Archive for July, 2009
THE SAME SHARED GROUND
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on July 23rd, 2009
Dee Estuary from Gayton Sands. © SCES 2009.
Larks and herons rise from the same shared ground -
a salt-marsh sprinkled with scurvy grass
like early snow. A navigable channel
is impossibly distant, far-off as
childhood’s spring tides. Silt obscured endeavour.
Sailors and milkmaids and priests lie low
as the worked-out coal seams. Glaciers made this -
ice miles, thick as centuries, combing valleys,
teasing out hills, a slow explosion
of seas. I imagine, back in Europe’s
reticular forests, a homely,
mackerel sky caught in another’s vision -
ancient weathers, sand settling in a pool,
pebbles jarred momentarily, the shape
and sense of time.
Towing the continent,
hulks sailed west. Only fulmars passed. The past
stretches like a landscape from this instant,
encompassing it. The oneness of things,
their disparateness I taste like blood:
the jest at the heart – being here and now
who could so easily have been elsewhere
or no one.
Oblivious of ironies,
soarers and coasters cohabit. The ice
was deep as mountains. I am shrouded in
imagining’s ponderous white oceans.
CONFEDERATE CEMETERY, ALTON, ILLINOIS
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on July 23rd, 2009
All of the names of the dead are Celtic
or English. Most of them died – in the prison
near the river -Â from typhoid rather than wounds.
Nobody set out to be cruel – farmers’
sons killing farmers’ sons. Their graveyard
above the bluffs was grassed, an obelisk built,
their names cast in bronze, bolted to limestone.
From the highway, there is no signage.
Eagles winter on the bluffs. America’s heart
is green and fecund: a confluence -
Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi.
VIRTUALLY BIRDLESS IN ASSISI
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on July 23rd, 2009
The Dodo, Ustad Mansur, Agra, 1610
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For Sarah:Â always a conservationist, latterly a twitcher.
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                                i
In Umbria – the cuore verde of pristine, wooded hills,
Orvieto’s honey-pale wines,
the paintings of Perugino and Pisano,
the Tiber’s milky jade,
tartufo nero -
they stew thrush.
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                                ii
At least once in our suburban garden,
house sparrow, green finch, ring-necked dove, wren,
jay, wood pigeon, robin, starling, Â swift, Â jackdaw, blue tit,
magpie, blackbird, sparrowhawk, chaffinch, swallow,
gold crest, bull  finch, great tit, hen harrier, mistle thrush
have, variously, courted, mated, nested, birthed, ate, shat, killed,Â
bobbed, waddled, hopped, walked, pecked, fluttered, shrieked,Â
whistled, warbled, squawked and died.
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                               iii
But, above all, sang – that esoteric music,
rich and varied as their plumage:
untutored, uncultivated, unstinting.
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                                iv
Though only crows circle St. Francis’ basilica,
in Cheshire ostriches are farmed.
How accidents of diet, doctrine, sentiment and flag
determine extinction!
THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on July 23rd, 2009
Blondin carrying his manager, Harry Colcord, on a tightrope.
Witness The Great Wallenda, an aging
high wire artiste, who, for his final act,
required technology’s summation -
tv, automobiles, bottles of plasma;
crossed a canyon on cable thin as a wrist;
walked on wire a quarter of a mile
above the earth. He stood, twice, on his head
and the crowds of thousands gasped, then cheered,
the noise muffled in that oh! profound gorge.
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