Category Archives: Poems by Alan Reynolds

Matthew

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What is a place when landmarks disappear?
Who knew wind blew so wildly? All fell down.
The map confirms that where we are is here.

It’s already hard to think this was a town
and that a forest. Where are all the trees?
Who knew wind blew so wildly? All fell down.

If there is no inside, tonight we’ll freeze.
Where the sun shown briefly through, would that be east
and that a forest? Where are all the trees?

Of all our problems it is not our least
that we learn that what we’ve lost we never liked.
Where the sun shown briefly through, would that be east?

I check the time and see that it is now.
The map confirms that where we are is here.
I look as far as gathering clouds allow.

Why ‘Wisteria’?

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Aware of what words say, not what they mean,
I am dumfounded in this living world.
With knitted brow, I oink each time I’m pearled.
I am stitched with drops — wisteria and woad —
that others cast before me. Life is fine.

‘Why,’ I ask, ‘wisteria?’ I am owed
a pittance of the earnings I must pay
in principle, if I want to persist
in living lightly on the edge of life.

I know that woad commemorates my blues
which I express more avidly than I feel,
but why wisteria? Magnolia, and pine,
and — when I’m at my best — the mighty oak
are me, or were my provenance. And weeds
are what I wear when my large debtors die,
and what I hide in when my creditors approach.

I think I’ve reasons for words I define
instead of living them. Word definition
substituted well most all the lengthy years
I was lucid, and went on a while beyond.

Like shade expanding from the church that makes it,
gloom takes in cemetery, road, and me.
The clouds of what seemed reason to Descartes
boil Bolshevik depression from the beach
and leave me panting, horse before the cart.
I shed shade, restoring tan that pale thoughts bleach.
I find respite in thoughtlessness. I doze.

The next table cheers a festive lunch’s arrival
for German damsels. They are noisy en masse.
They, in their last-ditch forties, celebrate.
I relish hot-dog tactics but desist
from sentencing them with verbs to help them end
their sentences. I’ve other Fisch to fry.

One word, an icon for all other words
that I hover by, define, misunderstand,
demands — this is unusual — a meaning.
Not what, this time, ‘wisteria’, but why?

The Russet Shell-less Snails

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How many colours populate this place?
Four russet shell-less snails assist my count.
White flowers proffer broad flat leaves
that boast greens enough for myriad gowns.
Most of the blooms host hordes of well-shelled snails,
each shell a riotous, tasteful blend of browns
between bands depicting darker shades of dawn.
The arborvitae’s hues are too complex
to count their variations on dark green.
The berry bushes burst with red and black.
The stonewall stonewalls colour, but its hues
of sand and shadow backdrop one red rose
whose perfect-flower edge descends to brown
as what was bud then bloom moves to decay.
The russet snails, like sea lions seen from planes,
seem all immobile less I really look.
One turns its head; antennae sample wind.

A Zero-Knowledge Protocol

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‘Where is the universe?’
Her answering ‘When?’
seems normal in the circumstances and
we look for it together in the thin
impossibilities where chances fan
false hopes till they extinguish something grand.

As raffles raise more hopes than they subdue,
so does the fact this mystery is true:
Although we know not why we are in love,
nor know if it will last, the skies are blue
and heaven is where we are, not above.

from Sometimes in Balance, 2007, isbn 987-9-0811-5821-3

sometimes-in-balance-front-cover-small

Joie des Livres

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In the beauty of this day’s fall colours
when its nip in the air put that tang in my tendons
I gave up my day job
of being unemployed
and my addictive personality
that hasn’t killed me so far
due to terminal sloth
and marched off
to my artisan’s workbench
resolute
to do something
of worth
in this world
until studied reflection
on the personal safety accorded me by Guardian Sloth
sent me happily back to bed to read.
Better read than dead.

Slynog and Durac Study On

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Sometimes when the jackdaws are absent on more productive errands I am visited by strange characters who I pretend call themselves ‘Durac’ (a made-up name with loosest of allusions to Paul Dirac, who applied relativity theory to quantum mechanics and predicted the existence of antimatter and the positron) and ‘Slynog’ (another made-up name).
They somehow get into stories here. Durac is by himself in Dizain for Durac 7. Slynog is by himself in Politicising the Slynog and in The Slynog’s Cure, a mishmash of poems and snippets from being in France one September, which, if I ever get to writing it as I want it to be, will be a riff on something.
Durac and Slynog appear together in some poems/stories already posted to Facebook and here on Earth Tourist: Non-U Socialising, Mad Helmut’s Tea Party, and Cat and Pig among the Pigeons. And in this one:

Slynog and Durac Study On

‘I am old,’ said the Slynog, ‘and addicted to grief
which I feed on by reading the news.’

The Durac replied with a stitch in its side,
‘Your debilities always amuse

the que vivre in me, though my nebulous glee
gets dispersed by the whiff of compassion

that your sighings evince – they don’t half make me wince –
as they spread in lugubrious fashion

a comradely gloom that fairs poisons the room
and we each go into our brown studies

pretending to be what we aren’t yet, you see,
a twain of twinned old fuddy duddies.’