Category Archives: Poems by Alan Reynolds

Dynamics Imaged

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O haggis, hunkered halfway up the hill,
uneven legs in fore-and-aft matched pairs,
each to the other skewed like stick in plaice
before the batter’s up in golden ducks,
attend right-thinking running, circle up
or down the slope until the golden mean
of altitude, corrected for spare crags,
prevails, and you proceed goat-like to graze
at ease and restfully, your haggis rules
OK, exemplifying strange attractors,
repelling border colleens, collies, kilts,
and robber burns on ceremonial night.
And, haggis, try to live as if you’ve got
the grit required to stomach Mandelbrot.

IF the weather is nice where you are, please by all means go out and play. But if the sea is too cold or it’s raining, perhaps you could help me with these footnotes.

FOOTNOTES (so far, so good, so what):

1. ‘haggis’ — A delicate, delicious smallish creature hunted in the Highlands for its meet and for the hill of it. Pulled more successfully than birds by Dawkins shellfish jeans to the extent that its right legs (called Bermudas) are shorter than its left (called Levis).

2. ‘hunkered’ — Squatted down close to the ground, but not as in a squat. Unclear as to why this footnote is needed at all, except that one would have to renumber the rest (except one, ‘1’) were it taken out.

3. ‘skewed like stick in plaice’ — An impossible situation, like the impossible animal that exists (footnote 1), since a stick that is IN a plaice (large edible flat-bodied fish Pleuronectes platessa in European seas) can NOT be skewed (neither parallel nor intersecting) to said plaice. Cf. Macbeth: Act 1, Scene 7, Macbeth’s castle:

MACBETH: If we should fail?

LADY MACBETH: We fail!
But screw your courage to the
sticking-place,
And we’ll not fail.

4. ‘before the batter’s up in golden ducks’ — Before all the batter (for the plaice) has been used up playing with our food, making little golden-fried ducks. Alternatively, for those who find the first explanation not cricket, before the batsman’s or batswoman’s turn is up by being out with a nil score (from a ‘duck’s egg,’ shaped like a zero). There is of course a third and very important possibility relating back to the skew framework of the poet’s mind [sick? sic?] of batter as a transitive verb for building a wall or similar so as to form an upwardly receding slope ‘The Haggis Hunting Ground,’ but by now this footnote itself is getting battered beyond all redemption.

5. ‘attend right-thinking running’ — Admonishing the haggis to pay attention to conventional ideas of morality, propriety, and decorum whilst ALSO running to the right (otherwise it would turn its short legs to the downside of the hill and fall into the hunters’ sacks) and whilst ALSO concentrating to avoid coming too close to the perpendicular (and falling into the hunters’ sacks).

6. ‘circle up / or down the slope until the golden mean / of altitude’ — Advising the haggis (so that it may avoid falling into the hunters’ sacks) to find and keep to that aesthetically pleasing and just-right height (which the haggis computes on the trot, the ratio of the whole line to the larger part being exactly the same as the ratio of the larger part to the smaller part) where its leg-length challenge matches the mountain’s slope-flat challenge.

7. ‘haggis rules / OK’ — Reminiscent of the wonder which led one seeker of truth to The Linguist List, Eastern Michigan University dash Wayne State University to ask, on Saturday, 11 September at 09:22:06, ‘I’ve seen several British spray-painted slogans of the form “X rules OK” on walls and other outdoor surfaces. Can someone explain the syntax to me?’ He didn’t seem to get an answer.

8. ‘exemplifying strange attractors, / repelling’ — Attractors and repellers are, of course, WHAT THE WHOLE POEM IS ABOUT!

9. ‘border colleens, collies, kilts,’ — Since this is simply about complexity and chaos, it follows that we mix up the Borders — Scots going to Ireland, Irish girls coming back to Scotland, etc.

10. ‘robber burns on ceremonial night.’ — In Dutch ‘robber’ means ‘seal’ which is a red herring of another colour. The line itself should have Robert Burns whirling in Dumfries, which is only fair seeing how many poor little haggis have been hunted down over the years to accompany the mashed turnip, mashed potato, and mashed whisky at Burns Suppers. O, Immortal Memory.

