Bésame, Carnicero

Posted on 11 Aug 2015 by Alan Reynolds

Pig Duroc’s uncle What Me Worry
had ended, Duroc knew, as curry.
So our hero harbours little
sympathy for humans. Spittle

mars his enunciation when he
thinks back to the pony’s whinny
when the butcher’s axe had ended
hopes his uncle’s life extended

beyond the age that is now Duroc’s.
He knows the butcher is thinking ham hocks
so Pig Duroc plays his trump card,
speaks Spanish, speaking fast and hard

to the pony: ‘Palomino,
life is one sour Maraschino.
Kick the brute. Eternity
for him or his axe’s kissing me.’

Specious Spectacles

Posted on 6 Aug 2015 by Alan Reynolds

With my glasses on I see these marks are words.
With my glasses off I thought those sticks were people.
I was sure those floating white things were fluffed herds
of helium sheep taut-tethered to a steeple.

With my glasses on I see that the spire’s a tower
filled with drinkers emptying glasses as they strive
to honour Bacchus who looked like a swine,
I thought, but I see, now that he’s passed on,

that I must revise my vision of his traits.
The gulls, nee sheep, alight like broken glass on
the blurred blue water of Altea’s straits.

Bugged by Poetry

Posted on 1 Aug 2015 by Alan Reynolds

This ruby moves: it is a bug
in an empty shotgun shell.
The shell has served the bug as roof and rug.
I gauge it serves him well.
The bug wants more. He comes outdoors,
flaps his wings, flies to my book.
He says a sonnet only bores
a bug too small to look
across a large and ink-filled page.
I give him praise and drink.
I tell him poems are all the rage.
‘That can’t be true. I think,’
he says. ‘A single shotgun shell
costs more than any ode.’
He bugs off then – it’s just as well.
I’ve stepped on his abode.

A Poem Accepting Footnotes

Posted on 29 Jul 2015 by Alan Reynolds

Je commence à y voir clair.

01. I would have been nine had I been born on time
02. but decades passed and Eliot wrote on
03. and the plover rested, angel to the ferret
04. and left no stern atoned, no field untilled
05. until a footnote marked its pocking flight
06. and the ferret breathed in sulphur and expired. (1)

07. Le clair de lune brought clarity I wrote
08. and lunacy I lived for all my worth,
09. yclept out Ford my room and board to God
10. and tenancy my station while on Earth.
11. Not that it frangled. Rank was knot I pulled
12. and Gordian my gorgon, George B. praised.
13. As Cecil, a half brother, kept the B.,
14. I dropped mine off the balcony and braised
15. the ferret, nothing-waisted as their wont
16. is, though the hocks are tastier than rat,
17. and rats who walk on broken glass are prone (2)
18. to every corporal attitude except
19. that yclept as prone, and I’d lie if
20. I sold you squirrel as rat hand ewe wood stew.

Footnotes:

Je commence à y voir clair = I’m beginning to understand

La clair de lune = moonlight

I would wager that, given seventeen hours, bread, manchego cheese and three bottles of Navarra (two white and chilled, one red and not), I could write thirty-four pages of footnotes ‘explaining’ the references in this poem.

Thirty-four pages!

But I wood knot wont tow reed them <g>

Footnote 1. ‘and the plover rested, angel to the ferret / and left no stern atoned, no field untilled’ Cf. TSE (footnote 3) ‘CHORUSES FROM ‘THE ROCK, The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven’, lines 100-102: ‘Only the wind moves / Over empty field, untilled / Where the plough rests, at an angle / To the furrow…’

Footnote 2. ‘and rats who walk on broken glass are prone’ Cf. TSE (footnote 3, again) ‘THE HOLLOW MEN, A penny for the Old Guy’, line 9: ‘Or rats’ feet over broken glass’

Footnote 3. TSE = T.S. Eliot, a poet who wrote these incomparable lines: ‘In the room the women come and go / and talk of Michelangelo.’ (footnote 4)

Footnote 4. . . . – – – . . . – – – . . . Maybe you will continue these footnotes for me <S>

Cat and Pig Among the Pigeons

Posted on 20 Jul 2015 by Alan Reynolds

‘I am old,’ said Pig Duroc. ‘I missed the last bus.
and I had to walk toting this carp.’
‘You’re myopic as well,’ said Cat Slynog, then shied
from the pig, and played Bach on a harp.
The music they made as they harped and they carped
seemed to pigeons that flew by great grief.
Then the carp joined in; all three flatted and sharped
till the end of the day, and this brief.

Gone Song

Posted on 15 Jul 2015 by Alan Reynolds

I’ve been pushed away so often that I’ve left.
You don’t notice nothing missing. You don’t look.
And I left the music playing and the broken rocker swaying
and my heart there where you pressed it in the book.
The screen door slammed behind me in an off key
and the drums rolled thunder on the radio.
I looked back and saw you reading and I hoped I saw you cry
then I saw you pick the phone up, say, ‘he’s gone.’

Crocodylus Acutus

Posted on 11 Jul 2015 by Alan Reynolds

The puerile croc up to his eyes in alligator flats
has polished off two kiwis: one cordovan, one black.
He much prefers, he leers at all, the polish to the paste
and says he bastes his choice more on staying power than taste.
Koalas smell of leaves they eat, and in the same way Croc
has belched himself an aura that locks vulture flocks in shock.
One fly-by of Croc’s lee side, they refuse to salivate
and chunder in their plumage. Croc waves and calls out, ‘Mate,
come down and swim with me and we’ll gobble monotremes,
amuse ourselves by snorkelling sharks and other creek extremes.’
The vultures retch incurably and curse big reptile geeks
as blithe as kookaburras with two geckos in their beaks.

Published in MÖBIUS, May, 1998.

Seeds

Posted on 9 Jul 2015 by Alan Reynolds

I am not sure exactly who I am
nor precisely who it is that I am not.
We meet and mingle without smoke or sham,
then separate, but share a common lot.
Not empathetic any way that counts,
we are more a blurring of the borders books
ascribe to personalities: an ounce
of human-kindness traits, a pinch of rooks’
and God knows what. In forests I am trees.
On beaches I am cloud and surf and sand.
I am the universe each time I sneeze
and it is me each morning when we stand
on the bridge to all tomorrows, and the rain
comes down like prayer, and we begin again.

Earth Tourist

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