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artifice

ONLY ARTIFICE WILL REMAIN

When a joiner made the oak frame of this

long sash window, when a builder set it

in the wall, when a glazier puttied

in the panes that keep the weathers in their place,

all I would have seen were hedges, fields, ponds

and grazing dairy cattle – before the rise,

the decline and the fall, in a hundred

and sixty years, of so many empires.

 

When I stand on the back doorstep and search

for the stars amid the urban glare and the overcast

and then look down I see me silhouetted

in the gazebo’s windows – like the figure,

in ‘Las Meninas’, whom we see through

an open door, having paused climbing the stairs

to briefly watch paint capture majesty.

 

I think of Xerses, anticipating

victory over all of Greece, the world,

watching his armies cross the Bosporus

into Europe, suddenly weeping,

knowing that none of them would be alive

a hundred years from then – and longing

for the pillars and for the gardens

of Persepolis. A century or more

later, Alexander the Great will scourge

the city’s entire populace. Only

artifice will remain.

 

 

 

ORPHEUS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read331 views

The high windows caught the sky, varicose,

livid. The house was empty, unlived-in.

He hurried down wide paths strewn with rose petals,

wind-culled and faded. He searched borders,

bushes, her features imaged and snared in shapes

of angled branch and thorn, an orange sun

searing gun-metal clouds, the fountain sprouting

papery leaves, its bronze boy greening alone.

Ivy’s grasp crumbled artifice, obscured

the basin inscribed with a sonnet.

Soughing of breath or the wind in the arbour

summoned him into its close. She was there.

Her brow on the cold pane, she saw the fire’s

mirror – then looked suddenly beyond

to examine a shape falling slowly:

a leaf, a bird, a dark star, sharpening

from blur through disc to pentangle

becoming – a man. Not the imagined

scream, the body’s slump on the terrace,

servants running towards the now headless corpse

but the incomplete moment was memorised,

the continuous present, choosing, longing:

a stranger falling to earth, without

history or songs but with infinite

consequences now not quite beginning.

The house lay far behind; through snow that flurried

eyes, rain that haled the flesh, hopelessness

choking like marsh light; through smoke from burning

stands of silver birch, a bitter smoke

that crackled forth like speech and swathed the head that

sang where it had fallen, sang finely,

like grasses or a stream, of hills as smooth as

limbs, of forests deep as memory,

of golden-helmeted horsemen cantering

eastwards over soft, wordless floors – one carrying,

by its black hair, a head scattering

blood like roses and sublimely singing.