Archive for October, 2011
LOOKING FOR PUFFINS: SOUTH STACK REVISITED – A POEM FOR OUR DAUGHTER
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on October 29th, 2011
South Stack, Ynys Môn, ©SCES 2009
Of course, by the time it’s my turn at the ’scope
the bugger’s turned its back. ‘It is a puffin,’
reassures the RSPB girl – and,
since she’s pretty and young, I believe
that what I see is not one of the teeming,
noisy, noisome, nesting guillemots,
razorbills or gulls. A hat trick: ageism,
sexism, anthropomorphism – plus
being churlish as a bear rather than
valiant as a lion. Intriguing opposites. Grrr!
We came here last when she was five or six.
Decades on, she stands with her lover
at a turn in the steps – both happy,
both blooming with her longed-for future,
and wrestling with the breeze for your camera.
Some gulls have eschewed the crowded cliffs
to nest in the lighthouse’s disused kitchen garden.
We lean on the wall like pig farmers.
There is a dead chick amongst the gooseberries.
A living one stands, yes, surprised, startled but resolute
though even here winds roar like lions or bears.
I hold my breath…1,2,3…for us all.
ONLY ONE IN STEP
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on October 29th, 2011
Plato's Allegory of the Cave
i
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
ii
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.
MARJORIE BEEBE’S BOTTOM
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on October 29th, 2011
For Ian Craine
‘Marjorie Beebe is the greatest comic possibility that ever worked in my studio. I think she is destined to become the finest comedienne the screen has ever seen.’ Mack Sennett
Marjorie Beebe in 'The Farmer's Daughter' 1928
Her bottom was a serious matter:
the butt, as it were, of numerous pratfalls
in many Mack Sennett two reelers – like
The Chumps, Campus Crushes and The Cowcatcher’s
Daughter – in which she was a capricious,
lubricious Columbine with witty eyes
and good teeth and various Harlequins,
who ended invariably as losers.
From Kansas City, her mother took her,
on the Yellow Brick Road, to Tinsel Town.
Beebe and Sennett became lovers, despite
or because of the thirty year difference,
so he knew her asset first hand so to speak.
From silents to talkies, slapsticks to wise cracks,
her Mid West accent playing well, then Mack goes bust
and Marjorie gradually disappears.
Was it the booze? She was certainly
a toper. Or, more likely, The Hays Code:
irony suppressed, vulgarity outlawed,
Puritan America triumphant!
WISHES
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on October 29th, 2011
For Evelyn b. 13 1.10
Born to good music by strong women,
Ella’s ‘isle of joy’, Nina’s ’it’s a new dawn’ -
how you nestle in your parents’ untrammelled
love, how you suck with unrelenting hunger!
Born into a world of rubble, with children
buried alive, a world of chicanery
and hatreds – you have entered a difficult,
place, little Evie, somewhere remarkable,
full of tears and amazing kindnesses!
Born into a world of snow, a fox’s
nocturnal tracks in the white garden
of the tall, Victorian villa, a Blackcap
at the bird feeder, a Redwing sheltering
in the laurel and, away on the Downs,
boys and girls, freed from school, tobogganing
over the fossils and flints on the steep shore
of a palaeolithic sea – how you squirm
with hunger, how you bask in so much love!
Three wishes then for you, little bird:
may you be lucky, may you be gracious,
may you always have someone to love!
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