RW Haynes

A Quiet Smoke with El Rey Nayar. A Poem by RW Haynes

by

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A Quiet Smoke with El Rey Nayar

Wittgenstein: I know I ordered scrambled eggs, so why aren’t they fried?

Waitress: As Kant used to say, Too late for that, honey.

Wittgenstein: Kant called you honey?

Waitress: No, he called me Kitty, but I didn’t see him that often.

Wittgenstein: But seeing is believing, ¿verdad?

Waitress: As Kant used to say, Too late for that, Cassandra.

El Rey:

You don’t want a partner impressed by your wisdom.

It’s the winds who are wise, as they glide up valleys

And wrap around the mountains, never lost

But only named in reverent jokes, La Flaca, you know,

And when you talk, talk of tortillas, of how the rain

Used to be reversed to bless the sky, of drink,

And how truth declares itself like this (waves hand)

And shouts its boasting name in empty noises.

Ha, man, you have it all wrong all the time, right?

What you call justice, I call—tortillas. Rain will remember.

So when you fall in love, right, you sing it out

Like a big green frog under the water, your eyes

Bulged out with passion, your froggy mind cool as

The rain, your empty heart full of compressed air,

And the Muses text you you are fucking up and by heaven

You need to emerge like one of those happy whales

At Sea World, ravenous for a small dead fish.

So you text back, O Motherly Muses, Queens of Life!

Blessed spirits of high imagination! OK, I’m coming,

Thrashing my flippers, always obedient, O yes, ma’am,

Damn, I need air, love needs oxygen, ah, ah, ah,

I always wondered how old Beowulf managed,

Swimming ten miles in an upward direction,

Clutching Grendel’s cumbersome head and the hilt

Of some ancient giant’s mis-inherited sword,

But up you go, with all that love, oh wow, that love,

About to explode you, to pop you, although

As a frog, you can handle the mission, kick those legs.

So that’s why I don’t talk much about love

Except to the hummingbirds flying in from death.

(St. Thomas More replies, through a cloud of smoke)

El Santo:

Wait a minute, there, (cough) Your Majesty,

Up in those mountains it may well be true

That death communicates from nowhere to you,

But here in Heaven, by gosh, it seems to me

That death is silent; in this guy’s poetry

He mentions that mistake that Judas made,

And I fucked up, too, and good faith betrayed

When I tormented heretics vigorously,

So now in painful purgatorial remorse

I write fourteeners day and night and then

I scan and rescan all my lines again,

And the sonnet is my only intercourse.

So love, you say, by way of conversation,

Is no more than a kind of frog inflation?

El Rey:

Sustenance comes in diverse disguises,

As we say down in the sierra, and

No one really wants their head chopped off

By a dude whose slaves put powdered gold

In his single-malt milkshake—too bad

He got you, my saintly friend. I warn you, friends,

All y’all readers, cozy as the bees,

There ain’t no rain in the Tower of London,

No saving mists that rise from the valleys,

No tortillas hot from the comales…

Don Tomás, forgive me a little, now,

Love was the matter, and when hummingbirds

Return from their paradise with hot-winged wisdom,

And foolish children play ball on the cliff tops,

And sing salvational ditties at sunrise,

Remember how rain washes down restoration

Where spirit comes forth in invisible splendor

And all become saintly for love of compassion,

And I hold a place in the heart of my mountains

To tell you how words must dissolve their creation

To say I am always the kind voice of the rain.

El Santo:

OK, so now the frog of love has hopped away.

O happy amphibious escapee!

And now you will explain to me

How love operates in a magical way.

Fair enough, I say, your (cough cough) majesty,

If we’re intrigued by appetite or fear

Or anything important but unclear

We may call magic any mystery,

So now I claim this boon from thy (cough) throne

To draw from thine oracular song

A truth that is unquestionably strong

And swear this truth to be my own.

As love descends like showers from the sky,

So love leaves nothing needful dry.

