Posts Tagged ashlar
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 -Â sparrows in flight,
a leaf falling. Love lasts.
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.
AT MYCENAE 1984
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on December 20th, 2009
Behind the lintel of the Lion Gate,
swallows had built their nest. Two Mirage jets,
burning Nato dollars, buzzed the valley.
A sweatstained, overweight American
squatted in the shade of the ashlar ramparts,
fanning himself with a bush hat. “Hey, which
pile of stones is this?” A veteran’s pension
kept him in exile. His mom and dad
had once stood arm-in-arm with that eager,
cropped marine recruit, who was altogether now
someone else. Thanksgiving and each birthday,
he would call collect. “This is the country
to screw up with your folks!”… He lies in the bunker,
smoking a joint. The black sergeant plays Hendrix
on his new Hitachi. From six miles
up the valley, NVA artillery
blow their minds… Parts of his skull were wired
like a broken vase. On the tourist bus,
his compatriots avoided him.
He smelt of despair, was a friend, a son,
brother missing in firefields of tattered
flags. Survivor’s guilt confounds. How he longed
to talk of Khe Sanh, how often spoke of
America! Swallows dipped above him,
under the gate. He did not look at them.
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