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Poetry by Carl Selph

Page 7

"In my most secret spirit grew
       A whirling and a wandering fire..."
                --  W.B.Yeats

 

 

Boy on a Bicycle
   

Bicycling from movies with a clipper's grace I moved
Toward the moon I fished for and netted with a tree.
With trade winds of breath through a megaphone of poems
I spoke the rising, falling stars with impartial ease.
The Great Dog and the Little Dog exultantly howled.
      
 
The house on the hill, like a ship on a wave that rose
In one great permanent billow and held me up and going,
Berthed my broad dreams in a cold, narrow bed.
My prayers went out like signals to God who was the moon.
      
 
Admitting the damp ashes of a January morning,
My eyes suffered the solid land under a mist of rain.
I pedaled toward school in a sharp daze of growing.
The sun watered.  My desires nipped at my heels.
      

© Carl Selph, 1960
    First published in Descant

Blessings on All This Green Unpleasance

Little of life without rime or season
I lived before I met that blossom
The buttercup whispering all cold poison
     Is drunk from a gold cup:
      
 
I came well seasoned from my mother
To provide this season with its broth
While I toil in my simmering trouble
     And boil toward April
      
 
Yet blessings on all this green unpleasance
That taps my vein for its roaring flood
My sacrifice is all too human
     For any good--still, blessings
      
 
I praise the bread from the ground bones
And the kettle wind that whistles my breath
Though the cook of all is frying my fettle
     In a pond of March
      
 
But being too human for any good
In a galloping wind and a day like sixty
I bind this wildering whorled water
     To my tricked heart
      
 
And bless confusion that sings like poems
To a man in a chair by a blowing window
Seeing grass and thinking windrows
     The yellow resolving of this green.
      
 
For what shall I hope for when some spring
Has satisfied all expectations
Holding my face between her fingers
     Awarding love between her thighbones?
      

© Carl Selph, 1953
    First published in Beloit Poetry Journal
                     
                          

 

Note to a Contemporary, 1953

  
Young man lying abed, your belly flat
To the white moon:  your ankles, your wrists, your
Throat are bound to your bed with thongs of nerve
While the imminent summer shrieks and careens
Like a diesel engine, you on its track.
      
 
The childhood that grew so interestingly 
Wild and the unbelievable puberty with its
Following carefully-nurtured adolescence (measuring
Developments at the mirror, the vague shading
On the chest) and all the shattering sparkling
      
 
Thoughts that burst like violent holidays
In your brain, all their exhilaration of tears
And hilarity:  these, trapped comrade, await
The crude commands of summer, its misused
Blood, the startling unfamiliarity and possible blood.
      
 
But O young man, bones glisten white under this trestle
Where summer has driven, chopped by stone axes,
Trampled by shod horses in the days before trains.
Oh, you are not novel lying with your thought --  you
With your negligible span, your sleeplessness.
      
      

 © Carl Selph, 1954 
     First published in Prairie Schooner      
                      

 

The Expatriate

     "I girdid up my Lions & fled the Seen."
                    -- Artemus Ward

      
 
      
 
At seventeen he went to college.  There,
after a year of compulsory prayer
among the Baptists and the incursion
of thoughts about the Authorized Version,
he moved on.  The state university
turned out to be an ideal nursery
for the post-adolescent agonies
for which he won honorary degrees
in sexual anguish, loss of gods,
aesthetic chaos...the usual fantods.
      
 
Fully equipped, he began moving around --
new places, jobs, lovers.  When he found
something he thought somehow might endure
he packed and left.  Seduction by the sure
thing was a pleasure that too quickly cloyed.
At least he knew what he had to avoid.
And since by Good Housekeeping standards he was flawed
irremediably, he went abroad,
where living through fresh versions of stress
soothed, assured him of the world's sameness.
      
 
He'd always felt an alien at home --
odd-man-out, angered, itchy, bored, formal;
at least in Taxco, Tangiers, Athens, Rome,
absence of ease seemed perfectly normal.
      
 
Lacking the provincial's smug sedation,
not sure Heaven was his destination,
and feeling far from home both here and there,
he thought it politer to breathe foreign air.
Alien in corn, vine, cactus, heather,
he pledged allegiance to low rents, weather.
      
 
Home or abroad he had the same pulse rate:
abroad it just seemed more appropriate.
Something he could not understand:
why Philip Nolan missed his Native Land.
He knew -- in cold, temperate, torrid zones --
Earth was not where he pined to rest his bones.
      

© Carl Selph, 1999

 

Volcanoes

 
Leaving Reykjavik, Icelandic Airways swung
out over the steel-feathered Atlantic
to let each heavy Icarus of us assist
at the birth of a white-hot island
bubbling up, ready to melt us down
from where -- there -- we precariously hung.
      
 
And on to London and a change, Milano
and a train by night into the warm South.
Alone in my compartment, I let the window down
and Italy blew in.  Back again, this time for life.
      
 
Years later, in another country, I remember
the piteous, reaching, plaster man.
One may not thrive too near the volcano.
      

© Carl Selph, 1999

All text on this page is copyrighted by Carl Selph and appears here by permission. All rights reserved. It may not be archived beyond one personal electronic copy for offline reading; such a copy must include the entire text of the present notice and the author's name. It may not be printed, posted on a web-site, distributed publicly or privately, used or quoted in whole or in part, or published in any manner or form whatsoever without the author's explicit permission. E-mail Wordreign to contact Carl Selph and your request will be promptly forwarded.

 

 

 

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