Illinois

POETRY

AT FAST EDDIES

By David SelzerJanuary 30, 20251 Comment2 min read323 views

The world has turned many times since I was last

at Fast Eddies on 4th Street in Alton,

Illinois, a Mississippi river town –

just after the First Gulf War to be exact.

Then Fast Eddies was a long, ill-lit room

with a bar and kitchen, wooden tables,

backless benches, and something of a

reputation. I had my pocket picked.

***

Until the end of the Civil War

Missouri was a ‘slave’ state Illinois

a ‘free’ state. ‘Runaways’ would try to cross

the wide and headlong river to seek out

Alton’s few abolitionists, and then

be sent along the Underground Railway

north and east into safer states. The town,

however, was home to would-be slave owners,

settlers from Kentucky and Tennessee.

In the town’s cemetery – on top

of a chain of limestone bluffs that flank

the Mississippi at this point – is a

monument of big city proportions

placed so that it can be seen from across

the river. It is in memory of

Elijah P. Lovejoy, abolitionist

and champion of free speech, silenced

by a murderous pro-slavery mob.

***

On the bluffs beside the Great River Road,

below the town, the first people painted

a giant bird, The Piasa – a creature

of myth, covered in multi-coloured scales,

with an eagle’s beak, and a fox’s head

surmounted by horns, that terrorised

the innocent in these fertile lands.

The people were exiled or slaughtered.

Archaeologists curate what they have left.

***

The world has turned many, many times since.

Now at Fast Eddies there are neon lights,

live music, and cocktails, the furniture

is cabaret style, and customers dance

with iPhones on the website. But the beer

is still Budweiser from St Louis,

on the opposite bank of the river,

and the clientele is still entirely white.

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By David Selzer

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POETRY

APHORISMS AND INDEMNITY: AN IDEA OF AMERICA

By David SelzerMay 27, 20211 Comment2 min read417 views

For Clive Watkins

‘The maker’s rage to order words…’

THE IDEA OF ORDER AT KEY WEST, Wallace Stevens

There, as we drove past the Heritage Centre

that once was a medieval church, on the steps,

among the shoppers and the trippers,

there on a provincial, English street

was a busker with a blue guitar.

And I thought of the poem by Wallace Stevens,

who did not drive, and walked to work each day –

from his house on Westerly Terrace

to his office on Asylum Avenue

at Hartford Accident & Indemnity –

composing verses and aphorisms,

jotting them down on a legal pad

for his secretary to type up:

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’

The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’

And they said then, ‘But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.’

The ‘Adagia’ of Erasmus – Ancient

Greek and Latin sayings now become common,

like ‘to die of laughing’, ‘out of tune’ –

inspired Stevens to coin adages:

for instance, ‘God is a postulate

of the ego’, ‘Money is a kind of

poetry’, ‘Every man dies his own death’.

He wintered – without his wife and daughter –

in Key West. A tall, heavy bodied man –

nicknamed ‘Giant’ at Havard – he was prone

to Martinis, and had a fist fight

with Ernest ‘Papa’ Hemingway, five inches

shorter, two decades younger, and prone

to Mojitos. Giant, it was alleged,

had sneered at Papa’s literary achievements.

The Ivy League lawyer was felled by two blows

into a puddle. He died, in his bed,

many years later, fully insured.

A black and white photo shows Stevens walking

almost jauntily in winter sunshine,

and self-consciously twirling his cane.

Beneath his straw boater he is smiling

circumspectly – as if W.C. Fields

(Mr Macawber in Hollywood’s

‘David Copperfield’) had just fallen

on the softest of times. The comic actor,

who was also rather prone to Martinis,

had opened a savings account in each town

where he toured in vaudeville just in case

hard times returned. All over America

the nickels and dimes gather interest.

Somewhere in Missouri or Texas,

Illinois or California,

in his faded denims and his baseball cap,

waiting for a ride beside the black top

is an ageless man with a blue guitar.

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By David Selzer

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POETRY

MONKS’ MOUND, CAHOKIA, ILLINOIS

By David SelzerFebruary 24, 20152 Comments1 min read611 views

The river valleys – Missouri, Ohio,
Illinois, Mississippi – are thronged
with prehistoric earthen mounds. Monks’ Mound
was lived on briefly by Trappists, hence
its English soubriquet. The city
of Cahokia – the name means ‘Wild Geese’ –
was six miles square, had more than eighty mounds.
At its thirteenth century zenith,
it was as populous as any city
in the then contemporary Europe.

The Trinculos and Stephanos came:
mockers and con men – drunken, violent,
slaughtering bison, fencing the prairie –
satraps of Washington and the railways,
converting, through alcohol, to the true faith
of dependence and destitution,
those whom they determined were Caliban.

Monk’s Mound is one hundred feet high. Westwards,
beyond the black slums of East St Louis,
over the river, on the waterfront,
is St Louis’s Gateway Arch – six hundred
and thirty stainless steel feet to celebrate
the final subjugation of the land.

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By David Selzer

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POETRY

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

By David SelzerDecember 20, 20142 Comments1 min read626 views

After the usual, civil formalities are finished
and the formal photographer has gone,
you begin to photograph people not poses;
charming, as you mingle; capturing, like a magus,
the very spirit of each and every guest.

In fifty years, we have been seldom apart.
When we are you are my very limb
and life. I was alone in Illinois,
driving, by the side of the Mississippi,
on the Great River Road, south to St. Louis –
thinking of you every lonely yard of the way.

Marriage, love, last, of course, by chance, choice.
I watch you ‘work the room’ – enchanting,
diffident, vital, a benison.

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By David Selzer

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POETRY