David Selzer

1046 posts

POETRY

A NEIGHBOURHOOD OF STRANGERS

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

Buzzards splayed their wingtips against the sun.

A Phantom entered the glacial valley,

its fuselage burning – the pilot

and crewman still at the controls, their choice made.

In school, it was story time – magical

oak woods, changelings secreted. The children

heard a rushing like oceans. Their teacher

saw the fire approach and two young men,

with a hundred years of technology,

burst upon the huddled village’s

common land…Children dreamt of foreign men

gone to dust in a golden fire for a

neighbourhood of strangers.

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POETRY

FIRST DATE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.4K views

Walking behind you – your chignon, your tanned

forearms, your calves, your white, pleated skirt

swaying,  just the suggestion of that

bottom – into a sunlit pub on

Wenlock Edge for gin and orange and a pint;

 

watching Macbeth through inexorable

drizzle in a Shropshire market town –

‘It will be rain tonight’. ‘Let it come down’;

 

drying off in another pub, hearing

someone recite Housman loudly:

‘When smoke stood up from Ludlow…;’

 

driving home, your sleeping head on my shoulder,

your future already in my hands – nearly

two generations ago.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

LA PIETÀ

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views
St Peter's Square, Bernini's colonnades, The Basilica 1910
St Peter's Square, Bernini's colonnades, The Basilica 1910
Bernini’s colonnades lead to the centre

of the known world – of hewn porphyry,

of granite kept in its place, of usury.

Irony turns each illuminated page,

celebrates the dissemination

of the word, funds the seeding of Europe

beyond oceans, in jungle, across pampas,

over sierra.  Only the clash of

vultures and the seas’ predictable tides

can erase carrion from argent sands.

How light the Saviour is! The Virgin seems

to hold him with such ambivalent ease:

a supplicant offering a sacrifice,

a rescuer carrying a corpse.

Michelangelo's Pieta, St Peter's Basilica
Michelangelo's Pietà, St Peter's Basilica
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POETRY

THE HEART’S TESTIMONY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.9K views

I am a gumshoe tailing mortality,

a shammus staking out history,

death’s sleuth. The past has bequeathed itself,

its deceiving legacy of meanings.

Here is the evidence, thronging the cramped,

provincial streets – the line of a wall,

family remembrance, an ancient name.

Before terraces and villas, before

canal and railway, under pavements

and metalled roads, beneath fields is lost heathland,

a forsaken brook. There are only stones

and ghosts and the heart’s testimony – childhood,

ambition, emptiness.

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POETRY

FAR ABOVE RUBIES

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read3K views

The silence woke her. Beyond the locked door

by now her maids should be chattering

in that harsh tongue. She went to the window.

Even the gulls on the battlements were mute.

And no guards on the ramparts, nobody

in the bailey. The straits were the colour

of the emerald at her neck – her father’s

wedding gift. A barque moved edgily

through the sands. Its pennants spoke of home.

The island’s coast was clear in the sun.

She imagined the light summer wind

stirring its fecund, strategic fields.

Her door was unlocked, opened and flung wide.

The Prince held a red cloth. “Cover your eyes.”

As she tied the cloth in place, he said,

“‘Who can find a virtuous woman?”

He put his hand in the small of her back,

steering her from her chamber into his,

impelling her to the window. She felt

the gentle air from the valley, inhaled

the woods and the river. He pulled the cloth

hard from her head.  Eyes shocked wide in death,

her lover hung from a gibbet. She watched

the body move this way, that way; listened

to the rope creak; turned to her husband.

“Until I die, I shall count the years

I will have loved him as a benison.”

 

 

Note: this piece has been subsequently published in ‘A Jar of Sticklebacks’ – http://www.armadillocentral.com/general/a-jar-of-sticklebacks-by-david-selzer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE SAME SHARED GROUND

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2K views
Dee Estuary from Gayton Sands. © Sylvia Selzer 2009.


Larks and herons rise from the same shared ground –

a salt-marsh sprinkled with scurvy grass

like early snow. A navigable channel

is impossibly distant, far-off as

childhood’s spring tides. Silt obscured endeavour.

Sailors and milkmaids and priests lie low

as the worked-out coal seams. Glaciers made this –

ice miles, thick as centuries, combing valleys,

teasing out hills, a slow explosion

of seas. I imagine, back in Europe’s

reticular forests, a homely,

mackerel sky caught in another’s vision –

ancient weathers, sand settling in a pool,

pebbles jarred momentarily, the shape

and sense of time.

 

Towing the continent,

hulks sailed west. Only fulmars passed. The past

stretches like a landscape from this instant,

encompassing it. The oneness of things,

their disparateness I taste like blood:

the jest at the heart – being here and now

who could so easily have been elsewhere

or no one. Oblivious of ironies,

soarers and coasters cohabit. The ice

was deep as mountains. I am shrouded in

imagining’s ponderous white oceans.

 

 

 

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