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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.

Denial in The Line’s Din

A one dimensional line evolves its point
to two, a pair that like dilemma horns
go separate ways before one can anoint
either horn as better. Both are thorns
that trouble staunch denial, as they’re bound
to do, uniting, by their binding, lots
of intervening space the dye has cast
a pall upon. The space itself is sound,
although unasked for by the man God wots.
The man sees both points threatening the past
existence he’s been used to all these years.
The line the points draw leads him into fears.

What is this dye that our traveller wants to stow
(reversing “wots”) away so that its hue
can’t cry explosively and splash and glow
so brightly that it forces him to view
some to-him-unfamiliar forms of life?
What is the point escaping from the din
to which he is accustomed? Just a dot?
A dot of dotage, small in size but rife
for an expansive future, brings a grin
to Wot’s not-yet old face. He says he’ll rot
rat cheer and thanks the points not very much
for spreading out to where they’re hard to touch.

Applauding Your Taking the Pi’s

Applause, sir, for your fine defense of fie.
With your complexes one can simplify
raw algebra to what I analyse
as your take on geometric squares of pi’s.

Does ‘complex’ stand in for ‘imaginary’?
Like a miner mourning death in his canary
with something of self-interest in his tears,
I tread with trepidation on my fears

that should I weigh in with the kitchen sink
asserting that these ‘complex’ numbers link
entirely different parts of higher maths,
you’d ask me how, and I’d fall on my aths.

Dispensing with Bird Calls

When you hunt a duck and track it with your Browning,
second-order exponential smoothing
can help you aim, and ups your chance of downing
Donald. If you find a pressed duck soothing
but are depressed to watch your bird shot drowning,
try leading with this mathy jazzy new thing
that weights most recent sightings of his beak
more than where he was on average, or last week.

How Chickens Count

When Annie Mae was very young
she counted on her toes.

She scratched her ciphers with a stick
in dirt in careful rows.

Her mother’s cockerel Chanticleer
would join her in her fun.

He’d hop about and crow a bit
when she wrote down a 1.

‘2, 3, 4, 5’ she counted on,
and then the other foot:

‘6 and 7, 8 and 9.’
Now what should she put?

‘1 set of toes, 0 extras left’
the rooster told a hen

and Annie Mae, who heard him, smiled
and wrote a great big 10.

‘It’s my turn now,’ the cockerel crowed.
They all looked at his feet.

‘Scratch it out,’ laughed Annie Mae,
‘We’ll read it if you’re neat.’

‘1’ he counted, ‘2 and 3.
I see I’m getting near

to 4. That ends my big left foot.
My right foot starts right here.

Here’s 5, and 6, and 7. Good
One toe to go. No! Wait!

Don’t tell the answer, Annie Mae.
Don’t grin like you just ate.

1 set of toes, 0 extras now – –
the same as you, my friend!’

Young Chanticleer was proud as punch
as he also wrote 10.

Lemon Hill

Lemon Hill was published in The Armchair Aesthete, Issue 16, Summer, 2001

The poor and lame climb up this hill when the fruit begins to grow.
The going blind watch from the shade and squint at April’s glow.
When flowers finish blooming and the rain pails them away,
petals pour down darkling hills and pollen swims the bay.
In May the buds begin to swell, accelerate their slow
chill winter’s start and form gold orbs absorbing sun in rows.

June’s sun bakes shade from leafy trees where turgid spiders spin
the webs they lime to catch their prey that had its own chance when
down in the roots the fly-nests blew, and the buzz that blind men hate
teased sighted heads as flies laid eggs in eyes, to incubate.
July sees owners mend the wires delineating groves
and joke with wide-eyed pickers who’re returning here in droves.

The healthy climbers harvest two to the blind or cripple’s one
as all hands strive together in the sweltering August sun.
Hands reach up where the branches fork, and arms stretch down to throw
ripe lemons in reed baskets with a braggadocio
that helps them harvest money now, to live on when it’s slow
and dulled eyes shine reflecting back when fruit began to grow.