On the edge of the pasture nearest Twisted River
in his trailer on its settling cinder blocks
the man confuses his faith with his liver
when he speaks French. He wrings and hangs his socks
above his cot. He pretends he would forgive her
if she’d come back. The wind of winter rocks
him not to sleep but every other way.
‘But loose,’ he says. He lives another day.
Here it’s five degrees. It’s twenty in Valencia
so, QED, there it’s four times warmer.
Pure math provides my faultless referencia
and Mother Nature’s never let my logic harm her
though she does insist we split the diferencia
to leave me five and give twenty to the charmer
who put new math in my-cold fingered reach
in my igloo while he trots off to the beach.
The weather up north’s German (as they say, ‘wetter’).
Dutch polders that aren’t frozen float in rain.
Down here in Spain it’s drier. Warmer. Better.
Though Oslo slows from powdered snow, the pain
of seeing that on TV does not fetter
my feckless glee. Orange blossoms help me gain
perspectives that permit me to endure
my winter where the sea today’s azure.
published in THE ARMCHAIR AESTHETE and in THE OLDING MAN
‘Corn doesn’t know he’s lying, so it’s okay,’
Medusa says, defending her meal ticket.
‘You mean Cornet,’ is what I try to say.
Medusa cuts me off: ‘The press can stick it,
that ‘et’ suffix, onto other horns:
Trump-et and Baritone-et. But my man’s Corn.
Corn lies a lot, okay? But he was born
in a weasel-wording world with lies as norm
in a wealthy world where lying was the norm.
He grew up lying. It made him who he is.
He doesn’t know he’s lying. Pundits fizz
about the lies he tells because he can.
But until truth catches up, Corn is my man.
by Alan Reynolds, with apologies to Edward Lear
How pleasant to know Mr. Reynolds
who has concreted reams of hot air
into harmless most times ornamentals
that he flogs for two cents at the Fair.
His mind is a sieve: he remembers
distortions of all that he hears.
He envisions an Earth burned to cinders
that he saves when he wiggles his ears.
For a human he’s an adept at flying,
say the jackdaws. They mean that he can’t.
He eschews every chance to die trying
and devotes his time trying to chant.
He basks by the sea when they let him,
not the jackdaws, the daemons of news.
He resolves every New Year to get trim
but that idea’s the first one he’ll lose.
His many friends number some humans,
several dogs, Evil Sam – that’s a cat,
and in Spain a matched span of ichneumons
he calls ‘mongeese’ and he chortles at that.
When he walks on the water it’s frozen.
When Earth welcomes in Springtime he sinks.
He’s averse to all lines that let prose in
and drifts off in those moments he thinks.
He thinks he would weep should the world stop,
he knows he will should it continue
to be wrung out by men like a whirled mop.
He imagines your gods are within you.
He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish;
he mumbles hoping his listeners blame dentals
that he doesn’t need yet. Vowels vanish.
How pleasant to know Mr. Reynolds.
A Squirrel in a tall Sycamore
had a passion for fashion so wore
a skirt of mauve suede that his Mother had made
for the Squirrel in that tall Sycamore.
An old man up in Teulada
liked to claim he had fought off a squad a
tree rats with a broom when they chewed through to his room
and left of his wiring just nada.
We must insist we never saw this photograph
even if we tell ourselves it is not real.
Having seen it sears our psyches with the thought
that absolutely nothing holds Earth up.
– – – –
We fall at speeds we cannot comprehend.
We circumnavigate the Earth while standing still
as it rotates at one thousand miles per hour.
Even that swift dash seems manageable compared
to how fast our Earth Rock gyres around the sun
on its eight-light-minutes leash: a thousand times
faster than our cars roll down our highways.
– – – – –
Thinking of ‘Pale Blue Dot’ — the photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), and of what Carl Sagan said about it.
Earth Tourist 