David Selzer

1046 posts

POETRY

THE DESERTED WAGON

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

It was county council green, wooden, with
metal-rimmed wheels and a curved roof
like a Roma caravan, and a triangular limber
for towing by clanking, ponderous steamrollers –
before petrol driven lorries took the road menders
to and fro in what, for a time, would have seemed
like no time at all. This one – abandoned pre-war –
was parked, throughout my childhood, on the verge
at a country cross roads.

It entered my dreams. I thought God worked there,
hunched in his robes above an operating table,
serious in his beard, bringing forth babies.

Whenever I approach that cross roads,
I remember the dream and being a child
and the image of God, though God
and childhood have long been abandoned.

 

 

 

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POETRY

SOMETHING LOST IN TRANSLATION

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.8K views

We are in the thronging, discordant food hall
at Euston Station, London, sipping
a latte and an americano from Caffé Ritazza,
taking the first bite of our Upper Crust bagettes –
mozzarella & tomato, pastrami & emmental –
while looking out for the disabled pigeon
that hops, scavenging, under the tables,
when we are approached, politely, gently,
by a bearded man with a shabby shoulder bag
from which he presents us with
an asymmetrically trimmed piece of paper
comprising a printed list, which appears
as if processed on an Amstrad PC:
‘I am a deaf mute.
I have no work.
I have a family to support.
Please help me, for the love of God.’
He also leaves a professionally produced
Romanian (we think) prayer card.
We notice he has disseminated the sheets
and the cards to all the tables
in our vicinity. He returns for the harvest.
Some give, most do not. We contribute more or less
the tithe of our meal. He takes his printed sheet,
leaves us the card, nodding his unsmiling thanks.
He moves on. The cacophony returns.

On the Virgin train to Crewe, we log-on.
‘Maica Domnului’, the prayer begins
– Romanian, ‘Mother of God’. (The giver
may be Roma, we think – informed judgement
or prejudice). It is, we deduce,
St Augustine’s intercessory prayer.
On the front of the card an icon
of the Virgin and Child is reproduced.
Mother and son are appropriately doleful.
She points to him, as if saying, ‘He is the one’.
Perhaps we have been conned. Maybe
our meek beggar has an apartment at Canary Wharf,
with those other cartoon characters,
The Masters of the Universe, and our modest gamble
will not have paid off. In English, as in Romanian,
‘charity’ and ‘justice’ are Latinate words. The British,
like the Roman Empire, kept the concepts distinct.
Interestingly, in Hebrew, one word encompasses both.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

OF CAT AND MOUSE

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2K views

We do not have a cat. Consequently,
the neighbours’ cats disport themselves on our
property – one in particular,
a black and white, besmirching the rhubarb,
sitting hopefully under the bird feeder,
alert to the blackbirds hurriedly eating
the ivy berries far above, or,
like its prey, perched on the bird bath, licking
the water. A quick study – I appear,
it scarpers – though, as yet, has not mastered
the concept of windows so is startled
when I lumber gruffily into view.

We had a field mouse, found making a nest,
chewing an eclectic collection of
plastic carrier bags – Waitrose, the Co-op,
Carrefours, Duty Free at O.R. Tambo –
in the garden shed. Discovered, it looked,
unsurprisingly, like the mouse that
intimidated The Gruffalo
and we thought of our grand daughter – so carefully
let the little mother-to-be escape
into the bushes beneath the garden wall
and thence back into the wilderness.
We did cat sentry-go till the rustlings stopped.

Two refugees, neither welcome, both
easily killed – one escorted gently
to the border, the other hounded daily.
What moral, sentimental beasts we are!
The piebald cat, out of reach on the fence,
eyes me quizzically, head fetchingly
to one side, and I feel pity and guilt.

