Category Archives: Poems by Alan Reynolds

Night Flights

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The squirrel of Buddha stands stock still and tall.
For a squirrel. She blinks and history unfolds.
Whatever you think should happen does somewhere.
It all comes back, in time, to Buddha’s squirrel.

A mysterious Editor reads back what I write.
I flit between rare visions seeking meaning.
What does the squirrel of Buddha symbolise—
wisdom, stillness? Answers go unheard.

I see a warm plate heaped with scrambled eggs
cooked in so much butter that the whole room glistens.
I eat until I am sated and beyond.
Somnolence returns as arteries clog.

‘With his arms and shoulders folded like a bat’s.
he sleeps, a gut tube trailed by knot-kneed legs.’
‘Surely “not” or “knocked”,’ says Editor. I stay
my quick reply. Tomorrow I’ll revise.

The squirrel intones, ‘They were excitable. They died.
They were alive and vile a century ago
until the year of our Lord 1915.’
The watchful jackdaw asks me, ‘When was that?’

CATTING AROUND

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Morose, what the cat lacked,
or was that morsels?

Sylvester attended breakfast,
that break time in bad marriages.
Maria howled.

‘The ideal that celibacy
beats off claims
that marriage is moral
but not for the godly

isn’t good.’ She purled.

Sylvester laughed.
Perhaps not noting the tears
in her regarding eyes.

‘Crepehanger,’ he said.
‘Dyspeptic from mousing around?

When we eloped, you didn’t say,
like Donne, to tip your paw
would “impossibilitate”
our lives.’

‘You battle faith,’ Maria said
in what she thought was answer,
‘and feed it to your reason.
No one’s glad.

Our years of marriage
number as our friends.
We talk things out with them
instead of going.

I lost my first friends
marrying (them or me),
and second sets departed
with divorce.’

‘Don’t be so glum,’
Sylvester took more mouse.
‘Your melancholy’s giving me the glums.

Brooding, cheerless dowager of doom,
confusing Eliot’s bang and whimper with
post coital tryst,
I’m going out.
The Doury you brought
me is aptly named,
as are the saturnine tales
you relate, that whip up
no emotion but disgust.’

‘Like gnarled misshapen branches,
you are knotted,’
said Maria. ‘No wonder
I can’t reach your crabbed soul;
it reasons with its belly,
has no ears.’

‘No,’ Sylvester said,
‘I’m more like Keats,
in that I’ll give you
plums, but not my time;

the burls upon my tree
as scratching post,
but not one look into
my private soul.

Devotion’s but annoyance to me.
Please look alive! We leave
to hunt at three.
Fidelity’s for dogs.

And you, who mewl this noon
of marriage pains, can’t
count one pleasure
celibacy brings.’

‘Cel-i-BA-cy? Ach,
Sylvester, PLEASE!
If thou must metric
do it right, or cease.
And don’t cite sight
rhymes back to put me down.

I’m free as verse,
as Bismuth in his bath.
When you are out
my vapours go out too.

The sick at heart
can scarcely warm my hearth.
So leave, for good.
We, married for a day,
(or was it for a night?)
shan’t share a nest.
Go howl into the night
and I shall raise MY kittens
well alone.

You are too old to marry:
second-hand, or, better,
furniture the shops could
never sell.

Now old, morose, and captious,
cat around
and see if I care.
Run along now. Hound!

Misanthropy would be your
human name.
Like Eliot’s cats you
hide your feline nomen

I bet you mutter
there are those who care,
but even mice, whose reasons
we can’t know,

would find “Sylvester”
sad enough,
would go a hundred mice
lives and not ask.’

‘You have no friends,’
the tom, fair stung, retorted.

‘That’s what I said,’ Maria
purred. ‘Our marriage
has no years.’

Her claws struck out
and stroked blood
from his ears.

‘I’ll give you “doleful”,
“woebegone” as well.
“accursed by fate”
and “desolate.”
Now go.’

Sylvester’s marriage,
fluid, leaking out
(he never realised it)
down the spout,

he sprang onto the
windowsill,
the while
he dreamed of
ancient Mormons.

Goofy smile,
not dry, nor tart,
not sullen,
greased his face.
‘Irascible?’ he asked his smouldering
mate.

‘Solein today, from something that you ate?’

The hangdog look he gave her
broke her up.

She licked his ears.

The faith that moves
small mountains
ain’t for cats.

Nor is the artificial,
sterilised
state that Shaw called marriage.

What’d he know?

Content, these cats,
to sour but two lives,
they wallow in unsociability,

and pride themselves on
being so aloof.
An eremitic
couple on the prowl.

Rock of Ages

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Morning Star
There is not a lot of madness in me, mornings,
and I pretend some mornings last all day.
Afternoons, I heed the worst storm warnings,
let news of wars and famines have its way
until the evening’s medicated hours
bring the wisdom of sedation and I sleep.
I sleep as well as those who wield the powers
must be sleeping. Could they be awake and keep
their counsel while around us battles rage
and all of us grind all of us to dust
that we press in pellets, feed upon, and stage
as if that’s normal living? Yes, they must,
or else be mad, and I be sane, to see.
But seeing saddens. They insist I’m free.

Free from the Painted Pony
The kitchen counter where I count my pills
is empty as it always really is.
Imaginary powders cure my ills.
Fantastic bromides bubble up and fizz
away the wars or, failing that, my view
of other people’s horrors. Fair enough.
I don’t need drugs to go outside and do
unto them first; for later I can slough
the memories, and do it all again,
for I have evolved (heroic anecdote:
like the rifle shot they say that lessens pain
in the slaughterhouse before we cut the throat),
so far that I think my scars come from the hugs,
and this is why I can say no to drugs.

Exodus
When they found the Moral Blindness gene and pruned
it from our DNA, they pulled the pin
from what had kept our civilisation tuned.
The towns unravelled. There was no more sin
and no more goodness. We were sore, appalled.
Once seen, the horrors left us paralysed.
In my last active moment, I had called
on God, who laughed at how I analysed
our fault: that we stopped thinking our actions mattered.
We would have been extinct before we evolved
had we been hindered every time we splattered
the less rapacious. Moral Blindness solved
that problem; its removal leaves a void
requiring this incoming asteroid.