			Alice \| Tin.it \| Foto album \| Disco remoto \| Community

Poetry by Carl Selph

Page 14

"But a raving autumn shears
       Blossom from the summer's wreath..."
                  --  W.B.Yeats

Letter from Lon

 
           In Memoriam John Berger
      
 
      
 
I decided to be tested again.
Went to a clinic and had a whole battery.
Back for the results a week later.
Took a number and a seat and waited,
a little nervous when they skipped my number.
Thought I was being left for last,
one of those going to need counseling.
Finally, a doctor appeared with a file,
asked for patient 432.
Follow me, he said, which I did,
into a room where another doctor
was looking at a ledger.
Sit down, he said, and I collapsed,
thought, This Is It.
You're here for the test results, right?
Your name's Edward.
Yes, I said, but my name is Lon.
Duplicate numbers issued by mistake.
A third doctor came in with my file.
Everything came back negative, he said.
May I hug you, I asked, and he said yes.
      
 
Leaving, I saw an earlier number,
staring at the wall, tear-stained cheeks,
a boy who could have posed
for Watteau's tête de nêgre chalk drawings.

© Carl Selph, 1999

Long Distance

                      In Memoriam  B.K.C.
      
 
      
"It was like that disease, I can't remember
the name of it, where you want to walk
one way but you can't, or you walk another.
I lost fifteen pounds, could keep nothing down,
eyes sunk into my head.  I thought,
'This time it's going to be the end.'
      
 
"I'm really feeling fine now.
I'm certainly not ready for that yet!
      
 
"Can you hang on for another year?
I expect by then to get it all cleared up.
Do you think you can manage till then?
I'll spend five months down there.
We'll get something interesting going.
I'm eating again.  I have to go to Dallas,
but I'll take it easy.  I'll just put in
an appearance, do a star turn.
I know what's wrong with me now, and having
a name for it is more than half the battle.
      
 
"I'll be there in May.
Hang on.  I send lots of love."

© Carl Selph, 1999

Winter from a Window

 
 
Summer passed in reluctant dispossession;
Autumn paled beyond a final glow;
Winter came, a gradual progression,
Fire and ashes before resolving snow.
      
 
The unsymmetric mass of summer's trees
Is starkly etched and blackly strict,
Drawn taut against the sky with stilted ease
As snow fell deep and watches ticked.
      
Summer's fountain crooks a frozen finger,
Posturing formally to unresponsive ice.
Beckoned so, I know I dare not linger
Where all is dead and deaths entice.

© Carl Selph, 1952 
    First published in University of Kansas City Review

Visiting Graveyards

       
I come from another country, in early May,
to my brother's house.  I am the eldest child
and now, also, am old.  I live on a high plain
in an arid land.  Here everything is green on green,
and with dry eyes I look through dogwood trees
to the abundant lake water swaying
at the foot of the hill the house sits on.
      
 
I ask if we may drive over to the little town
where I was born and visit our mother's recent grave.
My brother's found where our great-great grandparents lie;
so he and his wife and I begin a day of pilgrimage.
      
 
Between two cedar trees plain upright slabs inform
that J.L. Selph and Thursey Ann, his wife, repose below.
The cemetery, on a gravel road, is Pleasant Hill.
We have a picture of John Levi, long-haired, goateed,
that scared me as a child.  He volunteered and fought
four years in the Civil War -- he who had no slaves
nor square miles of cotton to defend, 
and in the lost battles forever lost his strength.
      
 
In Sparkman, where we grew up, we eat at the one cafe,
unrecognized, and drive out to the family plot.
There, in the shade of a glossy-green magnolia tree,
John Levi's son, John, and Emma, his wife,
and Gail and Florence, our grandparents,
and Hugh and Christine, our father and our mother,
lie below identical low gray granite stones.
Afterwards we walk a township of graves
and meet few strangers.
      
 
At Holly Springs we stop to see a cousin, Lorice,
one of the few alive who knew me before I knew myself.
Despite a problem with her knees, she says she'll come
with us to visit more family graves:  my mother's parents,
John and Cora, her sister Addie, who died at five,
her brother Earl and his wife, Nannie Lou,
our great-grandparents Robert and Christiana,
and distant baby cousins with lambs atop their stones.
We stroll under enormous oaks and stop
before the fresh grave of a girl who was my schoolmate.
      
 
Gold sun, the easy breeze, green grass, green leaves.
Below the hill a spring of cool water, remembered.
And all the loss expressed in ordinary talk:
surprise at dates of birth and death, the simplest way
of cleaning lichen from old, flaking stone.
      
 
Driving back through colors deepened by the setting sun,
toward supper and the TV news, I think:
no matter how far I move away, I'm bound always
to places I would never live -- by all true ties --
of common history, of blood, of love,
and at the last I'll yield and be drawn back --
whatever's left of me --
to fill a space that always has been mine to claim.

© 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.

    Carl Selph Poetry Index                    Original Writing Page

E-mail Wordreign