POETRY

POETRY

THE OLD LIME TREES AT ERDDIG

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment3 min read1.8K views

for Glyn Smith

 

When the meticulously landscaped gardens

were left to hazard, during the estate’s

long, reclusive neglect, some of the trees

in the two avenues either side

of the wide ornamental canal – whose

perspective frames the classical proportions

of the house – began to grow together

like errant, statuesque teeth. A couple

have been extracted to save the rest.

 

… Limes are almost indestructible – felled trunks

will sprout. Honey bees favour them. For aeons

they have been planted in rows for blessings,

and for battles – their bark used for basketry,

and rope. Their flowers mend the heart, and the soul…

 

Perched roisterously on topmost branches,

here, in autumn, are parliaments of rooks.

Against the sky, in winter, the trees

are wild filigree, black fretwork – in spring

flickering shade in the afternoon’s sun.

On summer evenings, after the park has closed,

dryads waltz amongst them.

 

 

The poem was inspired by the trees, their setting [https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/erddig] – and by an e conversation with Glyn Smith,  the current Head Gardener at Erddig. I sent Glyn the final draft of the poem for comment and asked if I might dedicate it to him.

He wrote:

I really appreciate your poem and thoughts to dedicate it to me. The only comment I might make is this one about time. I’m not the first head gardener, or gardener for all that, to work here and I’ll not be the last. Someone had the vision and had to plant the lime avenues, amongst other trees and flowers. Over the years there have been many others who contributed their sweat to the garden. On those lines I would like to modestly just be one of those dedicated artisan gardeners who made, developed and curate this garden. The limes stand as a testament to those generations of gardeners who over the years were watched over by them, by the limes themselves. In a way we were the children and the limes the parents and teachers in this school. What learning they must have witnessed and how proud they must be of our achievements.

I have been steadily looking at lime avenues on and off over the last few years and it would appear that our lime avenues are, historically, much more important than ever previously thought. Before c.1700 the only limes in this country were small leaved limes, Tilia cordata. A native species and less suited to the lime avenues we see. On the continent there were hybrid limes between T.cordate and T. platyphyllos and it was this hybrid lime that became so popular for avenues. Now called Tilia x europea it became particularly popular in northern Europe and there are now several slightly different forms of it that are broader, taller, or less or more covered in basal sucker shoots. Just walk in any estate where there are limes and you will quickly spot how densely some are shooted amongst their lower canopy branches.

As gardening spread, particularly the influence of French and Dutch gardening on British horticulture, so we saw introductions of this hybrid lime. It probably achieved its greatest influence around the end of the 17th Century and the great dutch influence of the Glorious Revolution and William 111. One of the more recent forms of lime to be introduced and possibly the most common, is Tilia x Europa ‘Pallida’ and our limes are of this. Perhaps it was best adapted to the wetter Dutch lands, and as such prospered best.

We usually see lime avenues planted across estates. It seems exceptionally rare that shorter avenues of trees were planted within walled gardens. That really makes our lime avenues virtually unique and they should be kept for as long as possible.

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

AT CHESTER CROSS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.8K views

I am standing near the loud evangelists

by the medieval sandstone cross that marks

the centre of this erstwhile Roman camp,

Castra Deva, base for two centuries

of the Twentieth, Valeria Victrix –

streets south and west to the Dee, east to forests

and the lush plain, north to sandstone outcrops.

 

The Presbyterian rhetoric

of Damnation and Sweet Jesus keeps

other spectators away, gives me

a clear view of the midsummer,

pagan parade – ‘I am the good shepherd:

the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep’ –

with its Hell’s Mouth on wheels, its samba band –

‘…he that is an hireling…whose own

the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming’ –

with its Romans, Vikings, giants, a dragon –

‘and fleeth: and the wolf scattereth the sheep’ –

with its Saint Werburgh, the city’s patron saint

(famed for resurrecting a goose)

and my three geese in white gowns following –

wife, daughter, granddaughter – but no sheep.

 

I move to a spec on one of the Rows,

unique first floor arcades, their origin

unknown but much admired by the Kaiser.

When I was at school in the city,

we would come to these Rows for a smoke,

our striped caps folded in our pockets.

Below was a tobacconist who sold

Cuban cigarettes in packets of 5.

How I would dream of the wide avenues

of a metropolis – of fame, romance

in its concert halls and libraries!

Directly opposite where I am waiting,

behind a Greek revival portico,

is a private club, its Masonic curtains

drawn. Here was the camp’s principia –

headquarters of the legion and the province.

If the Empire had continued to expand

not consolidate before collapsing –

despite Rome’s alarming geese – Deva

would have been Britannia’s capital.

 

The procession passes beneath me

in triumph – led by two street theatre

professionals, a husband and wife,

consummately engaging the crowds.

The evangelists are hectoring still,

threatening distantly, out of sight.

My geese are smiling still, cavorting,

even the littlest – earnest, seemingly

untiring – and my lucky heart fills with love.

All three are holding up their goosey standards

made by an artist – painted, sculpted

papier maché glued to frames of withies,

those lithe willow branches, slender, sturdy,

infinitely flexible, which have been used,

since antiquity, to keep safe ewes and lambs.

