Archive for April, 2010
ALIASES
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on April 18th, 2010
The Lenin Statue, the new FSB (aka Cheka, NKVD, KGB) HQ and a new church supported, in part, by Mars pet foods. ©SCES 2000
We remembered the newsreels with Uncle Joe
aka Koba the only one in grey,
so expected a black and white city.
But the colours astound us, beguile.
From our apartment – which used to be bugged -
we overlook what used to be October Square.
The monumental bronze statue -Â of Lenin, V.I.,
with assorted comrade soldiers and sailors set to march,
by Gorky Park, over the Crimea Bridge,
toward the Kremlin – is intact.
In May, parties of veterans queue to see Lenin
(erstwhile Ulyanov, V.I.) preserved.
Behind the Mausoleum, in the garden
of remembrance, is a bust of Stalin
(erstwhile Djugashvili, J.V.). Always,
fresh roses surround it. However,
in the Sculpture Park, the Great Helmsman,
in red granite, has had his nose knocked off.
Putin (sic), V.V. is crowned in the Tzar’s Cathedral,
the Annunciation. The double-headed eagle flies.
Like his forebears, he takes the salute in Red Square.
They are all dressed up in the uniforms
of the Great Patriotic War – and the troops
(not a tenor amongst them) greet their little C in C
with the time dishonoured and oh
so genuinely moving: “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!”
Sometimes, that spring, when we opened the windows,
we thought we smelled tundra, sea and ice.
Opposite the Lenin statue, outside the Metro,
an elderly woman, in a worn, quilted coat,
sold wild hyacinths. We did not understand
the price. She fluttered her hand above her heart.
AFTER THE RIOTS
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on April 18th, 2010
A skyline as idiosyncratic
as Manhattan’s, Chicago’s – its totems
of wealth, faith and dominion – belies
the city’s cruelty: fortunes from famine,
despotism, slavery; licensing
of squalor, bigotry and despair.
In the park where the Orange Lodge drummed out
The Twelfth, a rape was immediate headlines -
white girl, black youths. In Toxteth – its decayed
squares and terraces built on molasses
and cotton, some street signs repainted green,
gold, red, the colours of Rastafari -
was daubed, ‘Vote ANC’.
THE LAST REFUGE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on April 18th, 2010
‘Two bald men fighting over a comb…’ José Luis Borges
Almost always, winds blew – over heath and sheep.
Seas swelled southward – to ice, minerals.
Mapped, the islands seemed like green spume: a tattered
standard blown west. That bleak solitude
was Arthur Ransome country – The Camp,
Tumbledown Mountain – naive, single minded,
like the Falkland Flightless Steamer duck…
Larger than Greenland, smaller than India,
Argentina did not exist. Beyond
the cricket pitches was a wilderness
imagined, and illusive Indians
- ersatz Europe: anti-semitism
without chamber music.
HMS Ineludible sailed south,
Ward Room loud with rugby songs and Mess Deck
with obscenity. The glass was falling
and we were united in delusion.
The oligarchy of the point-to-point,
the clubhouse autocrats – stalking, for
decades, the welfare state – was seeking now
its last refuge. (Donkeys braying again
at the Menin Gate). Demagogues and
dockside farewells touched – a nation’s wishful,
seductive balm – like rhyming ‘liberty’
with ‘country’, ‘duty’, ‘butchery’. There were
real wounds and they festered.
And afterwards, on fenced-off heath, HMG
buried abandoned Argentine corpses
in some corner of andsoforth. Each cross
was patriotism’s benchmark: rejection
in defeat, in victory, a dutiful
compassion – or propaganda? Dead ground
marked the frontier between humanity
and cant. Widows from Rio Negro, mothers
from Buenos Aires were unlikely
to visit or invade.
ONLY ONE IN STEP
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on April 18th, 2010
Plato's Allegory of the Cave
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is
somehow very ‘Thirties: lots of chaps in
the dark behind high walls; much shadow-play
with unidentifiable voices;
belated, blinding suddenness of light.
The decade’s putative worthies (who all,
by the way, seem to have been chaps) go forth
unknowingly in parallel: e.g.
Hitler in Berchtesgarten, Wittgenstein
(Adolf’s erstwhile peer from Linz) in Cambridge.
Did Wittgenstein walk with Blunt, Philby,
Burgess and Maclean as the fifth man?
Meanwhile, elsewhere at Trinity College,
A.E. Housman tutored Enoch Powell: two
classicist lads from the West Midlands – and
the land of lost and wistful laddishness.
Our Enoch giving chase
Our Enoch – the wife’s second cousin twice
removed – although he always acted the
philosopher-king, indeed believed it,
in Parliament, in uniform, in the
groves of academe – appeared to labour,
tormented, in the dark, poor soul. Always
a solitary, he was chained to the
metaphysics of empire, protocol
and tribe: from the ‘Rivers of blood’ to ‘No
Surrender!’, preferring voluntary
exile to certain public failure. Yet,
see how, the fluent theme has become a
continuo – ‘influx’, ‘deluge’, ‘flood’, how
his acolytes have grown, like dragon’s teeth,
loquacious prisoners in Powell’s teeming,
booming cave of phantasmagoria.
THE DISGUISED REPUBLIC
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on April 18th, 2010
For Mark Chapman, PPC
So well is our real government concealed, that if you tell a cabman to drive to ‘Downing Street’ he most likely will never have heard of it…It is only a ‘disguised republic’, which is suited to such a being as the Englishman in such a century as the nineteenth.
THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION, Walter Bagehot, 1867.
HM’s Garden Parties turn the Bagehot trick,
showing GB as it really, really is:
the Law, the Cloth, clerks, hacks, uniforms,
diplomats, local government officers
and the odd charity bod – some wearing gloves!
Strangely, though there are two regimental bands,
there aren’t enough chairs, the ice cream runs out
and so many guests leave early – out
into London’s levelling traffic.
Fresh from the slaughter at Culloden,
the Duke of Cumberland’s men created
Virginia Water, a little bit
of highland wilderness in Surrey
- the land, a gift from the Duke’s grateful dad,
Her Present Majesty’s great-great-great-
granddad, for stuffing the Scots for good.
And it’s still in the family – with all
those acres and paintings and pottery,
liveries and lackeys, vanity and greed.
How well they obscure where real power lies!
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