A week later, the cat continuing, meanwhile,
its incursions, I find, on the path,
exactly half a mouse – head, torso, front feet
upright as if it were springing from the stones –
its claws, in death, like fists.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

FIGURES OF SPEECH

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.6K views

She is scooting on the South Bank, her four years
sailing without mishap through the crowds –
multi-national, multi-ethnic, mixed race
– like a skilled UN negotiator.
We stop – her choice – at the Galloper.
She rides sedately, grinning, on a painted
wooden horse. We stop again – our choice –
to watch an Australian with a travelled
face and lived-in voice reprise Houdini’s
cabinet trick. She is unimpressed
but enjoys the fifty metre sand pit
beyond the BFI. At the Tate,
she watches a brief video – over
and over – of Henri Matisse wielding
his draper’s scissors like a pen or brush.
(Later, she will cut us out of paper –
parents, grandparents, herself – and paint us
as cats). We leave for Chinatown and Dim Sum.

Dusk is settling in Trafalgar Square
as she eyes the forbidden pools. ‘Eng-er-lond,
Eng-er-lond,’ chant some youths from a lion’s plinth.
It is the World Cup’s first match at 10.00.
We cross to South Africa House where
a three piece band – drums, lead and bas guitar –
is playing ‘Money for Nothing’. She dances,
a Chinese tourist laughs and a rough sleeper
wakes from his pitch beneath a plane tree
and salutes us all with an empty bottle.

***

On holiday in Crete, à propos of
nothing, pleased with herself, she uttered
her first simile, ‘Sink like guitar.’
I think of that as we cross the river,
to return to our hotel near Waterloo,
and see the shimmering lights – and think of
Eliot’s ‘I had not thought death had undone
so many’ and Spenser’s ‘Sweet Thames, run softly
till I end my song!’ and feel the warmth of
love and mortality, the themes of
this harmonious day.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

MARJORIE BEEBE’S BOTTOM

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

For Ian Craine

‘Marjorie Beebe is the greatest comic possibility that ever worked in my studio. I think she is destined to become the finest comedienne the screen has ever seen.’ Mack Sennett

 

Her bottom was a serious matter:
the butt, as it were, of numerous pratfalls
in many Mack Sennett two reelers – like
The Chumps, Campus Crushes and The Cowcatcher’s
Daughter – in which she was a capricious,
lubricious Columbine with witty eyes
and good teeth and various Harlequins,
who ended invariably as losers.
From Kansas City, her mother took her
on the Yellow Brick Road to Tinsel Town.
Beebe and Sennett became lovers, despite
or because of the thirty year difference,
so he knew her asset first hand so to speak.
From silents to talkies, slapsticks to wise cracks,
her Mid West accent playing well, then Mack goes bust
and Marjorie gradually disappears.
Was it the booze? She was certainly
a toper. Or, more likely, The Hays Code:
irony suppressed, vulgarity outlawed,
Puritan America triumphant!

 

Note: The poem was first published on the site in June 2011.

 

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POETRY

ADRIFT

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K views

Where part of the back wall of the scena

of the Greco-Roman amphitheatre

has collapsed, we can see the sun setting

on Etna, its smoke drifting like a veil

over the sea. The town’s orchestra –

of mandolins, lutes, guitars, double bass –

with its plangent, sentimental, heart-

rending timbre plays the prelude to act one

of Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’…

 

We saw the opera at the Bolshoi –

with its gilt chairs and the Romanov box

with the hammer and the sickle above –

the month Vladimir Putin was first crowned.

When we left the theatre in the soft dusk

of May there was a babushka begging.

In the Lubyanka metro station,

a drunken man rolled down the escalator…

 

As Venus appears in the south east,

the orchestra plays encores – ‘Volare’,

‘Torna a Surriento’, ‘Ritorna-me’.

The audience, mostly local, largely

female, sways and hums, secure, for that moment,

in its campanilismo, thinking of amore…

 

Small boats are approaching, in the thickening

dark, from North Africa and the Levant,

chartered by men – vessels overladen with

women and children, craft whose landfall, whose

free fall will set tolling each and every

bell in the frantic campanile.

 

 

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