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POETRY

AT FAST EDDIES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read324 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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POETRY

APHORISMS AND INDEMNITY: AN IDEA OF AMERICA

David Selzer By David Selzer1 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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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

DOWN THE LINE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read362 views

For Kira Somach

 

I have regular readers – some I have known

for years, others I will never meet –

on every continent except

Antarctica: a wonder not a boast!

One, an actual friend from long ago,

tells me, via email, that she often reads

some of my poems over the phone

to her father – she in Missouri,

he in Florida: to remind them

of his years working in England,

and her years here becoming a woman.

Sometimes she rehearses the reading

before she makes the call. I like to imagine

the words spoken down a telephone wire:

under the Mississipi, over

the Appalachians, around the Everglades –

but I guess the sounds are bounced from the sky,

across longitudes and latitudes

and a multiplicity of time zones,

which is no less extraordinary,

no less amazing, no less humbling – my words

sounding through the ether.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THINKING OF AMERICA

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read465 views

‘Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force.’

MAKING AMERICA WHITE AGAIN, Toni Morrison

 

Twenty five years ago – the year of the First

Gulf War, the launching of the World Wide Web,

the repeal of South Africa’s Apartheid Law,

and the ‘End of History’ – one August

Saturday in Godfrey, Illinois –

a town on the Mississippi bluffs –

I watched the wooden New England style

Church of Christ at Monticello cross the road,

on hydraulic jacks, to the Lewis & Clark

Community College campus. The crowd

was affable, and overwhelmingly white.

A marching band played ‘Tie a yellow ribbon’,

and Old Glory was in abundance.

To cheers the steeple bell was rung and rung.

 

The college had been the Monticello

Female Seminary, founded in

1835 by Captain Godfrey –

a retired fisherman from Cape Cod –

for whom the town was named. He believed,

‘When you educate a woman you

educate a family’. He admired

Thomas Jefferson – Founding Father,

president and conflicted slave owner –

so named the finishing school after

his primary Virginia plantation.

 

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark –

U.S. Army officer volunteers –

were commissioned by President Jefferson

to map the West, mind the French, impress the Sioux

and expand the concept of the thirteen states

beyond the confluence of the great rivers.

They set off from the banks of the nearby

Wood River and crossed the Mississippi

to sail up the Missouri to its source

two thousand miles away in the Rockies

across the lush and pristine Great Plains.

 

*

 

In the small town on the limestone bluffs

where bald eagles nest above the river

Adams, Washington, Franklin et al

would have felt at home that August day,

recognising most present as descendants –

collegial,  patriotic, Anglophone,

Protestant and white. Now, across the vast

darkling fields of the republic, they would hear

incessantly Jefferson’s prescient

‘…the knell of the Union…this act

of suicide…of treason against the hopes

of the world…a fire bell in the night…’

clanging, clanging, clanging.

 

 

 

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POETRY

MONKS’ MOUND, CAHOKIA, ILLINOIS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 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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POETRY

CARDINALS AND GIANTS

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read523 views

As the First Gulf War began, I watched
the Cardinals – in their brewery
sponsored stadium in downtown St Louis –
beat the ‘Frisco Giants. The home team
is named for the scarlet-breasted bird –
the visitors (aka the New York
Gothams before they went west) for chutzpah.
The fixture was part of the USA’s
annual baseball World Series, which,
of course, includes no teams from abroad.

It was a weekday, early evening –
very much a family occasion.
The programme, advertising caps and tee-shirts,
urged us to ‘think of our boys in the Gulf.’
Most of the players had Hispanic names.
In the intervals, the black vendors
climbed the terraced steps. ‘Any of you farmers
want a coke?’ they called and the mostly white
crowd took no offence Missouri being
a state of farms – soya beans and hogs.
Meanwhile, the quadrille of baseball resumed,
its restrained drama accompanied by the theme
from Jaws each time a player made a home run.

As twilight became night, I remembered
the wide river a couple of blocks away –
rising in the hills of Minnesota
and debouching, two thousand miles
and more, through the shining, shifting Delta
into an altogether different gulf –
and I thought of the immense Republic’s
dark, inviolate fields.

 

 

 

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