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soughing

WHICH PASSETH UNDERSTANDING

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read302 views

With wind soughing in the churchyard yews,

lichen marking the gravestones of labourer

and landowner, Saxon foundations,

mediaeval tower, sunlight fitful

through worthy Victorian stained glass,

a brass plaque for ‘those who gave their lives’,

the wheezy organ, the orotund Order

for the Burial of the Dead, ‘I am the

resurrection and the life…’ the vicar’s

gentle eulogy of the deceased,

one is almost tempted to wish God

were in his heaven where ‘we shall all

be changed…in the twinkling of an eye’

but common sense prevails.

 

 

 

ORPHEUS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read322 views

The high windows caught the sky, varicose,

livid. The house was empty, unlived-in.

He hurried down wide paths strewn with rose petals,

wind-culled and faded. He searched borders,

bushes, her features imaged and snared in shapes

of angled branch and thorn, an orange sun

searing gun-metal clouds, the fountain sprouting

papery leaves, its bronze boy greening alone.

Ivy’s grasp crumbled artifice, obscured

the basin inscribed with a sonnet.

Soughing of breath or the wind in the arbour

summoned him into its close. She was there.

Her brow on the cold pane, she saw the fire’s

mirror – then looked suddenly beyond

to examine a shape falling slowly:

a leaf, a bird, a dark star, sharpening

from blur through disc to pentangle

becoming – a man. Not the imagined

scream, the body’s slump on the terrace,

servants running towards the now headless corpse

but the incomplete moment was memorised,

the continuous present, choosing, longing:

a stranger falling to earth, without

history or songs but with infinite

consequences now not quite beginning.

The house lay far behind; through snow that flurried

eyes, rain that haled the flesh, hopelessness

choking like marsh light; through smoke from burning

stands of silver birch, a bitter smoke

that crackled forth like speech and swathed the head that

sang where it had fallen, sang finely,

like grasses or a stream, of hills as smooth as

limbs, of forests deep as memory,

of golden-helmeted horsemen cantering

eastwards over soft, wordless floors – one carrying,

by its black hair, a head scattering

blood like roses and sublimely singing.