Category Archives: Poems by Alan Reynolds

Impromptu Afternoon Funeral for a Merle

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This bird’s Chapter One has ended.
Fake epic, abbreviated,
bird’s body in the unkempt grass.
Mallard tries to stare me down.
He wins. I win. We draw.
Across the canal, grey cat watches red.
A mower’s motor irritates.
The flowing water’s shades of green
float first fall leaves past us,
mallards, cats duck, me,
and the body of the bird.

The first boat has a rusted rudder.
The second has new, blue covers.
The coot that is silent
swims towards me, and dives.
She surfaces, eating weed.
To whom was this merle’s epic real?
Warmth and mites address the corpse:
its feathers, skin and song.
A mallard splurges wake.
Birds so loud they hurt my ears
contest the chestnut’s branches.

The sander quiets us all,
doing honest maintenance work.
Four more mallards paddle by.
The dead merle’s feathers stay still
while wind ruffles the red cat
as it stares down a floating feather.
What can be stayed, after execution?
I watch the red cat watching water.
Tall weeds dip purple flowers.
Shadows lengthen long enough
to cover more than the merle.

Sal Volatile

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God wants us all to travel as a family.
That’s why our laptop notebook’s DVD
lets you watch films and see facsimiles
of the scenery we’ve driven out to see
without glancing from the backseat’s cuir bouilli
or in a dictionary. All outdoors,
unedited, depresses or, worse, bores
you children who are force fed on sensation.
I cannot cavil at your whines and snores
because we are the same, our generation.

© ‘Lessons for My Babies’ Alan Reynolds

Note to self: Alan, why don’t you comment on this poem?

  1. because it is boring to title a poem ‘Sal Volatile’ (a solution of ammonium carbonate in alcohol or ammonia water, used in smelling salts). Maybe ‘Sal Mineo’?
  2. because the reference to watching DVDs on a trip is ridiculous, even though Patrick Bedard wrote in CAR & DRIVER about the Lexus GX470, ‘Mom and Dad up front go first-class, cosseted by leather and beautifully finished woodwork, while the kids get optionally DVD’d into back-seat bliss during those tedious interstate hauls to Grandma’s house.’
  3. because no one believes cuir boulli means ANYTHING, even though Bob Hurley not only confirms that it is real – it is hardened leather medieval armour – but also gives a method for making it.
  4. all of the above.

Wistful Waking

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I watch nostalgia surface, see it bite
at the sunrise that relieves the harvest moon.
This perfect weather – bright light day and night –
should be enough, but is not, to festoon
my autumn with the joys of the season:
canoeing, hiking, catching leaves that fall
like puzzle pieces teasing at my reason.
Why having much can I not have it all?
The past calls loudly but not using words.
I revisit places I have never been.
More of me than my eye pursues the birds
that gyre around the great church spire and then
flit out of sight, return once, and are gone
into the shade nostalgic thoughts bring on.

Time-Warp Warbles

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He felt that for sure it must be some time somewhere.
He talked to himself many minutes about that.
The after-noon appurtenance seemed strange.
‘If this were any time anywhere at all,’ he thought,
‘I would’ve sworn that the time it was were morn.’
It’s a teapot. What? The pot. Thing what you called
appurtenance. Apparently it’s time
to pore, not snore, nor cogitate no more.

It is strange how poems spring complete, neat, and well ordered from mind to paper. Well, they actually don’t:

Time-Warp Warbles

Miami Six

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We hug
the night away.
It’s heaven till we part,
cross town to man McDonald’s tills.
for cash.

Real Hells
are worse than this
eight hours shifting bits
of animals from fire to mouths
that smack.

Kids dropped
a cinder block
on Linda’s doll she held
in match stick arms. A taste of Crack
at dawn.

No cops
come here (no tanks).
No ambulances here
where Linda played her mother was
asleep.

At six
pink tourists peer
from sixty stories high
across the boulevard to see
the beach.

The kids
in ‘normal’ homes
watch television ads
then bus to spend their day in school
with guards.

At lunch
a lady’s fur
(chinchilla, chilly blue)
gets splashed with Cola near the pool.
She sues.

A thief
has lost his head.
He looses Uzi shots
that catch two tourists who’re surprised
to bits.

Fresh drenched
in CK1,
the pretty people prowl
where either sex and any name
will do.

A man
who’s happy here
and likes his wife and job
offends some beach front bandit, gets
run down.

The rich,
the really rich,
buy politicians’ smiles,
and being faces that we know,
get ours.

A nun,
someone who cared,
can’t turn attention off.
Now working-drinking-praying’s failed
she jumps.

We raise
a million bucks
to put a greeting in
a rocket NASA’s sending up
to Mars.

Shifts end.
The centre holds
we tell ourselves, and war
is what the bloody Balkans have,
we say.

Finlandia

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In a minute she will say ‘good morning’ and the ghosts
will scamper from my skull back to Biafra
where, like every day, the conquerers will kill them
and wipe the bayonets on oil-stained grass.

The sun will race everywhere when she opens the curtains,
its beams, at this prime distance, bringing me warmth
more bearable than gun barrels burning flesh from hands
that tried to push the noise and the light away.

My distance from the sun will make me welcome
its particles, the way we welcome ambassadors
who bring this message from so many lands:
Our oil supply stays safe, and in good hands.

Five minutes after firing stops, birds sing.
The smells of coffee, butter, fresh croissants
and the sounds of Jan Sibelius do their work
expecting my greeted skull to say it’s fine.

© Alan Reynolds, 1998 – 2016
I have worked and reworked this poem over the years, trying to write something that expresses my reaction to what I feel is the madness of being well adjusted in a maladjusted world.
There are too many examples of the maladjusted world. Here I went back to one which had a name and face many years ago, Biafra, conflating it with today and any day. Maybe I chose Biafra as my ‘scene’ (and Finlandia as my title, especially when listening to the music) because of Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote so movingly about that country when it was one: The Republic of Biafra, May 30, 1967 – July 17, 1970: ‘The tune of Biafra’s national anthem was Finlandia, by Jan Sibelius. The equatorial Biafrans admired the arctic Finns because the Finns won and kept their freedom in spite of ghastly odds.’ Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons: Opinions, 1974. p. 140.

Deinonychustic Damsels

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Deinonychustic Damsels

I am shopping on the Kalverstraat downtown,
the only man inside the H & M.
I find the gift I want to buy then notice
that the bevy all around me is not tame.

The mothers and daughters of predators, in times
future, past or present: these bright girls
with shining hair and you-come-hither eyes
are grazing high street shops in search of prey.

I am to them invisible, not here.
Too large to hunt, too aged to appear
on their homing screens as anyone to marry,
I am terrain, a rock they go around

like gaudy salmon climbing pouring streams.
They rise to take the bait of marketeers
and follow trends that they themselves began.
Extending plastic credit cards like claws,

they touch the gewgaws and occasionally buy
a scarf or purse or sweater they don’t need.
Then, swirling like Deinonychustic damsels,
they swarm away, and others take their place.

© Alan Reynolds, 2009 – 2016

Deinonychus. relatively small, fleet-footed, agile dinosaur discovered by John Ostrom of Yale University in the late 1960’s.