Archive for March, 2010
OH YES THERE IS!
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on March 28th, 2010
Queen Scheherazade telling her stories to King Shahryar
You are Princess Ayesha, the principal girl,
in the youth group’s pantomime at St Barnabas,
West Street, Crewe. Disguised as a boy, you are searching
for Aladdin – your true, lost love – in the canvas
forest and the bazaar, among the painted caves
and the amphora. Heavily Max Factored, dressed
in torn shirt and ripped shorts – having crossed the desert,
outwitted each one of the forty thieves, bested
Abanazar, bamboozled the Genie and charmed
Widow Twankey to be downstage centre – you sang
Buddy Holly’s top of the hit parade, ‘Oh Boy!’
Your story – we had not met then – though embellished,
of course. But I can see you as clearly as if
we had – in what you say, leave unsaid, and do not
know about yourself: lovely, witty, determined,
courageous, heart breaking. ‘Oh boy, when you’re with me,
Oh boy, the world can see That you, were meant, for me.’
THE PRICE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on March 28th, 2010
Just beyond the lamp’s beam, where coal and dark
were one, was fire, flood, blast and rockfall.
Shoring bulged, split. Rock jerked through. Earth returned.
Exploited roofs fell, distantly like sighs.
How men loved life to work that labyrinth
crowded with frustrated lives! There were
children in the collapsed seams. There was dust
in ears, nostril, mouth, pores – ubiquitous
as death, death’s colour – and in the palm, a chance
shaving from the crushed forests, the suppressed
centuries, drawing blood.
PREPOSITIONS II
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on March 28th, 2010
TO LINDISFARNE
From Seahouses to
Inner Farne, a bumble bee
escorted our boat.
OFF POINT OF AIR
In a far channel,
a lone boatmen plays the pipes:
‘The Road to the Isles’.
FROM HILBRE ISLAND
A pale summer’s day -
low tide, windless, infinite:
seals bark distantly.
ON YNYS LLANDDWYN
On summer’s last day,
wind flecked wave crests arise, curl,
spill like quick-silver.
FROM THE MARITIME MUSEUM
Brown pelicans glide
freely, over Alcatraz,
like tawny galleons.
FROM GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE
Shouldering the wind, our
close shadows are stretched below
on the ribbed water.
ON SCREMERSTON BEACH, NEW YEAR’S DAY
In the dunes, a seal
was stranded – dissipating whisky
and resolve.
THE GREATEST OF THESE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on March 28th, 2010
All day I was accosted by the same
black wino who called me, “Sir”, who had not,
he said, worked for three years, had an illness
(unspecified) and never knew me though
we met outside the Tribune Tower, the
Art Institute, a camera shop on
Wabash, Berghof’s, and then under the El
at State and Jackson! Finally, as I
took my first Wild Turkey of the evening
while I stood at my hotel window, there
he was on the far side of Harrison,
raising the product of his day’s labour
in, surely not, salute!
PARTING THE WAYS
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on March 28th, 2010
Earthmovers roared, made a whirling progress
six days a week: a four-lane highway
to bypass our provincial town. Gone were
Traveller’s Joy, Heartsease, Love-in-Idleness.
Our wood and its narrow roadway – a lovers’
thoroughfare – severed. Only clay was left
from world’s edge to world’s end: a no-man’s-land,
a dried-up riverbed. One Sunday,
our daughter crossed the silent excavation
and, from the opposite bank, called out:
‘It’s just like the Red Sea!’ And she waved.
We acknowledged the future lovingly.
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