POETRY

POETRY

FEBRUARY BURNING

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read766 views

One Saturday in February we drove

from Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport

north up the valley of the Tiber

to Umbertide in Umbria,

a town bridging the river’s upper reaches,

and that had guarded the northern Marches

during the bloody and iconoclastic

turbulence of the Renaissance.

We passed Orvieto and Perugia.

The sun shone unseasonably unfettered,

emollient as a British day in late June.

Folk were sunbathing on the grassy banks

of the motorway service stations.

When we reached our hotel on the town’s outskirts

the air was soft as on a summer’s evening.

Next day, St Valentine’s, the cathedral’s bell

ringing for mattutino, the flat fields

of vines, where lovers and iconoclasts

might lie – between the curving river

and the long road south – were drowned in mists.

 

This month, that here always used to be bleak

and wet, has become a changeling. Years

after Umbertide, on another

Valentine’s, we sat on a council bench

beside the corniche in the lee of the Orme,

sunning ourselves like superannuated

terrapins. The uninhibited sun

burned through a haze of blushing coral

above Penmaenmawr over the bay.

Februarius from februum,

‘purification’ – perhaps like the heat

and the calm of love’s absolution.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

PARADISE MISLAID

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read351 views

Our favourite morning walk that first visit

was through Elounda’s old town, along the shore

past the restaurants – ‘Kalimera!’, ‘Yassas!’ –

close by the salt pans the Venetians made,

over the bridge across the French canal,

and beside the gulf towards the pebbly beach

at Vathi. Other than a woman in black

on a donkey – ‘Yassas!’, ‘Kalimera’ –

we would pass no one on the peninsula.

 

We would sit in the shade of an olive tree

on the edge of the beach. It was as if

the rest of Crete, apart from the narrow

littoral we could see around us, were

only shimmering mountains untouched – and sky

unsullied all the way to Africa.

 

On our next and final visit we stopped

before we reached the beach. We could see it

littered with blue plastic supermarket bags,

some faded, some pristine, shifting in the heat,

the olive tree stranded. Across the bay

was Elounda – on the supermarket’s roof

a sign in red neon.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE CHAIR

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read783 views

Most second hand books, in my experience,

except perhaps for a certain easement

in their binding, show no perceptible signs of

previous owners, and those that do offer

only glimpses of the lives of others –

a fatuous marginal note, a Madras

curry stain. Some, however, present

a mystery of sorts – for instance,

I have arrived at page 15 of an English

translation of José Saramago’s

short story, The Chair – in his collection

The Lives of Things – to find somebody

has been there before me. A page corner –

dreadful habit! – has been turned down or rather

up, since it is the bottom corner,

and so obscured some text. In addition

the page has been marked by the stub of a ticket

for the Pompidou Centre, Paris, France,

11.40, March 1st, 2014.

 

We are at the point in the story

where the woodworm has thoroughly done its job.

The chair finally collapses when

the old man, whose chair it is, sits on it

for what will be the last time. He begins

to fall, and, on the next page, will bang his head

on the floor, and thus begin his slow demise.

The story ends: ‘Let us go to the window.

What do you think of this month of September?

We have not had such weather in a long time’.

 

The tale, which is a sort of allegory,

and also a protracted joke, is about

the death of Oliveira Salazar,

Portugal’s dictator of more than

thirty five years.  Despite Saramago,

however, there are some who claim a deck chair

collapsed under the tyrants’ weight, others

that he slipped in the bath. The haemorrhage

that resulted from hitting his head

took nearly two years to kill him. He believed,

though he had been replaced by another

the September he hit the floor,

he was still in office. Power seems to be

an illusion encouraged by others.

 

For whatever reason the visitor

to Centre Pompidou that Saturday

will have learned none of this, not only

leaving this particular yarn unfinished

but the whole collection of which it is the first.

Possibly he or she was distracted

by the exhibition in Gallerie 3,

PAPARAZZI! – the power of illusion.

 

 

 

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POETRY

MOONLIGHT

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read628 views

The full moon, part hidden by a wispy cloud

tinged grey with spring rain, lights the walls of the mill

and a tree in leaf at the water’s edge.

An oil lamp has been lit in a small window.

The water wheel begins to turn. The millstones,

their grinding muffled, judder the earth.

The creamy race pours from the wheel back

into the river thickened by the rain,

which is already falling on moorland

and its abandoned, shattered, moonlit crofts.

 

On the opposite bank a young girl

looks up briefly. She is alone, kneeling

in the shadows above a shallow inlet.

Only her bonnet and smock catch the dim light,

and the small bundle she has placed before her.

The abundant waters tumble past.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

RAIN

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read689 views

Heavy rain flung against the window panes

wakes me in the dark. In the lull before

the next gust I hear your breath, a sound

I have known now for most of my life.

A spate of raindrops patters on the glass.

Faraway, on the kitchen windowsill,

are pots of bulbs – crocus and daffodil –

sprouting in the early morning gloom.

 

The sun will approach first via low, wet hills

cleft into valleys, then ancient salt pans, dew ponds,

and hedgerows tangled with blackthorn and dog rose.

And you might be awake, hearing my breath.

You are my talisman, my totem, muse,

scourge, sanctifier, love.

 

 

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POETRY

FOOL’S GOLD

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read685 views

Threatened in the wild, razed for firewood, its bark

once the repository of prayers,

this Himalayan birch – planted to screen us

from our neighbour’s blind back bedroom windows

or vice versa – has, almost overnight

it seems, in a tardy autumn, turned

from pastoral green to gold, the gilt

of palaces and of temples, a wind-

shivered, aureate filigree, tear-shaped,

that burnishes the heart. When leaves have gone

bricks and pebble-dash where nothing happens

will appear obscurely as if through fingers

spread wide to mitigate the sunlight.

A sliver of bark like a leaf of paper

will catch in the bamboo beneath the tree.

Maybe this year or next we will inscribe,

with the finest brush, the Sanskrit prayer:

‘May we never quarrel!’.

 

 

 

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