Posts Tagged sunlight
UN DIMANCHE APRES-MIDI Ă€ L’ĂŽLE 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 PĂŞre 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 PĂŞre 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.
UNDER NOVEMBER SKIES
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on November 28th, 2010
The rain has stopped. We can hear only the wind
and a swollen stream – hidden beneath
the high moor’s golden fern – rush through a culvert
under the road, which glistens, after the shower,
in an unexpected shaft of sunlight.
Rain clouds are blackening the mountains
to the west but northwards, beyond bracken
and gorse that stretches seemingly to land’s edge,
through a gap in the hills, we can see the sea,
a sunny blue, and a white ship sailing east –
too far away to recognise her flags.
Chance has brought us here as winter comes. Love
stays us against the dark.
LOVE, AGAIN
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on November 29th, 2009
Above me, on the slates, pigeons are cooing -
and some already billing, though winter
has many weeks to run. Like a shadow play,
sunlight silhouettes them on the wall
the study window faces. From the desk,
I have looked up, over three decades,Â
to tease, from bricks, reluctant words of love.
Â
Before the allotments were sold off,
by the railway, there were pigeon lofts.
At dawn, out of a livid sky, birds
would home with only guessed at effort, like
the best of words: would touch down in the
empty, wooden rooms, now beating
with feathers, now cooing.
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