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baroque

POETRY

FEARLESS ARIAS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read363 views

In the gardens of the Premier’s palace

with its white Baroque facade there are

children’s swings and a red roundabout.

The linden trees the old Archduke planted

though leafless are evergreen with outbursts,

festoons of mistletoe, their berries

opalescent in the gentle wintry light.

A dozen or so mistle thrushes graze

amongst the leaf mould and peck in the branches –

but one, perched at the top of a tree, sings

its trilling, boundless, woodwind airs as if all

of the provinces were quiet and listening.

 

*

 

The ancients thought it spoke seven languages.

Clement of Alexandria noted its

‘harlot’s chortle’, Aristotle its

fondness for mistletoe. ‘Sanctus, sanctus’

it calls in the Armony of Byrdes.

‘Stormcock’ some name it – its notes heard above

the roughest, the loudest of weathers.

 

*

 

A scattering of snow begins to fall.

A child’s ball rolls from nowhere amongst the birds,

which rise, their long, white-edged wings flurrying

the flakes, their rattling alarms muffled –

but the one perched on a topmost branch still sings

its fearless arias.

 

 

 

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POETRY

TEATRO DEI RIUNITI

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read473 views

The Tiber’s olive waters curve past

Umbertide or, rather, the town curves

to the river in this limpid valley

alive with oak trees, willows, poplars

and millennia of settlements,

monuments – Etruscan, Roman, Lombard.

 

To impede the German’s retreat northwards,

the Allies bombed the bridge across the river

successfully and, collaterally,

razed a block of tall, narrow houses –

and many of their inhabitants.

 

The house numbers are brass inlaid in the setts

of what is now a car park in this

medieval town with its Via Papa

Giovanni XXIII, its Via

Kennedy, its Piazza Carlo Marx.

 

The Eighth Army built a bailey bridge

on the ancient arches – which was still there

when we performed Shakespeare, in English,

at the theatre. Unused and derelict

because of the war, the baroque theatre

was renovated by an alliance

of Communists and Christian Democrats,

I Riuniti. It had been a gift

from the town’s most famous son, Domenico

Bruni, a castrato, emasculated

for the usual reasons – poverty, greed.

A celebrity acclaimed and enriched,

he sang in Rome, Naples, Milan, London

and St Petersburg for Catherine the Great.

 

He might have stood by the deep canal

that channels the winter torrents through the town

from the mountains into the Tiber.

Our play was The Comedy of Errors,

in which one of the lads from Syracuse says,

‘He that commends me to mine own content

Commends me to the thing I cannot get.’

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

SEAMUS HEANEY: A LIVERPOOL MEMORY

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read618 views

After the reading, we strolled down Brownlow Hill

for a Guinness and a chaser at The Vines

next to The Adelphi on Lime Street –

a Walker’s pub in Edwardian baroque.

The westering sun lit the stained glass windows.

 

We were both young men then. He had been married

the year before. I would be married

later that year. His first book had been published

by Faber and Karl Miller’s prescient review

seemed genuinely to bemuse and amuse him.

We talked of the city’s sectarian split –

the Orange annual march, with drums and fifes,

to Newsham Park, their annual outing

by train to Southport past the Scotland Road flats

festooned with green – curtains, tablecloths.

 

The University was generous

with expenses and paid for a taxi

to Speke.  He had a flight booked to Le Touquet

and a hire car there he would drive through the night

into Italy to join his wife.

He was so unostentatious, so

matter-of-fact, that such travel plans

seemed perfectly ordinary to someone

who had no licence and had only

been abroad on a school trip to San Malo!

 

As he got in the cab and we shook hands,

I knew I had met a particularly

memorable person – modest, kind

and witty – who happened also to be

especially, exceptionally talented.

 

When I opened The Door Into The Dark

some three years later and read ‘Night Drive’ –

 

The smells of ordinariness

Were new on the night drive through France;

Rain and hay and woods on the air

Made warm draughts in the open car.

 

Signposts whitened relentlessly.

Montrueil, Abbeville, Beauvais

Were promised, promised, came and went,

Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.

 

A combine groaning its way late

Bled seeds across its work-light.

A forest fire smouldered out.

One by one small cafés shut.

 

I thought of you continuously

A thousand miles south where Italy

Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.

Your ordinariness was renewed there.

 

– I knew I had been privileged and lucky

that summer evening to shake hands with

a compassionate genius, romantic,

urbane: a maker of exquisite art

out of the everyday.

 

 

 

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