POETRY

POETRY

THE BOURBAKI PANORAMA

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.6K views

Lenin, to leaven his exile in Zurich,

would sometimes weekend in Luzern and,

after kalberwurst with onions and gravy

at the Wilden-Mann on Bahnhofstrasse,

would always visit the Panorama

in the Löwenplatz – or so it is said.

 

Panoramas were popular before

the illusion of photography,

still or moving, became reality.

They were cycloramas painted in oil,

typically fifteen metres high, one hundred

metres in circumference – often

with a three dimensional aspect:

in this case, for example, an empty

railway wagon – Huit chevaux, Quarantes hommes.

 

General Bourbaki’s beaten L’Armée de L’Est

in Bismarck’s Franco-Prussian War

sought asylum with the nascent Red Cross

of the now united cantons. In deep snow

eighty seven thousand men, twelve thousand

horses crossed the border that January.

 

An escapee from a school trip to the town

in the year of Hungary and Suez,

I wandered in by chance. The custodian

that day knew no English. My schoolboy French

struggled with his German-accent. But

I still remember the images

of the aftermath of some great battle

my history lessons had not mentioned.

 

Imagine if Lenin had learned from this –

the stumbling soldiers; the dead horses; the piles

of discarded, expensive rifles;

the woman with her basket waiting to help

whoever it might be lying in the cold.

 

He certainly learned from the railways.

Disguised as a worker, he returned

to Russia via the Finland Station.

But maybe he also learned from William Tell –

marksman and anti-imperialist –

or, rather, the apple.

 

 

Note: The piece was first published as LENIN AND THE BOURBAKI PANORAMA on the site in July 2016.

 

 

 

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POETRY

CODA

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

In a black cab on our way to the ballet –

‘The Red Shoes’ at Sadler’s Wells – we passed

the munificence of St Pancras Station

that dominates the six lane highway

and then the removed magnificence

of King’s Cross set far back from the road,

and I was reminded of some of Moscow’s

imitative terminals, and I thought

how a railway terminus is like

a proscenium arch and the track

inevitable like a plot unfolding.

Terminus was the god of boundaries,

the guarantor of happy ends, as it were.

And Moscow’s land locked dénouements came to mind:

Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev, Ekaterinburg.

 

For islanders the world supra mare

is almost abstract, fictive, the notion

that the end of land might be days away

impossible to contemplate – like

the stage gone dark, the dancing stopped.

 

 

 

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POETRY

AMONG THE RUSSIANS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

A week before Easter our Cyprus hotel

hosted the season’s last two conferences –

‘Moscow Niardmedic’, ‘Nestlé in Russia’.

The spacious, tiled, white walled lounge, the free bars,

the terraces with pergolas were filled

with Big Pharma salespersons on a jolly –

the many ethnicities of Russia,

all seemingly impassive, inscrutable,

seemingly suspicious of strangers.

 

April 3rd on the St Petersburg metro

a bomb was detonated between stations…

April 7th the US Sixth Fleet,

below the horizon due south from here,

launched its missiles against Syria…

That afternoon an Uzbek exile

drove a lorry at a crowd in Stockholm…

 

One evening, in the resident pianist’s break,

a Russian improvised – then played a slow,

soft melody all his compatriots knew.

They sang sotto voce, suffusing the space

with a wistful murmur.

 

 

 

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POETRY

WITH THE EYES OF THE SUN

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read1.9K views

For Erika Ricci and Anna Lisa Rosetti

 

i

 

”I am not dumb now,” was Helen Keller’s proud,

challenging statement of fact. Those who can

see, she said, should be “knights of the blind”.

 

ii

 

From the horsemen of the Apocalypse

to the breaking, millennia ago,

of wild horses on the western steppes

beyond Volga-Matushka – Mother Volga –

these beasts are both utility and symbol.

 

In the Aber Valley, where the Afon Goch –

the Red River – falls precipitously

and the princes of Gwynedd rode and hunted,

there have been feral ponies for centuries,

grazing by the river, under the alders,

unmolested. Last year’s snows culled many.

 

In Ireland, where the horse was revered in myth,

the companion of kings and goddesses,

there are thousands abandoned. In Dublin,

on a cut-off estate – workless, drug-peddled –

a man ran over a horse with a quad bike

repeatedly, and others beat it with planks.

 

iii

 

We visited the Palazzo dei Duchi –

near to the site of the town’s small ghetto –

by the Catania Gate, Taormina,

Sicily, once a medieval palace  built by

Spanish nobles, knights of the inquisition,

now the municipal art gallery.

And, by chance, we encountered a tale

of beasts made beautiful, the lost found.

 

Twenty nine paintings hung in the gallery:

an exhibition – that toured Milan,

Rimini, Terra del Sole and Forli –

to celebrate human diversity

and the curative power of horses.

It was inspired by a horse called King,

an Arabian gelding blinded

by corrosive chemicals –

il cavallo daglie occhi di sole,

the horse with the eyes of the sun.

His affliction, his strength, his compliance

rescued a young woman, an addict,

from her darkened, silenced wilderness.

 

 

 

Note: The Horse With The Eyes Of The Sun http://www.kingilcavallodagliocchidisole.it/king.html

 

 

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POETRY

THE CIRCUS HORSE

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

… inflated, a fiver, Made in Spain, bought

with candy floss and a fluorescent snake;

harness, saddle, accoutrements in red

and gold with tassels; caparisoned as if

for the Spanish Riding School in Vienna

or the corrida; forever prancing

with a winsome, vulnerable chestnut eye

but, though deflating, still too big for the long

drive south so left with us for safe keeping…

 

It rides unseen in the gazebo – secure

from downpours or gusts or jackdaws – becoming

one dimensional. Perhaps we will

frame it as a keepsake.

 

 

 

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POETRY

MYTH MAKING

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.6K views

Whichever way the visitors choose to come –

up the steep, narrow road with blind corners

and left onto the Harlech Castle car park

or walking down from the high street – most

make for the statue, especially those

with young children attracted by the horse.

 

It is a war horse, so the tail is docked.

Its neck and head are lowered, its legs splayed,

its nostrils flaring, its eyes wide. It carries

two kings: Bendigeidfrân – Brân the Blessed

– and his nephew, Gwern, a boy still, who lies dead

across the horse’s flanks, bound in a cloth

wrapped tightly round his uncle. Brân – whose name

means ‘Raven’ – is hairless, his arms merely stumps

and his legs lopped off below the knee.

He was once a giant who crossed the sea

in a dozen strides. Later in these same

Irish wars his head will be severed.

His seven companions will bring it back

talking to Harlech, where it will hold court

for seven years. They will bury it

on the westernmost isle of Gwales.

 

The sculptor’s work is mostly busts or statues

in bronze of figures of note: statesmen,

soldiers, artists, and these mystic kings

from the Mabinogion. Most visitors

are silenced by the three figures though some

seem unconcerned by the horror or are

too embarrassed to mention it.

The littoral that features in the stories

is now populated with caravan sites.

 

Such rhetorical bathos is arriviste,

for they were bards for millennia,

makers of metaphor. ‘The severed head

spoke. But one, curious for truth, opened

the forbidden door…’. Before messiahs,

before calendars, before the curve

of the imagination, ‘the waters

turned, replete with gods and birds, unsung,

unblessed, empty of man’.

 

 

 

Note: The statue is ‘The Two Kings’ by Ivor Roberts-Jones – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Roberts-Jones.

 

 

 

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