into one as old emotions choke
the man: a name not heard for decades stuns

him into seeking cover till he twigs
that the voice calling out must be his own.
While the houseboat lists alarmingly he digs
through the rotting deck boards that the suns have shown.

Hominy Creek Wandering

The wind brings back the barking of dead dogs.
I hear among them yips of childhood friends
And their snarls as they protected us from threats
In woods now cut and on country roads now paved.

I watch the wind’s work shaping grass and trees
Into silhouettes of dogs known: pointy ears
And cold noses. It is strange how one supposes
These fleeting vivid images are not real.

© Alan Reynolds, 2012

Truths Or

I tire of this and that
and go attired in flat
old Dunlops loping right
across the moon at night
to knock up Desiree
who’s out of lingerie
and she says into books
rekindling iPad Nooks
with classic acid prose
that could be verse suppose
she drops her closing lines
and gets sent to the mines.
She reads a little Proust,
I say Marcel’s a hoot.
I put on Paul the Beetle
in hopes his songs will wheedle
a paragraph or two
of future déjà vue.

Patience

Playing solitaire provides a soothing sense
that your actions count: that turning a new leaf
gets noticed and obtains fair recompense
for efforts made, and that when play comes to grief
it’s in ways a fair reshuffle can undo.
Each time you try again you’re not ignored;
your conversing with the cards shrinks down the blue
and empty space where you’re eternally bored
into images of action you can spread
around your mind as feedback amplified,
by wanting some, into old warmth that’s bled
away so long you think perhaps you’ve died.
Each time play ends and flowing hopes congeal
you foresee a better next hand, and you deal.

Nearing There

‘You have twelve more years,’ read the angel. ‘Erm. that’s twelve more minutes.
What do you, I mean did you, want to do
with the rest of your life within these finite limits?’
The angel watched me take this in and stew.

‘That’s eight now,’ said the angel. I was whistling,
making mind maps of the places I should visit
if I did had time. Death’s scythe persisted chiselling
at the stump of my lifespan in a rhythm to elicit

a shiver with each chip. I was not buying.
‘It’s a dream,’ I told the angel. ‘You and Death
aren’t really here. You two have not been allying
except in those gory stories like Macbeth.’

‘Till now,’ said Death. Death grinned without a face.
‘There always is a last time,’ the angel added.
‘Don’t you mean “first”? I asked. They both embraced
my pedantry a moment. Then Death patted

my arm, that froze, and said, ‘you’re down to four.’
I sang a childhood song to show sang froid.
Death said, ‘This does not seem to be your year.
You’ve lived your life as if it were a schwa;

neutral, muddling middle, bland, unstressed.
You’ve not done aught that you must answer for
so question time’s not needed. Face stage left,
adjust your collar, try for debonair

as we get in step and march. You’re down to two.’
The angel turned the parchment page and said,
‘Well bless my soul, it was years!’ (Death withdrew.)
‘What will you do from now until you’re dead?’

Schnidly’s Gasconade Gas

His gasconade, his stock in trade,
pretending catachresis
is what he meant in lines he’s rent
asunder in his thesis,

makes Schnidly head of his Sixth Form’s
poetic blunders study
where his mix of misty metaphors
has drove his tutor nutty.

He lets the runner in his ode
fly to the Finnish line
to stub his toe on Maginot
and tentatively entwine

his privates with his general quarters
whilst striking up the band
which gets him reprimanded
by a mandrill Genghis Kahn.

Schnidly is three wines into Monday
when elevenses are served
and he’s sure the Candy Stripers
on his ward think he is perved.

He enrols in near-rhyme sonnets
cause he’s been banned from dizains
and he craves Alsatian curry
when he gazes at Great Danes

like his Hamlet who’s been hamstrung
by Schnidly’s lame production
of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy.
He has brought the Bard destruction.

killing your darlings

Root up your favourites, post them somewhere else.
The land where you first planted them has died.
New settlers hang your mysteries like pelts
of squirrels upon their handlebars, and ride
across the melting ice floes where you dwelt.
They tan your loves they want to hoard inside
their ugly houses built on IOUs.
They desiccate your secrets for their news:

Young commentators analyse your words,
and underscore the syllables you used,
as signs to rustle thoughts you kept in herds.
They’ve cowed you now. The branding’s left you bruised.
Old analysts trawl gems they make absurd
and quarter your last hobbyhorse. Amused?
Retrieve your darlings. Loose them in those cold
and empty places dreams can still take hold.

TFP (today’s featured poem) of 19.9.2011