POETRY

POETRY

ONLY ONE IN STEP

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

 

 

 

 

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

 

 

 

 

 

i

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is

somehow very ‘Thirties: lots of chaps in

the dark behind high walls; much shadow-play

with unidentifiable voices;

belated, blinding suddenness of light.

The decade’s putative worthies (who all,

by the way, seem to have been chaps) go forth

unknowingly in parallel: e.g.

Hitler in Berchtesgarten, Wittgenstein

(Adolf’s erstwhile peer from Linz) in Cambridge.

Did Wittgenstein walk with Blunt, Philby,

Burgess and Maclean as the fifth man?

Meanwhile, elsewhere at Trinity College

A.E. Housman tutored Enoch Powell: two

classicist lads from the West Midlands – and

the land of lost and wistful laddishness.

 

Our Enoch giving chase

ii

Our Enoch  – the wife’s second cousin twice

removed – although he always acted the

philosopher-king, indeed believed it,

in Parliament, in uniform, in the

groves of academe – appeared to labour,

tormented, in the dark, poor soul. Always

a solitary, he was chained to the

metaphysics of empire, protocol

and tribe: from the ‘Rivers of blood’ to ‘No

Surrender!’, preferring voluntary

exile to certain public failure. Yet,

see how, the fluent theme has become a

continuo – ‘influx’, ‘deluge’, ‘flood’, how

his acolytes have grown, like dragon’s teeth,

loquacious prisoners in Powell’s teeming,

booming cave of phantasmagoria.

 

 

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POETRY

MARJORIE BEEBE’S BOTTOM

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2.5K 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

 

Marjorie Beebe in 'The Farmer's Daughter' 1928

 

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!

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POETRY

TRIGGER AT THE ADELPHI, LIVERPOOL, MARCH, 1954

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

For Alex Cox

 

This is the year Dien Bien Phu falls,

Algeria rises, segregation is

ruled illegal in the USA,

the first kidney is transplanted and UK

wartime food rationing finally ends.

 

Lime Street was filled with thousands of boys and girls,

gathered to greet the singing, celluloid,

Born Again cowpoke, Roy Rogers (erstwhile

Leonard Slye), and his entourage – combining

a promo tour with a Billy Graham

crusade. The youngsters, pinched with cold on that

blitzed and windy street, clutched their copies

of the Roy Rogers Cowboy Annual.

Those with seafaring dads – and there were ships

filling the Mersey then and its docks –

had something from the Sears catalogue

of Roy Rogers Gifts: boots, guitar, holster,

ersatz buckskin fringed shirt. (Roy and his wife, Dale,

had been mobbed in London, fringes ripped from

the genuine article). But Roy and Dale

were in bed with ‘flu in their Adelphi suite –

so Trigger trotted the route alone,

climbed the hotel steps, made his mark at

reception, entered the residents’ lounge,

visited his master’s bedroom and appeared

at a first floor window for a photo op.

 

But was it Trigger or, his double,

Little Trigger? And which rears on its hind legs

stuffed in the Roy Rogers Museum,

Branson, Missouri, the ‘Show Me’ state’?

Or is either or both with Roy and Dale –

and Bullet, the dog, of course – alive, well and

moseying along on the moon’s dark side?

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POETRY

WISHES

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

For Evelyn b. 13 1.10

 

Born to good music by strong women,

Ella’s ‘isle of joy’, Nina’s ’it’s a new dawn’ –

how you nestle in your parents’ untrammelled

love, how you suck with unrelenting hunger!

 

Born into a world of rubble, with children

buried alive, a world of chicanery

and hatreds – you have entered a difficult

place, little Evie, somewhere remarkable,

full of tears and amazing kindnesses!

 

Born into a world of snow, a fox’s

nocturnal tracks in the white garden

of the tall, Victorian villa, a Blackcap

at the bird feeder, a Redwing sheltering

in the laurel and, away on the Downs,

boys and girls, freed from school, tobogganing

over the fossils and flints on the steep shore

of a palaeolithic sea – how you squirm

with hunger, how you bask in so much love!

 

Three wishes then for you, little bird:

may you be lucky, may you be gracious,

may you always have someone to love!

 

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POETRY

SAPPHIRE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.8K views

We came here first maybe fifty years ago –

Porth Trecastell aka Cable Bay

(on Ynys Môn aka Anglesey) –

a small Iron Age hill fort on one headland,

a Neolithic grave on the other,

and a telephone cable to Ireland

in between. This bank holiday the bay

is busy – paddlers, bathers, canoeists.

 

In the gated burial chamber –

Barclodiad y Gawres, which translates,

‘the full apron of the giantess’ –

its prehistoric graffiti secured

against vandals, a pair of swallows

has nested. We can hear the nestlings.

Seeing us, the parents, beaks replete

with insects, perch on the outer gate,

waiting patiently for the lubberly,

flightless giants – one with a movable eye

that shafts like lightning – to depart.

When we do, they fly past, a steel-blue flash,

an iridescence, into the dark tomb.

 

From the dolmen’s entrance, on the horizon

is Holyhead Mountain. If the earth were flat,

we could see to Ireland – where the weathers

and the myths are made. In sunlight as sharp as

wings, the sea is so many shades of blue:

cerulean, aquamarine, cobalt,

amethyst, turquoise – and sapphire,

a token of all our married years.

 

 

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POETRY

PRIMATES

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.7K views

The Cape Point funicular stops. A baboon

is squatting on the track, suckling its young.

Cameras click. We wait. Mother and child lope off

into the fynbos and the proteas.

We trundle down to the visitors’ centre.

 

On a path by the electrified fence

beneath the restaurant terrace, a baboon stalks.

Much further below and beyond is False Bay.

A distant whale breaches, and another –

then a destroyer passes, sailing

from Simons Town for the Southern Ocean.

 

Towards closing time the whole troop gathers

on a knoll above the perimeter fence,

the dominant male at the centre.

They wait. Meanwhile, he copulates twice.

 

There must be gaps in the fence. A young male,

bleeding, clutching packets of sugar,

is chased from the coffee shop, his pursuer

with a padded stick. Suddenly, the big male

is among us with the speed of a sprinter.

He knocks a young woman down, grabs her coke

and crisps, disappears. We are powerless.

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