 

R. W. Haynes, Professor of English at Texas A&M International University, has published poetry in many journals in the United States and in other countries. As an academic scholar, he specializes in British Renaissance literature, and he has also taught extensively in such areas as medieval thought, Southern literature, classical poetry, and writing. Since 1992, he has offered regular graduate and undergraduate courses in Shakespeare, as well as seminars in Ibsen, Chaucer, Spenser, rhetoric, and other topics. In 2004, Haynes met Texas playwright/screenwriter Horton Foote and has since become a leading scholar of that author’s remarkable oeuvre, publishing a book on Foote’s plays in 2010 and editing a collection of essays on his works in 2016. Haynes also writes plays and fiction. In 2016, he received the SCMLA Poetry Award ($500) at the South Central Modern Language Association Conference In 2019, two collections of his poetry were published, Laredo Light (Cyberwit) and Let the Whales Escape (Finishing Line Press). His Latest collected works are Heidegger Looks at the Moon (Finishing Line Press 2022 ) The Deadly Shadow of the Wall (Finishing Line Press 2023) and forthcoming collection Old Temples in Moonlight (Finishing Line Press 2025)

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5 sonnets from the poetry of R.W.Haynes

by 
1]

The Knife and the Retreat

One awaits the knife, not that that
Is all that dramatic, cathartic, or just.
But anticipation can miss surprise in the dust
And there it pops up, wagging its hat.
And that’s the great crisis right then, of course,
That jolt of suddenly being unprepared
To cope with emotion one had never cared
To consider might land with unexpected force.
“I’d rather be a Stoic,” old Wordsworth might say,
His teeth clamping down on his old corncob pipe,
“Than be clotheslined to whimper and to gripe
While my sweet fantasies evaporate away.”
Now retreat and recover, live, do not die.
Be that imagined hermit, lonely by the Wye.


2]

The Cliffside Stroll

Her sonnets struggled along the cliffside path,
Shells and flowers tracking her aimless way,
As a dark spirit followed in shadows of the day,
And blue jays whispered, choking back their wrath.
But the bright sun vanquished in the blue sky,
And earthquakes held themselves in control
As she nibbled wafers and prayed for his soul
A little, and watched the hungry seagulls fly.
Below her, breakers gnashed at the rock,
And old prayers ascended upward as mere mist,
And memory quietly reft how they’d been
One sweet time, never to come again,
Since they’d looked at each other and kissed.
But now the jays can resume their clamor
And earthquakes swing their devastating hammer.


3]

Barks

So there is madness in exaggeration
And some cold, bold sanity, too.
Get unexcited by unthinking silence
Till the dogs start barking madly at you.
They know, these dogs, what’s in your mind.
They hear everything, and they’re not blind.
They smell all the aromas of violence
And long for the bite of imagination.
It is the bark of time that philosophy
Avoids waking us with to keep us free
From madness and unleashed disorientation,
One kind of wisdom, our mortal enemy.


4]

Last Conversation

Do we mix admiration and regret
For prudence managed half-heroically?
For half-blind pleasure felt half-painfully?
Ha ha, no paradise has come here yet,
Nor has a fatal drama played for us
With gestures, shouts, soliloquies,
Devastating recognitions—no, none of these
Has come, no, no bother, no fuss.
One turns away, right, when warning lights
Blink in the guts, and one’s breathtaking act
Of false control works to distract
Destructive impulse as it wildly fights.
And, O you craven philosophic Judas,
You let the grinning Fates come burn and loot us.


5]

The Quicksa-a-a-and of Laughter

One cannot keep writing sonnets.
			Tennessee Williams

The double-Debbie’s dud dude did
What he could and whenever he could
And sped sometimes up to no damn good,
And they all laughed hard wherever they hid,
Laughing like lobsters with haha like crows,
In musical moonlight uttering chuckles and snorts
And torrents of turbulent hilarious sports
In musical starlight until the sun rose.
“The operation of masks,” he nervously spoke,
“Is best done by women, whose all-wily wits
Confound men’s arguments and logical fits
Like music the mad game of mirror and smoke.
Get away, Cassandra!” he shrieked in agony.
“All right, brother—have you no faith in me?”

R. W. Haynes, Professor of English at Texas A&M International University, has published poetry in many journals in the United States and in other countries. As an academic scholar, he specializes in British Renaissance literature, and he has also taught extensively in such areas as medieval thought, Southern literature, classical poetry, and writing. Since 1992, he has offered regular graduate and undergraduate courses in Shakespeare, as well as seminars in Ibsen, Chaucer, Spenser, rhetoric, and other topics. In 2004, Haynes met Texas playwright/screenwriter Horton Foote and has since become a leading scholar of that author’s remarkable oeuvre, publishing a book on Foote’s plays in 2010 and editing a collection of essays on his works in 2016. Haynes also writes plays and fiction. In 2016, he received the SCMLA Poetry Award ($500) at the South Central Modern Language Association Conference In 2019, two collections of his poetry were published, Laredo Light (Cyberwit) and Let the Whales Escape (Finishing Line Press). His Latest collected works are Heidegger Looks at the Moon (Finishing Line Press 2022 ) The Deadly Shadow of the Wall (finishing Line Press 2023)

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