‘I am old,’ said the surgeon, ‘or given to drink.
Next year I shall be forty-seven.
In my surgery patients ask time off to think,
whispering, “ere he’s much older it’s Heaven
for our doctor”. There is little in my mien to leaven
their shock sighting lunch on my smock,
and at how my Mephisto shoes nibble my socks,
and how at lunch I slide under the table.
I’ve misplaced my house key, my Bentley’s in hock,
but my tremors don’t mean I’m not able.
He feels the weight loss that he still calls hunger.
He wishes to hear English native spoke,
or was that spoken? Harder to remember
alone inside his nearing-empty mind
with him Humpty-Dumpty bumping down the wall
at the bottom of the garden. Night time falls.
He goes inside and lights the guttered candle.
He pours his cup, last of this morning’s tea.
He disinters a banger. It revolts him.
With eyes tight shut it’s nourishing, he assumes,
so he throws bits at the cat he found that’s blind
and they both eat tea in silence. Midnight falls.
It is early somewhere warmer, he is thinking.
Not stinking darkness. Never rising damp.
He takes his diary down and tears out pages
that he holds above the candle, watching smoke
glow into flame then falter and char dark.
The cat meows, which seems to say it all.
He watches ash fall on the antimacassar.
Downtown the church bells ding-toll 4 a.m.
The neighbour, the one working, starts her car
for commuting to the hospice where she reigns
when she isn’t drudging, which is usually always.
The candle gives the ghost up. All is dark.
A silver lining on an ancient bookmark
succumbs to tarnish and his nervous thumb.
He rubs. The cat meows. All is less clear
than they told him back when he was graduating
and when he bought this practice and became
the general practitioner for this town.
The red horse dances hours in the sun
rehearsing two steps left, a bow, a stretch.
Three wading birds make no tracks as they walk
across dried mud. It’s hot in the Camargue.
I take the heat and watch the dancing horse.
The horse nor I will try to ford the mud.
There’s no one here, forever, in this heat.
Flamingos wade the water, browsing gunk,
and muskrats gnaw the cane grass. I am home.
‘The Black Book’ — Durrell’s premier published work —
lies where I dropped it, Tarquin’s tortured ‘lorve’
no match for red-horse dancing. Egrets fly
around flamingos, muskrats, horse and me.
I think how Durrell’s ‘Quinx’ taught me the tales
that brought me to this flat and open space:
gypsies in Les Saintes Maries de la Mer.
That town’s now filled with tourists, but out here
the red horse dances. Alan has come home.
I saw this horse, free and loose (across the mud flat of the Mudflat Bat), dancing by himself for at least an hour. I’m couldn’t really stay there forever, although I was tempted. I don’t think you can be home in any one place when you are an Earth Tourist.
The crescent moon hangs south, above the sea.
Out here in the Camargue the mud-flat bat
flies higher now. The atmosphere, you see,
has lightened. Insects lift, ensuring that
the mud-flat bat’s own mouth and mine won’t splat.
He flew so low on Wednesday that I feared
I’d swallow him in darkness, furry-eared
and sonaring the night. It scared him too.
Mosquitoes, the ones who Wednesday rudely jeered,
become his meal, malaria his stew.
Another ‘postcard’ — this one from the Camargue, a place of magic for me and part of the marshy delta where the Rhône river spreads out south of Avignon. In July the Camargue is hot and as dry as Arizona; in the winter two-thirds of it is underwater, sometimes only a few centimetres deep. I wrote this there one night, two miles north of the Mediterranean, standing out on a mudflat edge watching this particular bat inveigling me to write about him, or to open my mouth.
The poor and lame climb up this hill when the fruit begins to grow.
The going blind watch from the shade and squint at April’s glow.
When flowers finish blooming and the rain pails them away,
petals pour down darkling hills and pollen swims the bay.
In May the buds begin to swell, accelerate their slow
chill winter’s start and form gold orbs absorbing sun in rows.
June’s sun bakes shade from leafy trees where turgid spiders spin
the webs they lime to catch their prey that had its own chance when
down in the roots the fly-nests blew, and the buzz that blind men hate
teased sighted heads as flies laid eggs in eyes, to incubate.
July sees owners mend the wires delineating groves
and joke with wide-eyed pickers who’re returning here in droves.
