Posts Tagged oblivion
UN DIMANCHE APRES-MIDI À L’ÃŽLE 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 Рin the Place de Gr̬ve,
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.
CROSBY
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on January 26th, 2011
Another Place ©SCES 2008
We crunch through razor shells and squelch through
blackish silt – there is coal in the drenched sand -
to reach the artist’s cast iron avatars.
They are steadfast against anglers, vandals,
local Tories, jet skiers, the Coastguard,
and the RSPB – but not the wind
or the sea. Some are rusting deeply,
some barnacled already, some sinking
or rising – others missing on this
shifty shore. They have watched the North Sea.
Now, from here, they can see Snowdonia,
The Skerries, Queenstown, the New World -
and, some, when the tide is in, sea creatures
in their wilderness of oblivion.
Above, ships pass and the wind farm turns.
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
The hardback quarto exercise book opens
at ‘Funny Valentine’, an unfinished,
blank verse piece – full of Auden, Larkin, Yeats –
in thick-nib fountain pen on feint ruled lines.
Four decades old and more – and pristine:
‘Today, at best, brings scented, satin hearts,
Numb messengers of somebody’s desires…’
I can see the back room in the shared flat:
sagging bed, faded armchair, torn carpet,
wobbly table; I’d brought a large ashtray,
a glass fronted bookcase and a small, handmade
Chinese cabinet; a tv blared upstairs.
Through the sash window stuck fast with paint
was the littered garden – out of sight and
sound, all of Liverpool, swinging city.
I google Lorenz Hart’s lyrics – ‘Your looks
are laughable, unphotographable,
Yet you’re my favorite work of art’- and hear
Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald.
The cabinet – carved drawers filled now with years
of love – was a woman’s gift to a man
coming of age. But I was a boy, full
of fears and words. ‘Stay little valentine, stay…’
Borne on the leafy fretwork of the doors,
two gilded, lacquered kingfishers in flight,
sun catching on their iridescent wings,
fall together into oblivion.
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