David Selzer

SEASONAL GREETINGS

By David SelzerAugust 28, 20100 Comments1 min read1.5K views

GUBBIO, WINTER 1992

Where the tourist buses turned, the Werhmacht

had murdered partisans – La Piazza

di Martiri Quaranti. The cold from the hill –

old, old rock – rose from the cathedral’s floor

into our very soles. Outside, February seemed mild,

seasoned with wood smoke. We bought a hand thrown,

hand painted jar with an ill fitting lid.

Since then: earthquakes, marriages…

GUILDFORD, SPRING 1998

Beneath the new Dillons in Guildford,

a mediaeval chamber, disclosed

during the refurbishment,

had been preserved.

Some archaeologists claimed

it was built as a synagogue:

others denied it.

Dillons’ MD was a Jew

the local paper informed us.

The peoples of the book misread each other.

THE CAPTAIN TILLY MEMORIAL PARK, QUEENS, SUMMER 2001

The Goose Pond was green with insecticide:

the West Nile mosquito threatened.

Named for the scion of a local family –

mutilated by Filipino freedom fighters

a century before – the Park was playground

for the replacements of the ‘teeming masses’:

Hispanics, Afro-Caribbeans, Asians.

From Memorial Hill, you could see the Twin Towers.

HOOLE, AUTUMN 2009

Two aging lovers, best friends in all the world,

orphaned late in life, walked circuits of the park

for their hearts; smiled at mums pushing buggies, scowled

at druggies near the gate; talked of ghosts and hope –

and jokes: ‘What’s this fly doing?’ ‘Waving, waving!’

Old lovers count their blessings, side by side.

Pages:

VIRTUTIS FORTUNA COMES

By David SelzerAugust 28, 20100 Comments1 min read1.8K views

Lasting longer than the Thirty Years War,

than half our biblical shelf life, this marriage

has grown like coral – drops of the slain

Medusa’s blood – become, like Corallium

Nobile, a charm against fits, poison,

sorcery, whirlwind, lightning, fire, shipwreck!

From Norway’s fjords to the Cape Verde isles,

the Niger’s delta to the Orinoco’s,

reefs build, decline: the slow massing of

defunct algae, discarded oyster shells, lost

sailors’ bones; the unmarked ebb and flow

of topless towers, clayey tenements.

So, let’s celebrate chance, charity, courage –

Fortune’s inexorable comrades.

Pages:

INTIMATIONS

By David SelzerAugust 28, 20100 Comments1 min read1.5K views

This house is sentient, light with rapture,

replete with canny, familiar ghosts.

This house has been indifferent

to vicissitudes of human fortune:

train wreck and famine, siege and tsunami.

The grounds have diminished. From the residue,

you have made an L-shaped paradise:

rhododendron, camellia, nasturtium,

eucalyptus – a global gazetteer.

On some summer nights, the pomaded air

heavy still with heat, there is a moment,

ecstatic, brief, when we will live forever.

Pages:

BEARINGS

By David SelzerJuly 31, 20101 Comment1 min read2.4K views

They lie after loving in a shuttered room,

lit with an underwater vagueness,

replete with jasmine. They hear but

do not listen to the hoopoe calling

in the almond tree or the goats clinking

softly in the olive grove. They no longer

even hear the roar of the cicadas.

She lies in his arms. They sink into sleep,

lovers drowsing in a perfumed sea.

The spate plucks willows weeping from the banks

and careers them swirling, whether or not,

to waltz downstream with honeysuckle stems,

a bloated lamb. Do we change course, with charts

and signals, once, inexorably? Or

do we drift at wind’s and swell’s mercy,

unremarked and far into the night?

A lamp flickers. The mainland is mauve,

precipitous, its valleys covert, profound.

A flute moans in olive groves. Brief insects

chafe the night air. Behind them, waves

from Africa rush to shore. They have steered

for open seas yet homed on the past.

They will skirt the swamp. Upstream, where the river

is jade, beneath the invisible nets

swifts weave, on a low hill, are fate’s stone doors.

Priests and their chicanery resurrect

numberless tribes of the dead: old men and brides,

lovers and generals. The future

waits like an assassin.

Pages:

1 Comment

PERSPECTIVES

By David SelzerJuly 31, 20100 Comments1 min read1.5K views

From the long window on the half landing, I saw,

almost as soon as you had filled the small bird feeders

under the pine and come inside, the big beasts land

to eat the scattered seeds – three wood pigeons, two turtle doves

and a solitary magpie – then a cat appear, the birds scramble

and you again, shooing.

From where the hawk stoops, I heard the magpie’s

irrelevant chatterings, saw a tableau of live flesh;

saw our Victorian suburb from where the airplane flies –

heard nothing above the thrumming of the engines;

from beyond the stratosphere, saw somewhere

still not yet silenced by the enveloping yellow

of the Sahara or the Arctic’s melting blue.

From the long window, I heard the next track begin –

late Billie Holiday, ‘Dancing Cheek to Cheek’ –

heard her miss the key change yet again, promised myself

never to play it yet again.

Pages:

ARE WE NEARLY THERE?

By David SelzerJuly 31, 20103 Comments1 min read2.6K views

The tide is at its ebb. Late sun quick-silvers

the narrowed estuary, where river and sea

conflict and oyster catchers race upstream.

An ice cream van’s jingle jangle sounds

across the almost empty sands. ‘O sole

mio’… And you are suddenly there –

aged three – digging with purpose into the dusk.

Your daughter – that longed for, longed for joy –

already strives unprompted towards the sun,

scrabbling beyond the bounds of her play mat!

‘…n’aria serena doppo na tempesta!…’

How calm you are, how fulfilled with love!

As we leave the shore for home, mute swans

fly west – their thrilling wing beats song enough.

Somewhere before us, echoing through the streets,

the ice cream van calls: ‘O sole, sole mio.’

Pages: