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gazebo

POETRY

THE BELVEDERE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read643 views

You and I with fifty valentines and

February’s sun pale on the glass!

We count the camellia’s crimson blooms –

and remember, last summer, our grandchild

shivering with ecstasy the day

she chased her daddy with the garden hose.

From here, the house seems sentient, our

remembrancer – the lawns and borders and

parts of neighbours’ houses an urban landscape.

In this wooden hexagon – a half-glazed

gazebo, its blind back turned to a high

Victorian wall festooned with ivy

and clematis – voices are naturally

intimate and revealing, privacy

in an open space. Is it remarkable

we have been friends and lovers so long?

Chance, choice, serendipity or willpower?

We opt for all four. Behind us, in shade

for most of a winter’s day, accidental

primroses are blooming.

 

Note: The poem was originally published on the site in February 2012.

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POETRY

PAINTING PARADISE

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read613 views

If I were a painter – and I would have

so many memorable titles – I would paint

your garden in all its rooms and seasons:

across the high back wall spring’s coral pink

clematis; summer’s sword-leaved, red-flamed

crocosmia by the aquamarine

gazebo; the white, weathered table and chairs

and the acer on the dark-brick terrace;

plants inherited, self-seeded, handed on

in stewardship – a world compendium.

You are the architect, builder, labourer –

and only begetter: ‘Sylvia Among

Her Sonnets Without Words’.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE RECLINING GARDENER

David Selzer By David Selzer10 Comments1 min read924 views

On the first spring day of prolonged clear sunshine

she mows the lawns, weeds the paths, hoes the borders,

counts the figs, admires the honesty,

tends the low lavender hedge – then relaxes

on a lounger in front of the gazebo,

framed by clematis and magnolia blooms.

 

She sleeps, safe in the garden’s ivy clad

chambers – the alfresco rooms she has made

from soil ravaged by lime and gravel.

If she lies too long she will catch the sun –

a curious, promethean turn of phrase

yet right for a gardener who has acquired

from the air itself wild strawberries,

welsh poppies, common columbine, even

honesty. Perhaps I should not let her sleep –

but waking her seems always an intrusion

into the private solitude of dreams.

 

We have been in love for more than fifty years –

doppelgänger, alter ego; boxing hare,

comedy partner; devil’s advocate,

critical friend; anxiety’s balm, pearl

irritant; good companion, turtle dove.

She stirs – wakened, no doubt, by that slow passion

of plants – before I can rouse her with a kiss,

like any common or garden prince or frog.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE CIRCUS HORSE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read344 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

ONLY ARTIFICE WILL REMAIN

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read487 views

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.

 

 

 

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POETRY

OF LEAST CONCERN

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read495 views

A young wood pigeon, not much more than a

nestling seems, at first, to be sheltering,

from the almost Mediterranean heat,

in the short shadows cast by the pots

of lilies and lavender.  But, closer,

I see it is limping, its left foot damaged.

Seeing me, it hobbles out of sight

into an exotic, Sleeping Beauty-type

border of camellia, crocosmia,

rhododendron. Later, an adult bird

lands, walks the edge of the border,

its head bobbing, then flies away. Next morning,

the young bird lies dead by the side gate.

 

I bury it behind the gazebo

in an undergrowth of ferns and roses

by the back wall, where we have interred –

over forty years – a budgie, a young swift,

a crippled rat, a female hen harrier,

a severed mouse and now the pigeon.

A low body count by any mark.

This time I say, ‘Come, little pigeon,’ as I

load the corpse, which the flies have already found,

on a spade. Someone may discover the sets

of bones, reconstruct the skeletons

and make up a story.

 

 

 

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