Selected Poems by John Reynolds

Author:John Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2017-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ego apis Matinae

more modoque

grata carpentis thyma per laborem

plurimum circa nemus uvidique

Tiburis ripas operosa parvus

carmina fingo

HORACE, ODES, IV.2

Epode: a conversation

In these days of late autumn I know the poet only

As the fortunate man who

Free from cares on cool mornings

Praises the commonplace world.

On just such a morning

It’s Quintus Horatius Flaccus I invoke

Whom I know only by the garlands

Laid daily upon his tomb, and whose tomb

I know only as the books I read, hoping

To hear in them, in their different accounts of the work done,

The equitable voice of the poet, winecup in hand,

Conversing with his muse

While her green earth sweats to loose its young.

Digesting its dead

It has better things to do with those words that contain everything

Than bring them to him in a basket bedecked with laurels.

This is his work, the poet, this is where,

Like the good husbandman, he must expect no reward

From merely hoping.

Groaning and bulging with that death

From which nourishment crawls, encumbered by no debt

The nibbled winter ejects itself like birdsong.

Written in a language of profane glamour

The lovely world has everything he needs when

He encounters the produce he savours

As night falls. He can’t walk to barbarous tribes

And not get lost. Nothing else for it.

Fires of the deep flare along the flank of darkness where

Sediment packs down under time

And how can he talk to the gallery of oblivious gods?

The Forum he avoids and lofty doors, preferring

In the quiet of his own company to ask

How could his father be in the picture when

It is perhaps a mirror? Or postcards of copulating gods,

Of sons unborn? The call to prayer startles that solitude

And so days are driven by his father’s wanderlust.

Again at loaded tables

How gravely his weight can remember

To sit in meeting rooms and taste childhood’s

Amiable libations, and those who joined him in the shade

And in sheltered valleys where he sees his wandering herds.

‘You loved life in heaven but I saw everything –

The sad marks of uncountable grains of sand

On your birthday. I, Death, took the pictures

For years now, no longer completely insincere.’

Even the poet’s vanity is like the inspired horizons of cities.

His language is a kind of weathered pyramids of Dashoon.

‘But there is one memory when autumn raises in the fields its head

Which is that I’ve been a brother

Stealing through the black spectrum like a thief,

Like this smoke drifting from the dark, pacing from world-weary eyes,

This subterfuge, this exact picture

Poured into mirrors

Seeing it exists and ends.’

Say, do it now, and time shines as if with the light

Of friend and lover, it just lies down

Like a corpse freed of posture.

‘But today I have finished a work outlasting bronze.

I’ll go on and on – and is it beautiful

This tawdry world deep in grass too lush to leave?’

The taxis are flushed with dawns of backlit peaks

And filled with awe or dusk, depending on the time –

Time’s music that will make spires aspire to heaven.

Its meaning, too, of cloud-piercing

Little, laconic tunes, like someone merely whistling

Fades away. And every sound invites to easy sleep

Amid the mitred peaks that pierce through gorges,

Clouds, and time now painting its frothing wake.

Eating while

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