11. ‘the grit required to stomach Mandelbrot’ — Somewhat at ‘out of the mouth (stoma) of Benoit’ but not very. More at ‘Fractal, fractal on the wall.’ I rest my case of Jacques Denials.

Prophecy

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Come laugh with me, it is the only way,
to laugh ourselves out (a Dutchy idiom)
and nothing anyway we’d say
defuses bombs or saves our bum
’s rush that waits us. Better smile and sing
and celebrate the moment’s beauty, hein.
You have your dreams and someone must have mine
and when I find them I’ll not swoon or whine
but dance a minuet while babies boom.
I’ll pirouette inside a crowded room
and sing how happy I am prophecy
is now updated. Prozac’s set us free.

Open-Hearted Surgery

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Machines assist but only doctors heal.
Some specialists in fact are so well-heeled
that they take to their heels while patient queues congeal
to link up foursomes. Golf’s a crowded field
and par takes practice. Dying patients feel
partaking in robotics ought to yield
a surgeon clone equipped to play the part
of a caring healing doctor with a human heart.

(ottava rima; last line has, appropriately enough, an extra beat)

Open House

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It’s open house in the dead folk’s home today.
The bright sun shows no shadows. Empty light
laves limestone markers. Children outside play
but here, inside, the shadows wait for night.
Entombed regrets accumulate, give way
in turn to melancholy tunes that fight
for breath to give them more than memories’ sounds.
All fades away, subsumed by fresh-turned mounds

of humid soil. The scratched panes of this hearse
reflect no light. Inside, no mirror marks
the driver’s breath. No notepad notes his curse
and no one’s here to count the motes and quarks
of flesh half gone to Hades now, or worse.
The shovels striking arrowheads throw sparks
illuminating tribes no longer here.
Silent watchers wait the lonely bier

to weight it down with yet unspoken words
and stories told in futures we can’t fear.
The dead folk’s home is mindless of the herds
of scapegoats buried here the awful year
the plague achieved majority. Two birds
whose plumage blacks no-future nights don’t hear
no-words the chauffeur’s phantom wants to say
but pose with wings up poised to fly away.

They cannot budge. No mortals live inside
the dead folk’s home, not even feathered things.
These birds are props set here back then as guides
for visitors, and scarecrows guarding rings
among the mausoleums. They deride
the hopes their makers had, and doleful pings
(no wind makes them emit) elicit but
wan silent echoes of their task to shut

down hopes of succour for us everyone
who man this dead folk’s home, where honoured bones
and humble dust exchange their finite fund
of molecules. The children’s (playing outside) mobile phones
don’t penetrate this atmosphere. The dun
and acrid ether draws no tears. No moans
disturb the mounds and hearse. No Vespers douse
no comfort lights. It’s always open house.

Somethings

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The peroxide-blonde possum looks alien strange
but she says with the passing of the seasons she’ll change
into something, into something we know of.

She grins like a fool and wears styrofoam horns
that she picked from the litter thrown down from a dorm
like they’re something, a valuable something.

She climbs down the locust tree avoiding the thorns
and follows me home watching out for loose dogs
that hunt something, and to them she’s a something.

I put a bowl down on my porch and we share my Mac meal.
She eats like a starveling with tales to conceal
about something, a frightening something.

I ask her no questions, she tells me no lies.
I give her the rest of my milkshake and half of my fries
and we’re onto something, a companionable something.

I sit in the rocker. She sits under the swing
and we talk without words if that makes any sense
about something, a valuable something.

Then she leaves in a flash of upended blonde fur
and somewhere I guess she is half up in a tree
waiting for something, an I-don’t-know something.

Storms!

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Persephone glowers at the buds and flowers pre-announcing Spring.
She winces fearing Winter’s powers soon will return to fling
finger-freezing sinus-seizing ice and wind around
and to stomp the budding flowers down in the refrozen ground.

Verbal-Rorschach Prescriptions

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What I write, the words, and their images and rhythms,
serve as records of ‘me as subject’ — my perceptions
that a psychologist can analyse, as can algorithms,
to examine the feints and parries and deceptions
in my verse and worse to show personality
and emotional functioning if any. There I go.
With a Rorschach here, and a decision tree over there
they’re no limits to what psychology claims to show.