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Menai Straits

POETRY

MIRROR, MIRROR

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read512 views

‘Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?’  Pablo Picasso

 

We have moved our print of Henry Holiday’s

‘Dante and Beatrice’ – bought second hand

fifty years ago – from the window wall

of our eclectic bedroom to above

the bed, where it hangs now in its gilt, ornate,

retro-Victorian frame like an icon.

The bed faces the mantle piece, on which

is a Spanish mirror as large as the room’s

window. Its olive wood frame has flamenco

curves, its top adorned with bridal wreaths

of silk roses and rose buds and ribbons.

 

The morning after the hanging I wake

in expectation of seeing the famed

platonic lovers central in the pier glass,

though knowing they will be on the wrong side

of the Arno, which will be flowing upstream.

However, to my chagrin, this mirror

of long acquaintance is distorted

in its right hand corner like some fairground

feature. The poet and his preoccupied

muse, her forward friend, her hand maiden,

and – though possibly excluding its pigeons –

all of the manufactured magnificence

of Florence seem about to descend into a vortex.

 

Now, where the Holiday originally was,

is a print of Janet Bell’s ‘Low Tide

At Menai Bridge’ – a gift from our daughter

and her family for our fiftieth

wedding anniversary. Bell’s pastel

acrylics have replaced Holiday’s

Pre-Raphaelite oils – his love story

succeeded by her stylised landscape.

If I stand close to the mirror I can see

Janet Bell’s print far over to my left.

At the centre of her painting is Telford’s

suspension bridge – beyond is Snowdonia.

 

Bell’s picture does not show me – why should it? –

that even at low water the sea’s currents

whirl from north and south through the Menai Straits,

that separate the North Wales mainland

from the fecund isle of Anglesey,

and, at the flow, become a gyre, a maelstrom,

nor should Holiday’s tell me that this

particular Beatrice may not have been

Dante’s muse after all, any more than

this mirror with its Iberian

curvatures should declaim in song and dance

its own imperfections.

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

FROM A BALCONY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read441 views

A flock of goosanders fishes in the Straits,

as ubiquitous oyster catchers whistle

on the shore. In the early evening

the air about our balcony throngs

with birds – swallows whispering, swifts screeching,

two ring-necked doves cooing in the clematis,

and a small flock of sparrows chattering

below – as the last sun shades the mountains

opposite. By night three fishermen

make their profaning way along the pier

with swaying torches. The seeming darkness

above the peaks is thronged with unnamed stars

we cannot see, and their imagined,

and fabled harmonies.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE SKY ABOVE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read342 views

From the kitchen door of the holiday let,

down the hill, over roof tops, on a clear day,

are the summits of the mainland’s mountains;

from the front door the gaol’s stone grey massif;

above the cottage’s small courtyard,

where the privy was and now are festive lights

and a hot tub burbling, is a square of sky.

 

Around the corner in Steeple Lane

high in the prison wall is a door,

with rivets either side to hold the scaffold

when it was needed. The condemned cell

led directly to the door. Witnesses

stood in the lane observing the drop,

just up the street from the bakery,

the old chip shop and the Chinese takeaway.

Behind its own high wall on Steeple Lane

the parish church clock strikes the hours.

 

The cottage was built before the gaol.

Hangings then were carried out at Gallows Point,

a low promontory in the Straits

where a boatyard and chandlery are now,

with a view of the peaks of the Carnedd range.

 

On the top of the thick stone walls of the courtyard

are red and white valerians and clusters

of elderberries. The wind tugs at them.

Suddenly, up in the blue, is the roar

of Hawks out of RAF Valley –

and then, in the slow silence regained,

the clatter of jackdaws, the mewing of gulls.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE PICNIC

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read423 views

At the end of a dull August afternoon,

two little girls, sisters perhaps, in hijabs,

and a stocky boy of ten or so,

and two women, probably their mother

and grandmother, dressed in woollen hijabs

and abayas, are preparing to picnic.

They lay out a tartan rug, and Tesco bags,

on that part of the Green closed to vehicles:

between the low stone wall – beyond which

is the narrow walk along the sea wall,

and occasional notices of bye laws

strictly prohibiting the feeding of gulls –

and the small standing stones of the eisteddfod

from before the war. The coach parties have gone,

so they must have driven here – where few

pass through on their way to somewhere else –

along the winding, bosky corniche

beside the Straits. They sit on a tartan rug,

and share the foil packets from the bags.

The boy notices a seagull waiting near,

and asks if he may feed it with a crust.

The younger woman gestures as if such things

were bountiful now. He leaves the rug,

and throws the bread to the bird, which gobbles it

cautiously. His sisters ask for crusts

to join the boy. Almost immediately

the grass is covered with a flock of

seemingly frantic wings, a maelstrom

of dark grey and white, a turbulence

of harsh, jeering cries. The children flinch,

then run to their mother who gathers them in.

The grandmother, putting food and drink

to one side, pulls up the tartan blanket,

charges the gulls, waving the rug like a flag.

The flock rises silently – then settles

behind the standing stones… ‘After the battle,’

sing the bards, ‘after the battle, hearths

are desolate, birds gather, a woman keens…’

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

MANY A SUMMER

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read532 views

As usual Uncle Tacko is trundling

his Flea Circus to the end of the pier,

and the Island Princess is embarking

for a trip up the Straits and around

Ynys Seiriol with its nesting puffins,

its elderberry woodland purpling.

And the dogged chambers of my heart, open

and close, open, close, like an harmonium.

 

All the familiar sounds – the Flea Circus crowd,

the paddlers in the pool, the revellers

on the hotel lawn next door – carry

to this balcony like paper lanterns.

Who would have thought that, like war babies

from Surbiton holidaying per annum

always in Bournemouth or Bognor Regis,

we would count the benches here every year,

value each of the stanchions of the pier,

the stones of the castle, the courthouse, the gaol.

I see you crossing the Green towards the house.

The medicated chambers of my furtive

heart are humming, like a Welsh male voice choir,

‘The more I see you as years go by’.

 

 

Note: Uncle Tacko’s Flea Circus: http://www.prom-prom.com/acts/uncle-tackos-flea-circus/

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

OMENS

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read606 views

This October’s high water has almost reached

the top of the sea wall, its lapping

silenced by two oafish nabobs on jet skis –

iconoclasts shattering the seascape

of the Straits. Rain clouds along the mainland

are lifting, greyness lightening, slowly

becoming white – revealing early Autumn’s

gradual alchemy. Two porpoises

surface briefly out in the deepest channel,

swimming, in the remnants of the Gulf Stream,

from Cardigan Bay to Liverpool Bay.

 

As the tide drains northwards over Lavan Sands

from the unexpected south a cold breeze blows.

A great crested grebe – a freshwater bird

only on sea coasts in winter – is fishing

among the moored cruisers, their pennants

tremulous in the wind.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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