The healthy climbers harvest two to the blind or cripple’s one
as all hands strive together in the sweltering August sun.
Hands reach up where the branches fork, and arms stretch down to throw
ripe lemons in reed baskets with a braggadocio
that helps them harvest money now, to live on when it’s slow
and dulled eyes shine reflecting back when fruit began to grow.
© Alan Reynolds. Published in THE ARMCHAIR AESTHETE, Issue 16, Summer, 2001, New York.
Having taken a ferry from an island to the Greek mainland, we cycled uphill to a lemon grove exuding a fragrance I thought literally ‘heavenly’ in a place that was an antonym of ‘haven.’ Half-starved cats, more semi-persecuted scavengers than pets, wandered among people suffering from white-eyed blindness that I guessed, perhaps correctly, came from blow-flies. And heptameter meter ‘chose me’ to try to portray the strange mix of richly fruiting trees with heat-stilled inhabitants.
Alan Reynolds, acrylic on paper
These rough-drawn salamanders symbolise
the patient grace of Gaia as she pours
our molecules, in always-new reprise
of forms and folds and patterns she adores.
This bee, who’s dead, or sleeping in this box,
epitomises Gaia’s gayer pranks.
He’s sniffed the flowers, flown above the flocks
of sheep in April; gambolled near their flanks.
He bet he’d last the summer, and he might,
but only on this canvas, stretched and sketched.
Perhaps he’ll be recycled as raw light.
A full reincarnation? Too farfetched.
We dance in patterns we cannot perceive
but Gaia does, and pets us when we grieve.
Originally a 19th century silkworm nursery, the now legendary artists’ retreat ‘Beauregard’ in southern France nestled among vineyards, forests and Celtic ruins. It was where the artist Leo Musch (1943 — 2013) gave wonderful summer lessons, inspiration, and lodging to painters and sculptors.
One July morning Leo assigned a project where we were to paint something showing motion whilst leaving an empty rectangle somewhere in our paintings. He would tell us later how to use the rectangle. I covered my large sheet of gesso-treated paper with acrylic sketches of some lizards I watched playing, and of a bumble bee that fell and lay still on a table where I had been having coffee under the trees. I carried the bee around with me in a metal box, feeling he might have been sent to me as a model. Leo reviewed the pictures and instructed us to make different but related paintings in the reserved rectangles, showing some theme that would relate the two parts of the work. I sketched the bee (about twenty times) on other paper, then painted him in the rectangle, in a three-dimensional box that looked out into other space and time. Then I wrote ‘Les Uns et Les Autres’ to accompany my painting.
Seven minutes to the next bus. A heron flies
a calm commute about the ancient church.
The grass, so green around the stone-blessed graves,
grows wilder, longer, by the dark canal.
The water, brightened by large water lilies
conceal/reveals a frog, and tiny fish.
Yellow flowers on green, broad floating leaves.
Storm clouds contest the heaven’s startling blue.
A mass of grey occludes the western sky,
the sky’s skirts hemmed at the horizon by thick fog,
cows silhouetted sharply in the false light.
The sun, imprisoned, in prism, by the clouds.
A drawbridge, unattended on this weekday,
stays down while underneath it, red canoes
containing children from a school-trip class …
A large canal, houseboats with their own boats
and a dredger barge maintaining navigable waters.
We cross the ring way. Constant clang of new construction.
Machines assist machines, reshaping roads
and stamping houses on what were green fields
last week or was that a decade. Stop: shopping centre,
then on along a boulevard with flowers
and more canals and sport fields, green full trees.
Then down a topless tunnel/major road
at speed, red poppies on the banks scarce heeded.
Bigger waterways with locks. An actual tunnel
underneath the river to the city centre.
We pop up there, our bus a time machine:
grand houses here for centuries. Tourist swarms.
Written twenty-first of May 2014 on the bus going to Amsterdam. Thank you, Dragon Dictate, for making the transcription from paper notebook so painless.
I thought, if I had accomplished something, how different I would be.
I heard wind hassling halyards on the boats stashed here with me.
I walked out on the floating dock. I walked back to the shore.
A gull disputed aerial space with a crow who wished it more.
They flew. Wind blew. The moored boats stayed tied fast.
I breathed a sigh, and wondered, whether, it would be my last.
Earth Tourist 