Category Archives: Poems by Alan Reynolds

Mad Mackie’s Manor

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‘There are a badger, milord, and red squirrels, at the door.’
‘Well, let them in!’ I yell. The butler sighs.
‘You don’t get it, milord. They is wanting letting out.
Your castle is not the keep it was no more.’
I go to correct his grammar. The squirrels dash
the penultimate Ming vase on the flagstone floor.
I help the butler sweep up, handling broom
and crystal dustpan more than handily.
I think the badger likes me, but the squirrels
have convinced him all he wants from here is out.
There’s no pleasing some, so I cry, ‘Fetch the shotgun!’
I send the butler to the village for fresh shells.
The mammals go out with him. All ends well.

Timepiece Cascade

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He had removed his watch so he knew it was not time
that was passing. He could hear the waterfall
growing louder and presumably getting nearer
in the darkness that was everywhere these days.
A duet for two or, less precisely, tutu
rang in his ears — where else? — as he swept past
the islands Bridle Sweet and Bishops Nein.
He heard, ‘Take two aspirin scold me. Yule bee fined.’
That can’t be right, he thought. He reached the edge… …

Staged Right

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We hear the stage direction, Exit right.
We face the audience seldom; it is us.
Beyond the footlights, all we see is night.
From here it looks eternal, as we fuss,

each with our own stage business, and we pine
for speaking parts, and plots where we can lead,
at least a little. Blind directors mine
emotion lodes. They make us cry and bleed.

We take steps that take us further from salvation.
Clapping hands disorient us. We pause,
on the edge of what we’d meant to be creation,
but which our hamming up reveals as gauze

and spangles masquerading as The Light.
We move across the stage and exit right.

Half-Hinged Fairytales – The Giantess and the Beanstalk (excerpt)

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I think that serendipity
rewards no one resembling me.
The wench, whose overweening chest
gives umbrage everywhere it’s pressed,
advances to unjust desserts
adroitly flouncing in her skirts.

Me, the Huguenot, and Thou make three
united ungrammatically
and in our apprehension grave
that hopes we’ll not be made her slave.
The giantess, for such is she,
grunts, approaching, ‘Fum-fo-fi-fee’

the distaff version of the hum
her husband grumbles: ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum’.
Thou and me make haste to squat
behind the hapless Huguenot.
The giantess gives his head a squeeze
that sends his brainpan to his knees

which swell like they’ve contracted mumps.
I am less scared of Heffalumps.
Thou and me hide by a well.
We gather this may not end well.
We kick our wellies off and dive
in the dark and hope we’ll stay alive.

Nine Days to Silence – Day One

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I retreat a final time back to The Farm.
I cross the creek down where the real road ends.
I walk from there, into the ever woods.
I ford the creek twice more and see the sun.
It cooks the dew from what had been the orchard.
The path is steeper than I had remembered.
A blacksnake on an overhanging rock
conceals her rapt astonishment if any.

Back into the dark forest. Does it end?
I work to think of nothing but I remember:
projects well begun but then abandoned,
salt traces on the cheek of one I loved.
The sun again. I step into the clearing
remembering it was here I learned to ride
with hope and halter, quirt and bit forbidden.
I used a blanket for a saddle on hot days.

Emotions I thought atrophied propel me
uphill to where the cabin’s rough-plank porch
was the perch I launched myself from in the dawn
before walking through the weeds that wet bare feet
to wade the creek and watch for rainbow trout
that faced upstream below the larger rocks.
On nearing, I see saplings, dirt, and weeds.
The cabin I planned to move into is gone.

Gymnast Anna at Sea

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The beam she walks is wider than they’re wont
to be, she sees. It is anchored at one end
but not the other, like a diving board.

A pulled-punch, prodding cutlass punctuates
her pause to think. Her puncture fear propels
her next step forward, leaving her less plank

than she’d wish for, and the ship’s slight heeling shows
her more waves than she’s seen since the time she won
the Olympic gold, and a friendly crowd had cheered

her coming home with it, had met her plane.
‘Planck’s constant,’ she says, seeing first her words
and then their value, wondering should her steps

be quantum small, could she prolong her stroll?
‘The plank is constant,’ said the Moorish Mate,
‘the penalty for not being one of us

but of another tribe.’ His hooting crew
hosannas Anna, while the arabesque-
festooned blade of his cutlass draws first blood

and then her full attention. Pirouetting
on what, for her, is a boulevard-wide beam,
she somersaults, then leaps on the Mate’s head

and hands it to him, having swiped his blade
then swiped it, horizontally, through his neck.
Four leaps suffice to reach the quarterdeck… …

Ravine

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There are skunks, and a flask of warm gin, and a barrel of laughs
in the ravine where Sam’s kept far away from the unlighted house,
kept attached by a collar to a chain that links up to a cable
that runs overhead between trees stood a good way apart.
He runs back-and-forth, forth-and back, back-and-forth when he’s able.
He barks at the skunks, drinks the gin, and he looks in the barrel
for the joke why he’s here, in the fading hope this time he’ll get it.

Time Fall

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We take time to contemplate the universe,
our approaching sleep embraced by alien arms.
Is our galaxy avoiding the void?
How many super galaxies underpin
the nothingness on which all matter rests?
I fall asleep while you count falling stars.

I wake once more on our planet on the edge
of falling while revolving round a star
that itself is falling casually in step
with myriads and plethoras, and with slews
of things and forces I don’t understand.
Not that it matters as the fall continues.