Archive for May, 2010
A BOOK OF HOURS
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on May 30th, 2010
'FĂ©vrier' from Les Tres Riche Heures du Duc De Berry
July
We are rather formally attired
for country pursuits in the ducal woods;
August
me with a tie and you, I uncover,
with white suspenders and matching knickers.
September
Intimate stranger, forever touching
for your least kindness, forever surprising;
October
unpredictable as light, you bring
my heart from hiding again and again!
November
Earth warms. Ice melts. Seas rise. And nothing,
everything changes. Each day, we marvel.
December
Still flowering, for our wintry birthdays,
are fuchsias, geraniums, a rose.
January
As the tide turns, we watch snow drifting
landward over fields, woods, hilltops.
February
We turn for home – and, in the dark border
beneath the ivy, find the first snowdrop.
March
Our camellia flowers: hardy, exotic.
Palaces are stormed. Governments fall.
April
Somewhere the wind is always blowing.
We make our house tight against all weathers.
May
A solitary swift arrives, gliding,
banking, silent. Our daughter is born.
June
And verdant England is replete with bird song,
with that hushed stirring, that old, old promise.
DULCE DOMUM
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on May 30th, 2010
Built well before the Mahdi sacked Khartoum,
like a ledger or the Church of England
our house is square, accommodating. Swifts,
each May, pronounce their southern benison
on ashlar cornerstones and dead masons…
A butterfly, lost in the wintry cellar,
seems closed as death but wings part knowingly.
O peacock eyes, how you seduce from purpose
and time! Imperial birds cry harshly
in paper gardens… At dusk, in indigo,
swifts dissolve. The house is white, seems solid
as a steamship. Darwin and Marx sent more
than smoke up the funnel.
THE FALL OF EUROPE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on May 30th, 2010
The Assassin
Lucheni had waited all day in the pines
above the lake. When she passed, he begged.
Her equerry dismissed him. As always,
self-absorbed, she saw nothing: an anarchist
with a grand and personal design.
On the quayside at Geneva, a week
later, Lucheni, the labourer,
stabbed Elizabeth, Empress of Austria,
with a homemade knife. Her husband foresaw,
like her assassin, anarchy: armies
entrenching in Bohemia; riders
galloping from Buda; at the Hofburg,
Jews and republicans!
The Crown Prince
The Empress and her only son discovered
the twentieth century. Rudolf
was cavalry and a liberal. ‘After
a long period of sickness,’ he wrote,
‘a wholly new Europe will arise
and bloom.’ Father misunderstood him.
At Mayerling, Rudolf shot Marie Vetsera
and then himself. Elizabeth travelled
from grief or disillusion: obsessive,
dilettante, naive and beautiful.
They died before their time, believing
their neuroses symptoms of the age, the world’s
contours shaped like their hearts.
The Empress
On Corfu, she built The Achillean,
a kitsch imitation of the attic.
She peopled the palace’s emptiness
with statues of soldiers and poets -
like Heine, her favourite. “Another
subversive Jew!” the Emperor observed.
‘Ich hatte einst ein schones Vaterland.’
The Dying Achilles, nude except for
his helmet, was turned to face the north – Berlin
Vienna, Sarajevo. After
her death, the Kaiser bought the palace,
sold off Heine and replaced her Achilles
with his, The Victorious.
The Emperor
Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria,
King of Jerusalem, Duke of Auschwitz,
wore, on his wedding night, dress uniform.
He signed his letters to Elizabeth,
‘Your lonely manikin.’ After he had read
the telegram informing him of her death,
“No one knows,” he said, “how much we loved
each other.” ‘Es traumte mir von einer
Sommernacht.’ Across the darkening straits,
lamps are lit on the Balkan mainland.
On the empty terrace, a march or perhaps
a waltz wheezes from the orchestrion.
Fireflies blink with passion.
CHUZPAH
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on May 30th, 2010
A nor’ easterly blew – over Dutchman Bank -
on the front at Beaumaris, so we had
our chips, fish and mushy peas in the Vectra,
watching the ebb tide slowly, slowly expose
the furrowed gold of the Lavin Sands
and the cormorants and oyster catchers
skim the waves, when, suddenly, a herring gull,
that voracious omnivore, that frequenter
of rubbish tips and landfills – the colours
of its plumage pristine, as if painted -
landed on our bonnet and, not six feet
from a town council notice forbidding
the feeding of said beasts, watched us eat
each pea, chip, fish flake and morsel of batter -
meanwhile blocking the view – and then buggered off!
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