 

 

 

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POETRY

A NEW YORK TALE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read2.1K views

Though they lived for decades no more than a block

from each other in Greenwich Village – one

in Washington Square, the other Patchin Place –

there is no record they ever met,

Hopper the painter, Cummings the poet.

 

They would have thought that they had nothing

in common – the real, the lyrical.

But, hey, what do geniuses know?

 

They may have passed each other on some sidewalk,

on Sixth Avenue or Bleecker Street,

or in the subway on 9th, or eaten,

unaware, in the Grand Central Oyster Bar.

Though for different reasons, they would have

admired the colour co-ordination

of the pink elastic bands which restrain

the claws of the live lobsters brought to tables

on metal platters for diners to select.

 

***

 

In ‘Automat’ a pretty young woman

in a beige cloche hat and a dark green

fur trimmed coat sits alone. Behind her

the two rows of the vast automat’s

overhead lights are bleak in the night-filled

plate glass window. Her silk stockinged legs

are crossed beneath the table.  Her dress –

which we can glimpse through her open coat – is tan.

She has removed the black glove from her right hand

to eat whatever was on the small plate

in front of her and to drink her coffee.

 

Maybe she is thinking about the poem

her lover read to her this afternoon:

‘somewhere i have never travelled…your eyes

have their silence… your slightest look easily

will unclose me…nobody, not even

the rain, has such small hands.’

 

 

 

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POETRY

LEVITICUS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

As we travelled back from a London weekend

in the Quiet Zone on the afternoon express

three very young, head scarved mothers nursed

their newborns and chattered softly all the way.

At Chester they headed for the North Wales train.

 

Not far from the Great Orme Tramway Station,

Church Walks, Llandudno, and near St Georges,

is a three storey detached house whose ground floor

has been a synagogue for a century

and more. Lubavitch rabbis officiate.

Above the shul, to facilitate

a minyan, are holiday apartments.

 

In summer months there are pop-up kosher shops

and activities. Families stroll along

the promenade – the men, black suited,

with trimmed or untrimmed beards, fedoras

or keppels, some with earlocks – past the strident

evangelicals by the bandstand.

 

What would the Lubavitcher Rebbes –

during their century of solitude

in the shetl among the darkening forests

and the gorging marshes of Belarus,

who only knew of oceans from God’s words –

have made of Jews, their Jews, sauntering

beneath the sun and beside the sea no less,

safely and kosherly among the goyim!

 

Somewhere among the streets below the Orme

is the six week post-partum retreat

the new mothers were travelling to

with their unknown futures.

 

 

 

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POETRY

RESURRECTION

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

Our house, the street’s first, was built epochs ago

on Cheshire pastureland. There has been nothing

for history to note here – only births, deaths,

the occasional fire and break-in,

and marriages at the Methodist Church

almost opposite us. Empires collapsed

from within – Austro-Hungarian,

British, French, German, Ottoman, Russian,

and Soviet. Here only the seasons came,

and bed-sits, then gentrification.

 

Now the St Petersburg Resurrection

A Cappella Choir – founded post-Gorbachev

to sing the liturgy in concert halls –

performs this autumn night in the church feet

from our front door. So powerful is this octet

the first three rows are kept entirely empty.

The utilitarian space fills with that

Russian Orthodox polyphony

guaranteed to make even an infidel’s

neck hairs tingle – plangent, sonorant, soulful.

I think of Tolstoy’s novel ‘Resurrection’,

his last – the hypocrisy of suppression,

the injustices of poverty,

the long path to redemption through cold, dull wastes.

 

During the interval, like a scene

from some implausible cold war movie

three Russian men in DJs – the two basses

and the conductor/founder of the choir

quietly, almost surreptiously, leave

the building, and go into the shadows

of the small, bushy garden. Matches flare.

Three cigarette ends glow.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

A DEATH IN GASCONY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read2K views

We flew late, on the year’s busiest Friday,

to Toulouse. As we drove in the hire car

through Haut-Garonne and Midi-Pyrénées

into Gascony, its rolling hills green

with August’s growth, the sun was setting –

the burgeoning fields of sunflowers paused, bats

swooped before the car like twilit angels.

 

As we topped each rise we could see the glow

fade in the west above the Bay of Biscay.

We arrived in darkness at the pension.

The patronne gave us supper on the terrace –

her bread, pâté, tomatoes, a local cheese.

A cascade of shooting stars fell in the north.

We toasted ill winds and silver linings.

 

We woke to an ass braying, a cock crowing,

and a bell tolling for early Mass.

We drove to the city of Auch, Coeur

de Gascogne. The crematorium was new

– floor to ceiling windows, light wood benches.

The deceased, it was said, had chosen Holst’s

‘Venus: The Bringer of Peace’ on his death bed.

 

The wake was in a bar on the square

in a small, erstwhile market town in sight

of the Pyrenees, its highest peaks snow capped.

The mourners were mostly English, settled

in renovated, abandoned farm houses.

Each of us had some ill fitting jigsaw piece

of his life: an exile, a fugitive?

 

There had been a week of summer events

in the square with its defiant poilu.

The festivities ended the next day

with a dance in the commune’s echoing

La Salle Des Fêtes. An accordion played.

Old couples with dyed hair, some singing softly,

fox trotted slowly to ‘La Vie En Rose’.

 

 

 

 

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