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indigo

THE SEA AND THE STARS

The owl we heard last night hoots near the road

and a fox barks deep among the oak trees.

Though it is moonless and the sea a sliver

of a different dark, light pollution

from the small resort to the east

means we must find the westernmost wall

to lean against and view the stars tonight.

We see them trembling and marvel, wordless,

so many more than we ever remember.

We forget they are always above us.

 

‘What is the sky for?’ I asked my mother

and she said, ‘To hold the stars,’ and I wondered.

‘What colour is the sea?’ I asked my mother

and she said, ‘The colours of the sky.’

‘What is the sea for?’ I asked my mother

and she said, ‘To give us life,’ and I knew.

 

A discarded bottle returns sculpted,

an iron spar rusted, shapeless, their journeys

unchartable but so much remains –

so many bones unburied, so many

stories unfinished – for there is no dark

like the deep of the oceans. Corals

that we will never touch, blind creatures

we will never see teem down, down in the

cold, indigo ravines.

 

 

 

 

A DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF VENICE

PIAZZA DI SAN MARCO

 

After the sky has shaded from indigo

to sepia, when swifts have gone and pigeons

roost in the crepuscular arcades,

when the Basilica’s looted bronze horses

are illumined – where Rossano Brazzi

and Katherine Hepburn failed to meet

at any one of the five cafés in

Napoleon’s ‘most splendid drawing room

in Europe’, where Proust (holidaying

at the Danieli with mother) corrected

his translation of Ruskin and criticised

the risotto, where Casanova

evaded the watch – then the eclectic

clock tower, the three, competing string orchestras,

and the melancholy campanile

accompany gratis a young man, alone,

masked, waltzing on the marble pavement.

 

 

 

DULCE DOMUM

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read334 views

Built well before the Mahdi sacked Khartoum,

like a ledger or the Church of England

our house is square, accommodating. Swifts,

each May, pronounce their southern benison

on ashlar cornerstones and dead masons…

A butterfly, lost in the wintry cellar,

seems closed as death but wings part knowingly.

O peacock eyes, how you seduce from purpose

and time! Imperial birds cry harshly

in paper gardens… At dusk, in indigo,

swifts dissolve. The house is white, seems solid

as a steamship. Darwin and Marx sent more

than smoke up the funnel.