POETRY

POETRY

THE SOLITARY ANGLER

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K views

The fog bell sounds every thirty seconds.
A shag bobs in the swell by the lighthouse
painted black and white with the legend
‘No Passage Landwards’ on its east and west sides.
An occasional heavy wave thumps the beach.

I climb the high bank of sea-smoothed pebbles
from the landward side and hear and feel them
chafe and slip. At the seaward foot of the mound –
a petrified wave three times my height –
an angler stands, motionless, his rod propped
on a tripod, the line taut in the tide.
And the bell sounds twice every minute.

On the island, a quarter mile away,
are cormorant, guillemot, razorbill.
On the horizon, tankers are waiting
to berth at Holyhead on the high tide.

He is watching the line, I presume,
ready for the slightest twitch to pull in
whatever it is his optimism
has prepared him for. The island has housed
a monastery, a sanctuary,
a telegraph station – now elder thrives
and puffins flourish on Puffin Island
or Priestholm or Ynys Seriol.
Every half minute, the lighthouse bell sounds.

I have my own fish to catch. This place,
whatever the weathers, inspires, inspires:
it is the end of land and the sea’s start,
under a sky always open, immense
but its compass points known beneath rocks
unchanged, a fifty year pilgrimage.

He is still watching the line when I leave
climbing the steep bank of worked pebbles.
And the bell sounds, and sounds…

 

 

 

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POETRY

SPRING, AFON MENAI

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.5K views

High waters from each end of the straits
meet here in whirlpools, in vortices
of current and spume – that at their highest
cover the island, which weathers each maelstrom,
and flood its improbable cottages.

***

A little inland along a banked lane,
lambing ewes are in a field. There are
a dozen or so, some birthing, some with young.
We look over the bank, startle a ewe,
intrigue her offspring. Mother moves off,
child follows. The grass is cropped, springy.
The recent storms have felled an oak that lightning
had blackened and eviscerated years ago.
Waters rush through culverts beneath the lane.

***

The tides ebb. On the island, no one now
uses the fish traps the drowned cottages
were built for. Codlings, dogfish, sea bass
swim freely, oblivious of chance.

 

 

 

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POETRY

MONKS’ MOUND, CAHOKIA, ILLINOIS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.5K views

The river valleys – Missouri, Ohio,
Illinois, Mississippi – are thronged
with prehistoric earthen mounds. Monks’ Mound
was lived on briefly by Trappists, hence
its English soubriquet. The city
of Cahokia – the name means ‘Wild Geese’ –
was six miles square, had more than eighty mounds.
At its thirteenth century zenith,
it was as populous as any city
in the then contemporary Europe.

The Trinculos and Stephanos came:
mockers and con men – drunken, violent,
slaughtering bison, fencing the prairie –
satraps of Washington and the railways,
converting, through alcohol, to the true faith
of dependence and destitution,
those whom they determined were Caliban.

Monk’s Mound is one hundred feet high. Westwards,
beyond the black slums of East St Louis,
over the river, on the waterfront,
is St Louis’s Gateway Arch – six hundred
and thirty stainless steel feet to celebrate
the final subjugation of the land.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

RANDOMNESS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K views

As we walk on the path by the Dee, glad
a low wall keeps us from the river in spate,
its white waters covering the flat rocks
that stretch half across the river’s breadth,
waters whose unvarying roar fills the town,
we see, coming downstream from Chain Bridge,
bounced erratically by the relentless
torrent, a child’s ball, plastic, red, bright as new.

Later, as we cross the bridge to climb the hill
to the Llangollen Wharf Tea Room for
a welsh rarebit with smoky bacon,
having assumed the ball would already
have left Wales, we see it, once more, caught
in eddies made by one of the buttresses
of an arch and the smooth rock it is built on.

As we re-cross the bridge, after we have
walked off the rarebit along the canal,
we see the ball again, stranded on the rock,
and hope a child in Bala or Corwen
has another now – plenty of time
to learn about physics.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

SOME RISE BY SIN, AND SOME BY VIRTUE FALL

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2.1K views

MEASURE FOR MEASURE AND THE THIRD MAN –
TALES FROM THE SEWERS OF VIENNA

SOME RISE BY SIN, SOME BY VIRTUE FALL

 

Says Mr. Popescu – about Anna,
or Isabella – ‘She ought to go careful
in Vienna. Everybody
ought to go careful in this city.’ ‘Even,’
adds Lucio, ‘the fantastical
duke of dark corners.’ Tyranny has scope
in the paradox between nature and art.

The movie is shown, three days a week, on a loop
at the Burg Kino on Opernring. In the play,
Vienna, under the Duke, is depraved –
brothels abound, citizens, unleashed,
give the finger to laws as well as morals
but, in the dénouement, the Duke confounds
the dissemblers and offers Isabella
marriage. We never know if she accepts.

Beneath the statue of Franz Josef,
Dr. Winkle, Baron Kurtz and a third man
exploit victims of dissembling: children
who die needlessly, always elsewhere, always
bemused with pain. In the late Emperor’s
sewers, Harry Lime lives! The truthful poets are
excluded from ideal republics or
dukedoms. ‘Hence,’ says the Duke, ‘shall we see if
power change purpose, what our seemers be…’
So, Holly Martins, a successful writer
of Westerns, outguns his high school friend.

In the cemetery’s main avenue
of pollarded trees – which shed their leaves, art,
of course, confounding nature – Holly waits,
the handle of his hold-all in his right hand,
as Anna walks towards him and the zither
sounds. She passes by, unseeing.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ONE FOR SORROW

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.1K views

Piero della Francesca’s painting
La Natività (oil on poplar panel),
hangs in London’s National Gallery,
‘acquired’ in 1874
after a botched restoration and being
slightly singed by an altar candle.

Top left is a winding Tuscan valley,
top right the artist’s home town, Sansepolcro,
more than half a millennium ago;
in the foreground, the infant Christ on a rug,
his mother kneeling, praying, beatific;
behind are five bare-footed angels, two
with lutes, two singing, one thoughtful, as is
Joseph, seated and looking away from
mother and son, with two shepherds beside him.
Possibly the third has been delayed –
as have the Magi consulting Herod.
One shepherd points to heaven or the roof,
with its weeds and holes, of the lean-to
beneath which a donkey is braying
and an ox peers at the baby – and on which
a silent, solitary magpie perches.

As the British advanced through Italy,
Sansepolcro was saved from bombardment
by a well read artillery captain
defying orders to protect the painter’s
La Resurrezione in the duomo.
The risen Christ – melancholy, determined,
posed to show the stigmata – holds a flag
with a red cross. Beneath him are four soldiers,
asleep – exhausted after a battle
in one of Tuscany’s continual,
dynastic wars perhaps. Two are sprawled
against the tomb – the clean shaven one
reputedly Piero.

 

 

 

 

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