HERE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on August 28th, 2010
Garden, Hoole © SCES 2006
For more than half our lives, we have lived
in this enigmatic, anachronistic
Victorian villa – built to look like
a Georgian farmhouse – with ashlar blocks
at three corners, the fourth unfinished.
A Valentine’s Day removal, we ate
a takeaway in the kitchen with friends.
The wife is a widow now. Our daughter
has grown, gone and visits: her childhood
still blesses the rooms sun touches through the day’s
compass. We have watched, at the long sash window
on the half landing, the sky and the garden
change through the slow seasons - sparrows in flight,
a leaf falling. Love lasts.
REPRISE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on August 28th, 2010
Window, KwaZulu-Natal © SCES 2006
This is a declaration of love
on August the 6th, our anniversary.
Here is your essence: the pathos of ink
pristine on domesday parchment makes you cry -
“Ah, bless them!” you say – not only the sad,
the halt but the deluded and the unmasked.
Wisely, you leave me few pretensions.
On Hiroshima Day, I celebrate
our forty four years with ephemera:
images of figures in landscapes;
walking an ancient copse full of wild
garlic and forget-me-nots, heaven’s colours -
and saying, “I love you”.
SEASONAL GREETINGS
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on August 28th, 2010
Door, Marrakech © SCES 2009
GUBBIO, WINTER 1992
Where the tourist buses turned, the Werhmacht
had murdered partisans – La Piazza
di Martiri Quaranti. The cold from the hill –
old, old rock – rose from the cathedral’s floor
into our very soles. Outside, February seemed mild,
seasoned with wood smoke. We bought a hand thrown,
hand painted jar with an ill fitting lid.
Since then: earthquakes, marriages…
GUILDFORD, SPRING 1998
Beneath the new Dillons in Guildford,
a mediaeval chamber, disclosed
during the refurbishment,
had been preserved.
Some archaeologists claimed
it was built as a synagogue:
others denied it.
Dillons’ MD was a Jew
the local paper informed us.
The peoples of the book misread each other.
THE CAPTAIN TILLY MEMORIAL PARK, QUEENS, SUMMER 2001
The Goose Pond was green with insecticide:
the West Nile mosquito threatened.
Named for the scion of a local family -
mutilated by Filipino freedom fighters
a century before – the Park was playground
for the replacements of the ‘teeming masses’:
Hispanics, Afro-Caribbeans, Asians.
From Memorial Hill, you could see the Twin Towers.
HOOLE, AUTUMN 2009
Two aging lovers, best friends in all the world,
orphaned late in life, walked circuits of the park
for their hearts; smiled at mums pushing buggies, scowled
at druggies near the gate; talked of ghosts and hope -
and jokes: ‘What’s this fly doing?’ ‘Waving, waving!’
Old lovers count their blessings, side by side.
VIRTUTIS FORTUNA COMES
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on August 28th, 2010
Stepping Stones, Kettlewell © SCES 2007
Lasting longer than the Thirty Years War,
than half our biblical shelf life, this marriage
has grown like coral – drops of the slain
Medusa’s blood – become, like Corallium
Nobile, a charm against fits, poison,
sorcery, whirlwind, lightning, fire, shipwreck!
From Norway’s fjords to the Cape Verde isles,
the Niger’s delta to the Orinoco’s,
reefs build, decline: the slow massing of
defunct algae, discarded oyster shells, lost
sailors’ bones; the unmarked ebb and flow
of topless towers, clayey tenements.
So, let’s celebrate chance, charity, courage –
Fortune’s inexorable comrades.
INTIMATIONS
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on August 28th, 2010
Embrasure, Spinalonga © SCES 2003
This house is sentient, light with rapture,
replete with canny, familiar ghosts.
This house has been indifferent
to vicissitudes of human fortune:
train wreck and famine, siege and tsunami.
The grounds have diminished. From the residue,
you have made an L-shaped paradise:
rhododendron, camellia, nasturtium,
eucalyptus – a global gazetteer.
On some summer nights, the pomaded air
heavy still with heat, there is a moment,
ecstatic, brief, when we will live forever.
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