Tag Archives

taxidermy

POETRY

THE TAXIDERMY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

In a one storey Gothic-kitsch building

with small steeples – where Abbey Road meets

Mill Street – attached to the Bridge End Hotel,

opposite the pelican crossing,

angled on the corner of Wharf Hill

that leads steeply up to the canal

and, over the narrow, hump-backed bridge,

left to Ysgol Dinas Brân and right

through the sheep fields and onto the hills

there is an eclectic bestiary:

the hare about to box, the barn owl roosting,

the erect meerkat, the leery hyena,

each an exemplar of this ancient art –

the beasts of the forests and the fields

as trophies, outlasting in effigy

their killers. The high school students walk past

blasé but assorted foreign tourists,

serious walkers, narrow boat sailors

and strayed revellers stop and wonder.

 

Do any of the them wake suddenly

before a cold dawn and remember

that they had been dreaming, in the silent

watches, of a herd of bright, glass eyes

glowing red, amber, green?

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments
POETRY

STILL LIFE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

In the central hall – more cathedral than
museum – the queue for the dinosaurs
curls round the replica skeleton
of a diplodocus. Though only four
and very excited, she waits patiently –
and, once we are in the gallery,
studies each exhibit: loves the T Rex
life-size model that moves, that snarls, that roars
and the loop of the movies’ take on these
‘terrible lizards’. The fascination
transcends generations –
real monsters definitively dead
and, if not buried, then truly ossified;
their thirteen thousand and thirty five
millennia, our fifty thousand;
their earth as distant as Hollywood’s.

We visit more megafauna. She leads me
through an aisle of glass-cased taxidermy
to view the carcass of a blue whale strung
from the vaulted ceiling. On the way out,
we pause at the fossilised skeleton
of a giant sloth. We are killing the whale,
as we killed the sloth – what will be left
is this necropolis, this charnel house
with the carved monkeys on its columns,
the faux gargoyles on its roof – and, of course,
real pigeons gobbling crumbs.

 

Note: the poem was first published in 2015 in LIVE FROM WORKTOWN – http://www.livefromworktown.org

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments

Recent Posts