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POETRY

THE LANE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read593 views

The motorway cuts through it. It was always

a proper Cheshire country lane with

ditches and hedgerows of may and oak

but it remained an unpaved track subject

to the weathers. Travellers or Roma –

though ‘Gypsies’ or ‘Irish Tinkers’ we called them

then – with grass for their hirsute ponies,

their caravans obscured by the hedges

and their shy kids safe from the odd car,

would camp there. We would try to explore,

to find where it led, hoping for some mansion

occupied by GIs with their comics

and gum. But, each time we tried, one of the men,

the same one always – wiry, dark haired, sharp eyed –

would send us packing with a raised fist

and a curse. One summer, near dusk, we crept

as close as we dared. The man was seated,

on a stool, playing a guitar. Somewhere,

out of sight, a woman was singing.

 

We got a telling off, home after dark,

and my spinster aunt sang, unbidden,

‘I’m away wi’ the raggle taggle gypsy-o!’

 

I drive by what remains of the lane often

and always, out of the corner of my eye,

look – as if there were something to see

other than grass and weeds.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

1913

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read584 views

In an art deco theatre on the Avenue Montaigne

off the Champs Élysées – newly built, its exterior

(for style and mechanics in concrete) the interior

(gilt, lead paint and plush) still smelling fresh – there is a riot

on the evening of May 29th at the premiere

of the ballet, ‘The Rite of Spring’, by Igor Stravinsky,

Vaslav Nijinsky and Nicholas Roerich.

 

This is the year the House of Romanov celebrates

its three hundredth anniversary, the year there are two

Balkan Wars, Ford introduces an assembly line,

Pablo Picasso paints his Cubist ‘Guitar, Glass and Bottle’

and the first volume – ‘Swann’s Way’ – is published

of Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time.’

 

Proust and Picasso were in the first night audience – as were

Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Gertrude Stein: luminaries

of a luminous city. The riot began, it is said,

with derisive laughter as the first notes were played.

Vegetables were thrown. The dancers could not hear the orchestra.

Nijinsky, dancer as well as choreographer,

called out the steps. Forty people were ejected – or maybe

no one was. The impresario, Sergei Diaghilev,

was a master of PR, hence, perhaps, the greengrocery.

Modernism in music was so successfully launched

on an eventually calm sea that Walt Disney used

the opening bars in ‘Fantasia’, conveyor belt art

in the year of the Blitzkreig. Yet art’s truth transcends as always.

How such fierce music and brutal dance overtured, by accident,

the sacrificial Eurasian violence of the rest of the century!

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

TRIGGER AT THE ADELPHI, LIVERPOOL, MARCH, 1954

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read649 views

For Alex Cox

 

This is the year Dien Bien Phu falls,

Algeria rises, segregation is

ruled illegal in the USA,

the first kidney is transplanted and UK

wartime food rationing finally ends.

 

Lime Street was filled with thousands of boys and girls,

gathered to greet the singing, celluloid,

Born Again cowpoke, Roy Rogers (erstwhile

Leonard Slye), and his entourage – combining

a promo tour with a Billy Graham

crusade. The youngsters, pinched with cold on that

blitzed and windy street, clutched their copies

of the Roy Rogers Cowboy Annual.

Those with seafaring dads – and there were ships

filling the Mersey then and its docks –

had something from the Sears catalogue

of Roy Rogers Gifts: boots, guitar, holster,

ersatz buckskin fringed shirt. (Roy and his wife, Dale,

had been mobbed in London, fringes ripped from

the genuine article). But Roy and Dale

were in bed with ‘flu in their Adelphi suite –

so Trigger trotted the route alone,

climbed the hotel steps, made his mark at

reception, entered the residents’ lounge,

visited his master’s bedroom and appeared

at a first floor window for a photo op.

 

But was it Trigger or, his double,

Little Trigger? And which rears on its hind legs

stuffed in the Roy Rogers Museum,

Branson, Missouri, the ‘Show Me’ state’?

Or is either or both with Roy and Dale –

and Bullet, the dog, of course – alive, well and

moseying along on the moon’s dark side?

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

TRIGGER AT THE ADELPHI, LIVERPOOL, MARCH, 1954

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read569 views

For Alex Cox

 

This is the year Dien Bien Phu falls,

Algeria rises, segregation is

ruled illegal in the USA,

the first kidney is transplanted and UK

wartime food rationing finally ends.

 

Lime Street was filled with thousands of boys and girls,

gathered to greet the singing, celluloid,

Born Again cowpoke, Roy Rogers (erstwhile

Leonard Slye), and his entourage – combining

a promo tour with a Billy Graham

crusade. The youngsters, pinched with cold on that

blitzed and windy street, clutched their copies

of the Roy Rogers Cowboy Annual.

Those with seafaring dads – and there were ships

filling the Mersey then and its docks –

had something from the Sears catalogue

of Roy Rogers Gifts: boots, guitar, holster,

ersatz buckskin fringed shirt. (Roy and his wife, Dale,

had been mobbed in London, fringes ripped from

the genuine article). But Roy and Dale

were in bed with ‘flu in their Adelphi suite –

so Trigger trotted the route alone,

climbed the hotel steps, made his mark at

reception, entered the residents’ lounge,

visited his master’s bedroom and appeared

at a first floor window for a photo op.

 

But was it Trigger or, his double,

Little Trigger? And which rears on its hind legs

stuffed in the Roy Rogers Museum,

Branson, Missouri, the ‘Show Me’ state’?

Or is either or both with Roy and Dale –

and Bullet, the dog, of course – alive, well and

moseying along on the moon’s dark side?

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

TRIGGER AT THE ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, MARCH 1954

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read889 views

For Alex Cox



This is the year Dien Bien Phu falls,

Algeria rises, segregation is

ruled illegal in the USA,

the first kidney is transplanted and UK

wartime food rationing finally ends.

Lime Street was filled with thousands of boys and girls,

gathered to greet the singing, celluloid,

Born Again cowpoke, Roy Rogers (erstwhile

Leonard Slye), and his entourage – combining

a promo tour with a Billy Graham

crusade. The youngsters, pinched with cold on that

blitzed and windy street, clutched their copies

of the Roy Rogers Cowboy Annual.

Those with seafaring dads – and there were ships

filling the Mersey then and its docks –

had something from the Sears catalogue

of Roy Rogers’ Gifts: boots, guitar, holster,

ersatz buckskin fringed shirt. (Roy and his wife, Dale,

had been mobbed in London, fringes ripped from

the genuine article). But Roy and Dale

were in bed with ‘flu in their Adelphi suite –

so Trigger trotted the route alone,

climbed the hotel steps, made his mark at

reception, entered the residents’ lounge,

visited his master’s bedroom and appeared

at a first floor window for a photo op.

But was it Trigger or, his double,

Little Trigger? And which rears on its hind legs

stuffed in the Roy Rogers’ Museum,

Branson, Missouri, the ‘Show Me’ state?

Or is either or both with Roy and Dale –

and Bullet, the dog, of course – alive, well and

moseying along on the moon’s dark side?

Pages:

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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