Archive for February, 2011
UN DIMANCHE APRES-MIDI À L’ÎLE DE LA GRANDE JATTE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on February 15th, 2011
'A Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte', Georges Seurat, 1884
The trombonist will blow unnoticed. Much is absurd:
a monkey, women in bustles, the brass player.
The bourgeoisie reflects in post-prandial
tranquillity… Purges, coronations in Paris,
the metropolis of revolution, where Haussman’s
boulevards were an imperial stockade…
For two sous, the ferry transports Georges Seurat
across the Seine to the Ile de La Grande Jatte. Two years’
preparation, observation of colour, shape,
application of theory delineate an
historical moment, which never occurred.
In shade, a man with a clay pipe reclines, so self-
absorbed he breathes – like the infantry officers
striding this way. The vistas of shadows, sunlight,
water – each coruscating perspective – catch
the city’s portentous murmur… On the Champ de Mars,
Dreyfus is humiliated – in the Place de Grève,
Marie Antoinette… Northward, Prussian howitzers
position. From the Vélodrome d’ Hiver, the Jews
are leaving for Birkenau. Against the high wall
of Pêre Lachaise, the remnant of the Communards
is shot. The citizens are culled in this city
of bloody principle and virtuous
mayhem – thousands in La Semaine Sanglante…
He was of his epoch: diligent, self-
regarding, a scion of the bourgeoisie –
mistress and son secreted in Montmartre.
He conjugated art with science, measured
the golden mean by the chemistry of colour.
He died young of a weakened heart and was buried
in Pêre Lachaise. Light records nothing. Only words
describe past as history. Lozenges of paint
are ignorant of irony, are the colour
of time. One late and sunlit afternoon, a child
follows a butterfly into oblivion.
THE MEMORIES OF SLAVES
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on February 15th, 2011
On Overton Hill, an obelisk
in local sandstone marks the parish war dead.
Fresh graffiti partly obscure Worrall,
Egerton, Massey – names of Cheshire gentry,
villages, labourers. There is a solace
in landscapes, remorseless historians.
Below the hill, the town becomes a toy.
To the horizon, are laid out the pricey,
strategic illusions: refineries
distilling forests and the wide, poisoned
river narrowing to an ashen,
urban haze of broken streets, redundant wharves,
the memories of slaves.
POETIC JUSTICE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on February 15th, 2011
A wishful thinking editor re-spelt
my name with a T and changed a poem’s
final words from ‘a tramp woman nurses
an infant/under a tumbling sky’ to
‘under a trembling sky’. Humbling to find
an editor’s chance(?) choice of epithet
happier than mine own! Mine was truer.
One winter night, I was changing trains at Crewe
and a red faced fellow traveller
sang, “…not her beauty alone. ‘Twas the truth
in her eye made me love the Rose of Tralee”.
His pale wife shivered by their cardboard case.
His breath condensed like the whitest of roses.
DINAS BRÂN, LLANGOLLEN
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on February 15th, 2011
'Castell Dinas Bran', Richard Wilson, circa 1771
The path zigzags upwards to the keep, like
smoke or a hare hounded. Magpies lowfly
the gorse, bank to a clump of pine, barks pink
as coral. Ravens wheel. Birds and the wind
disdain the ruins peasants carted, raised,
razed and thieved. Before allegiances, walls
was this hill, that vast, limestone precipice
and, everywhere, silent, ancient waters.
Whoever sees the turf worn with walkers’
traffic and earth’s crust shining, whoever
looks across the vanished sea to the cliff’s
myriad catacombs will imagine the hoe
snick in the furrow, the clangour of arms
and the chough’s triumphant croak.
Defenders, tousled on the battlements,
watched fields sown, leaves fall, expected Saxons.
Foes were covert. A viaduct terminates
the valley and trim, mechanical
dynasties converge on the smoky plain.
The journey from Powys to the Five Towns
was all of sixteen leagues, as ravens fly,
a thousand years and such optimism.
Recent Comments