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Manhattan

POETRY

BACKSTORY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read421 views

Ella Yeivin was taught to play the piano

by her mother in pre-war Poland.

Her parents were musicians in what was then

Lvov, previously Lemberg, now Lviv.

They were active in the Jewish Labour Bund.

 

Ella survived Auschwitz. They did not.

She never spoke of it. Still in her teens,

in a DP camp in Schauenstein,

she organised a children’s choir.

They would sing in their many languages.

When her US visa came she was

reluctant to leave her little singers.

 

She lived first in the Bronx, with the family

of a distant cousin of her father.

She looked after the children, and began

to teach piano. With the reparations

she was able to buy a top floor apartment

with an upright in Brooklyn Heights,

long before it became fashionable.

She was a good teacher. Her young students,

and even their mothers, never complained

about the six floors they had to walk up.

 

She would sometimes think of their apartment

on Ruska Street in Lvov – always

imagining it sunlit and empty.

She never married. Briefly each day

she watched pedestrians on the wide walkway

crossing Brooklyn Bridge. She saw the Twin Towers

rising in Lower Manhattan – and lived

long enough to see them fall.

 

 

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POETRY

WHITE PLAINS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read527 views

My first time in Manhattan I was amazed,

walking down Madison from the Park.

Yellow cabs and subway trains from A to Z

I knew – but there were buses, a plenitude,

most seemingly destined not for The Bronx

or The Bowery but White Plains.

My ignorance pictured some far distant place,

almost Arthurian, in the Mid-West,

from where travellers might never return.

 

This was the city of Sipowicz,

Homicide Detective and Everyman;

of lives wasted in the garish, pulsing streets,

in the brownstone apartments of the rich,

the challenged, and the modest; a city

of small victories for humanity,

of humble, humbling journeys of the soul.

 

This was the city of, at least, one

genius on every other corner.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was born

on Riverside Drive. Enrico Fermi,

exiled, researched at Columbia.

 

Albert Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt

tick-tocked in a safe in a skyscraper,

opposite City Hall, where five thousand

civil servants clocked-in covertly.

The uranium was warehoused near the port.

Brighter than a thousand suns, the bomb’s fulgent,

multitudinous clouds wasted what they touched.

 

White Plains is a suburb twenty miles north

of mid-town. There is a Bloomingdale’s,

a Macy’s. It occupies earth bought

with beads by immigrants, who named it

for the groves of white balsam they felled,

the river mists drifting.

 

 

 

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OTHER PEOPLES' FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS Mary Clark: Writer

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments3 min read739 views

David kindly asked me to contribute to ‘Other People’s Flowers‘.  I’ve enjoyed his poetry for more than half a decade now, having linked up on LinkedIn. His encouragement while I was writing one of my more complex books, Community, was invaluable. Community is a political memoir, tinged with urban scenes and community activism. For David, though, I included several excursions into the art world, including a brief description of a book signing and reading at New York University’s student center in 1986. In it, Germaine Bree and actress Irene Worth read portions of Marguerite Duras’ work.

During the pandemic I began writing memoirs of my insignificant life. I hoped to convey the tenor and the ethos of the times in each book. Tally: An Intuitive Life harkens back to the idealistic and sexual-political revolutionary 1920s, quiet by comparison to the 1960s and more vibrant than the 1980s when the aging, impoverished Bohemian artist looks back critically at his life.

Into The Fire: A Poet’s Journey through Hell’s Kitchen is the story of my years at the New York Poetry Festival at St. Clement’s, a midtown Manhattan west side church. The program was founded in the late 1970s when the “anything goes” 1960s and early 1970s were fading and the arts becoming less grassroots and more corporate run. I came to the program in 1978. Many poets, both well-known and less established, read or had their work performed there until the Festival’s end in 1983. Changes in the church and my transition into the community outside its doors led to the next phase of my life.

