Tag Archives

Chinese

THE PROMONTORY

At the landward end of the bronze age site

is a six storey apartment hotel;

right a broad sandy beach with amenities,

left, behind palms, cypresses and olives,

another hotel, vast as a cruise ship,

hiding the property development signs

in Russian and Chinese on the main road.

 

A peloton of young German students,

when we arrive, is being lectured

at the entrance to the museum –

an architect-designed, circular space,

subtly engineered into the sandstone,

with a green dome and copper plated doors.

A Cypriot copper oxhide ingot

is one of the exhibits. They were standard

in weight – and shaped always like a stretched

animal skin – throughout the eastern sea.

 

Precursors of the fictional Ulysses,

exiles, refugees from Mycenae

found this safe haven – with its thirty foot

sandstone cliffs and a fresh water spring

and its crow’s nest view of the sea, north to Troy,

south to Egypt, west to the Hesperides –

three thousand years ago. They survived pirates,

a fire, built defensive walls, stone houses,

but stayed for only two generations

before Hellenising the island,

exploiting its copper.

 

 

 

THE ANATOMY OF PILGRIMAGE

We had not visited Beddgelert for years.

We remembered the winding, bosky drive

following the Glaslyn from Porthmadog,

slowly climbing as the swift river narrows;

the walk across the field to Gelert’s grave

with its slate marker his remorseful owner,

Prince Llywelyn the Great, erected

for the faithful hound he had killed in

frantic error, finding too late the dead wolf

and the saved baby. Who would not be moved

by such an irredeemable act!

The sounds of endless waters rush nearby.

 

What was new that hot August Bank Holiday

was a tumbled faux bothy at the edge

of the field with an under-sized bronze dog

eager in the doorway; the eerie whistle

of the tourist train on the re-opened

railway that carried the quarried slate

down to Porthmadog, across to Caernafon

through mountain passes of green and purple;

a coach from an EFL summer school

full of excited Chinese students;

an Orthodox Jewish family, mother

with headscarf, father with keppel and earlocks,

little girls in long skirts; two young women,

in hijabs, sitting on the river’s bank,

bathing their feet in the chilly shallows.

 

Dafyd Prytchard, the  landlord of Beddgelert’s

Royal Goat Hotel, invented the story

in the late eighteenth century. Gelert

was the saint for whom the village was named.

Wales was brimful with saints, their remains

unvisited post-reformation,

but who would pass by a doughty dog’s!

 

 

 

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

The hardback quarto exercise book opens
at ‘Funny Valentine’, an unfinished,
blank verse piece – full of Auden, Larkin, Yeats –
in thick-nib fountain pen on feint ruled lines.
Four decades old and more – and pristine:
‘Today, at best, brings scented, satin hearts,
Numb messengers of somebody’s desires…’

I can see the back room in the shared flat:
sagging bed, faded armchair, torn carpet,
wobbly table; I’d brought a large ashtray,
a glass fronted bookcase and a small, handmade
Chinese cabinet; a tv blared upstairs.
Through the sash window stuck fast with paint
was the littered garden – out of sight and
sound, all of Liverpool, swinging city.

I google Lorenz Hart’s lyrics – ‘Your looks
are laughable, unphotographable,
Yet you’re my favorite work of art’- and hear
Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald.
The cabinet – carved drawers filled now with years
of love – was a woman’s gift to a man
coming of age. But I was a boy, full
of fears and words. ‘Stay little valentine, stay…’
Borne on the leafy fretwork of the doors,
two gilded, lacquered kingfishers in flight,
sun catching on their iridescent wings,
fall together into oblivion.

 

 

Note: the poem was one of the first pieces to be published on the site in April 2009  and has been subsequently published in ‘A Jar of Sticklebacks’ – http://www.armadillocentral.com/general/a-jar-of-sticklebacks-by-david-selzer

 

 

 

 

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

The hardback quarto exercise book opens
at ‘Funny Valentine’, an unfinished,
blank verse piece – full of Auden, Larkin, Yeats –
in thick-nib fountain pen on feint ruled lines.
Four decades old and more – and pristine:
‘Today, at best, brings scented, satin hearts,
Numb messengers of somebody’s desires…’

I can see the back room in the shared flat:
sagging bed, faded armchair, torn carpet,
wobbly table; I’d brought a large ashtray,
a glass fronted bookcase and a small, handmade
Chinese cabinet; a tv blared upstairs.
Through the sash window stuck fast with paint
was the littered garden – out of sight and
sound, all of Liverpool, swinging city.

I google Lorenz Hart’s lyrics – ‘Your looks
are laughable, unphotographable,
Yet you’re my favorite work of art’- and hear
Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald.
The cabinet – carved drawers filled now with years
of love – was a woman’s gift to a man
coming of age. But I was a boy, full
of fears and words. ‘Stay little valentine, stay…’
Borne on the leafy fretwork of the doors,
two gilded, lacquered kingfishers in flight,
sun catching on their iridescent wings,
fall together into oblivion.

 

Note: this piece has been subsequently published in ‘A Jar of Sticklebacks’ – http://www.armadillocentral.com/general/a-jar-of-sticklebacks-by-david-selzer