Posts Tagged waltz
BEARINGS
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on July 31st, 2010
They lie after loving in a shuttered room,
lit with an underwater vagueness,
replete with jasmine. They hear but
do not listen to the hoopoe calling
in the almond tree or the goats clinking
softly in the olive grove. They no longer
even hear the roar of the cicadas.
She lies in his arms. They sink into sleep,
lovers drowsing in a perfumed sea.
The spate plucks willows weeping from the banks
and careers them swirling, whether or not,
to waltz downstream with honeysuckle stems,
a bloated lamb. Do we change course, with charts
and signals, once, inexorably? Or
do we drift at wind’s and swell’s mercy,
unremarked and far into the night?
A lamp flickers. The mainland is mauve,
precipitous, its valleys covert, profound.
A flute moans in olive groves. Brief insects
chafe the night air. Behind them, waves
from Africa rush to shore. They have steered
for open seas yet homed on the past.
They will skirt the swamp. Upstream, where the river
is jade, beneath the invisible nets
swifts weave, on a low hill, are fate’s stone doors.
Priests and their chicanery resurrect
numberless tribes of the dead: old men and brides,
lovers and generals. The future
waits like an assassin.
THE FALL OF EUROPE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on May 30th, 2010
The Assassin
Lucheni had waited all day in the pines
above the lake. When she passed, he begged.
Her equerry dismissed him. As always,
self-absorbed, she saw nothing: an anarchist
with a grand and personal design.
On the quayside at Geneva, a week
later, Lucheni, the labourer,
stabbed Elizabeth, Empress of Austria,
with a homemade knife. Her husband foresaw,
like her assassin, anarchy: armies
entrenching in Bohemia; riders
galloping from Buda; at the Hofburg,
Jews and republicans!
The Crown Prince
The Empress and her only son discovered
the twentieth century. Rudolf
was cavalry and a liberal. ‘After
a long period of sickness,’ he wrote,
‘a wholly new Europe will arise
and bloom.’ Father misunderstood him.
At Mayerling, Rudolf shot Marie Vetsera
and then himself. Elizabeth travelled
from grief or disillusion: obsessive,
dilettante, naive and beautiful.
They died before their time, believing
their neuroses symptoms of the age, the world’s
contours shaped like their hearts.
The Empress
On Corfu, she built The Achillean,
a kitsch imitation of the attic.
She peopled the palace’s emptiness
with statues of soldiers and poets -
like Heine, her favourite. “Another
subversive Jew!” the Emperor observed.
‘Ich hatte einst ein schones Vaterland.’
The Dying Achilles, nude except for
his helmet, was turned to face the north – Berlin
Vienna, Sarajevo. After
her death, the Kaiser bought the palace,
sold off Heine and replaced her Achilles
with his, The Victorious.
The Emperor
Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria,
King of Jerusalem, Duke of Auschwitz,
wore, on his wedding night, dress uniform.
He signed his letters to Elizabeth,
‘Your lonely manikin.’ After he had read
the telegram informing him of her death,
“No one knows,” he said, “how much we loved
each other.” ‘Es traumte mir von einer
Sommernacht.’ Across the darkening straits,
lamps are lit on the Balkan mainland.
On the empty terrace, a march or perhaps
a waltz wheezes from the orchestrion.
Fireflies blink with passion.
Recent Comments