Chapter 2, Culture Review, of Into the Fire…, includes a description of the church sanctuary and theater space, bits of my poetry, and some of the characters rolling through town, as well as two recommended poems and references to others

Chapter 2, Culture Review – view here

The book I’m currently working on also revolves around art and artists, the inner and outer drama of our lives, and the perceptive and honest analysis that drives us forward, if we have the courage. It doesn’t have a title yet, but it is the most intensely personal of my memoirs. It takes place in the mid-1970s amid moral and ethical unmooring, a lost world in more than one sense. The attached section is one among the several points of view or ways of telling stories juxtaposed within the text.

Whether I – view here

©Mary Clark 2021

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

CAPTAIN TILLY PARK, QUEENS, SEPTEMBER 2001

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read454 views

‘The park is named for Captain George H. Tilly, a local son of a prominent family who was killed in action in the Philippines while serving in the Spanish-American War, and a monument to the war is prominent in the park.’ New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.

 

From the park’s Memorial Hill one can see

Manhattan, and the World Trade Center’s

Twin Towers. Below, this Labor Day

early evening, the benches round Goose Pond

are filled with families – Sikh, Jamaican,

Hispanic. Annually this season

the water is the colour of  jade –

insecticide to kill mosquitoes.

 

George Tilly was killed by Filipino

freedom fighters. His family owned the land

the park is built on. They used the acres

for flocks of ducks and geese – when Empire City,

seen from rural Queens, was like somewhere

in the clouds. The air, this gentle evening,

is filled with music and barbecues.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ASYLUM SEEKER

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read652 views

i.m. Samuel Selzer

 

He was never sure if it had been a joke

when the police arrested him for being,

he learned later, Jack the Ripper,

even though the last murder had been

a dozen years before, and he himself

had been eight and far away – or just

a lesson for yet another alien

wandering Whitechapel as if he had

a right to be lost in a pea souper.

 

Fresh from the Hamburg boat docked at Tilbury,

with no understanding of English

or the Roman alphabet, astray

from his equally ignorant, naive

travelling companions – oldest sons

escaping the twenty year conscription

into the Tzar’s army, all believing

they had arrived at last in Manhattan –

he was ‘sprung’ from his cell in the early hours

by the Jewish Board of Guardians.

 

A wry, resilient man, weathering

bankruptcy, his son’s death, his wife’s,

he always told the tale with humour –

another greener mislaid in the fog.

‘In Kiev if a policeman walks towards you,’

he told me, ‘you step in the gutter!

Better a night in the Leman Street lock-up

at eighteen than a lifetime of fear!’

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

A NEW YORK TALE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read689 views

Though they lived for decades no more than a block

from each other in Greenwich Village – one

in Washington Square, the other Patchin Place –

there is no record they ever met,

Hopper the painter, Cummings the poet.

 

They would have thought that they had nothing

in common – the real, the lyrical.

But, hey, what do geniuses know?

 

They may have passed each other on some sidewalk,

on Sixth Avenue or Bleecker Street,

or in the subway on 9th, or eaten,

unaware, in the Grand Central Oyster Bar.

Though for different reasons, they would have

admired the colour co-ordination

of the pink elastic bands which restrain

the claws of the live lobsters brought to tables

on metal platters for diners to select.

 

***

 

In ‘Automat’ a pretty young woman

in a beige cloche hat and a dark green

fur trimmed coat sits alone. Behind her

the two rows of the vast automat’s

overhead lights are bleak in the night-filled

plate glass window. Her silk stockinged legs

are crossed beneath the table.  Her dress –

which we can glimpse through her open coat – is tan.

She has removed the black glove from her right hand

to eat whatever was on the small plate

in front of her and to drink her coffee.

 

Maybe she is thinking about the poem

her lover read to her this afternoon:

‘somewhere i have never travelled…your eyes

have their silence… your slightest look easily

will unclose me…nobody, not even

the rain, has such small hands.’

 

 

 

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