POETRY

POETRY

ETHEREAL

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read693 views

The Facebook algorithm tells me I have

memories to share with friends – and when I look

I see that one of them died four years ago.

She was always a meticulous person

but seems to have neglected to leave details

of what to do with her Facebook account.

Now LinkedIn is encouraging me

to congratulate a colleague – deceased

these nine years – on his work anniversary.

Social media is filling with dead souls

that pass across our screens like shooting stars.

 

Maybe these are deliberate memento

mori; if accidental, permitted

by heirs celebrating the departed’s

sense of the absurd – or a casualness

about our commonwealth, like space debris:

the flecks of paint off bits of satellites,

an astronaut’s toothbrush, a rocket

lost, junked in the heavens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

FAMOUS FOR POEMS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read603 views

For one week’s show-and-tell when my granddaughter

was seven she took in, unprompted,

the book I had dedicated to her.

She told her mother, “I told the teacher,

‘My grandpa was famous for poems.

He writes about everything in the world.’

But I don’t know why I said ‘was’.” Perhaps

she was rehearsing my obituary.

 

The teacher, keeping faith as the good will do,

sight-read the title poem, A JAR

OF STICKLEBACKS, to her multi-lingual,

multi-cultural class – a piece about shattered

glass, and spilt fish, and my grandpa rushing

to the rescue, which ends, ‘imagine me

holding up to the light, unbroken,

a jar with all your wishes, all your hopes’.

 

Note: see https://davidselzer.com/2013/01/a-jar-of-sticklebacks/ – the poem was first published by Armadillo Central – http://www.armadillocentral.com/armadillo-central/a-jar-of-sticklebacks-david-selzer.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE BANDSTAND

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read766 views

Beside the city’s river is a bandstand –

Victorian, octagonal in shape,

with eight delicate wrought iron columns –

redolent of summer Sunday afternoons,

and the poignant breathiness of brass bands.

Since the pandemic it has been silent,

and empty except for an occasional

escaped toddler pattering across its floor,

their brief glee echoing from its roof.

 

Someone is sleeping rough in the bandstand

in a red sleeping bag. Though it is late

morning he or she still seems asleep.

Probably the last they heard of the night,

before they slept, was the river’s soft passing.

Perhaps the distant siren is not for them.

 

 

 

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POETRY

FEBRUARY BURNING

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read887 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 read422 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 read936 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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