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Poetry by Carl Selph

Page 9

"Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
  And ancient lineaments are blotted out."
                           --  W.B.Yeats

The Marchesa

For Jack Frankfurter

 
I met D'Annunzio while I was blonde --
one summer -- in Venezia.  We weren't,
of course, Fascisti -- Darling, no one was! --
but still he was a fascinating man.
I wore my rubies...a black, sequined gown.
I gave my maid that dress. Edda Ciano, 
at the same ball, wore one identical!
      
 
I met the Porters frequently those days.
Linda, I thought, was beautiful -- but cold --
quite chic,  he like a monkey.  And, you know,
he was comme ça  -- he liked the pretty boys.
That Maxwell person was ubiquitous.
Looked like a pug.  Her charms escaped me quite.
      
 
Wonderful years!  Back then, of course, we had
the whole palazzo  just for ourselves.
No shops, no flats let out to hoi polloi.
The ballroom, where my mother entertained
the king and queen, is where they're selling knit-
wear now.  The crown prince came to luncheon once.
We wondered how he had contrived to make
so many babies.  Noel Coward said,
speaking of someone else, "Well, probably
he lashed it to a toothbrush once."  Oh, we
of course had seen him in newsreels, the swoop-
ing like a swallow after bugs, the hands....
We said they should be tied behind his back.
He was amusing, though I now suppose
his abdication was the wisest move.
If not, my God! today we'd have the son!
      
 
When poor Umberto left for Portugal,
you know, his family had sat some throne
longer than any other in the West.
True mediocrity, someone observed,
is just about invincible.
      
 
                                    The war
changed everything, of course.  The Germans seemed --
the ones we met -- so civilized.  And then ...
the bridges mined, the lungarni  destroyed.
Just after that the Allies came, and I --
that's when I met my darling general...
important, handsome...quite presentable.
My great, great love!  We had a grand affair.
      
 
But let's be honest now:  I'm Florentine:
He was a true convenience at the time.
Before all else, perhaps, we Tuscans see
the world in terms of cash -- and after all,
banks were  invented here.
      
 
                                           We're practical
and cynical -- and less sure of ourselves
than we let show.  Appearances come first.
My grandfather could not afford a car;
instead, for grand occasions he had made
a kind of decal with his coat of arms
that could be glued to a hired limousine.
      
 
It's wretched being old.  I hate to think
I look like Donatello's Magadalene.
Sometimes I hold my rubies in my hands,
remembering when I was fresh and young.
D'Annunzio, if I had wanted him,
was mine.  He tried -- my dear, he really tried.
The youth today are mindless, rude beyond
belief.  A child driving a silver Porsche
nearly hit me yesterday and screamed
obscenities I didn't know I knew.
      
 
I think poor Italy is suffering
from three great ills:  democracy, trippers
on packaged tours, and wealth in vulgar hands.
      
 
How strange to think my world, the way we lived,
is gone.   But totally!  As far removed
as the ancien régime.  On our TV
last week I saw Bugatti driving off
in one of those big cars he made.  (My own
azure and cream Isotta had the seats
upholstered in a sapphire silk brocade.)
He might have been some sporty troglodyte
riding le dernier cri  in dinosaurs.

© Carl Selph, 1999

An Exile

 
      When forced to abdicate,
  Last of a line of matriarchs,
She took to drink, crosswords, and solitaire:
        No realm, no strife.
      
 
      By now subordinate,
    Deaf to most critical remarks,
She comes to Florence with her son and heir,
        To afterlife.
      
 
      With coral strung she sits
    In tea-gowns in his drawing-room,
Bourbon to hand, a Bible in her lap
        At times, and smiles
      
 
      At Tuscan exquisites--
    Her keeper's courtiers, one may assume--
Nor deigns to struggle in her silken trap:
        Whiskey beguiles.
      
 
      Daily more stooped and small,
    More foreign, inarticulate,
Unsure more frequently of hour or day,
        She sits and waits.
      
 
      Tonight, before them all,
    Despairing and inebriate,
She fell face forward in the consommé
        And broke the plate.

© Carl Selph, 1990 
    First published in the San Miguel Writer

The Contessa Mounted on her Arabian and at Home

 
 
Her son's a fool; her daughter's mad.
The count has dirty fingernails.
In riding togs the Countess looks
Descended from a race of cooks:
From iron pot to iron clad.
How money counts when all else fails!
      
 
Her blood is bluest Philistine.
Her villa's chiseled, fitted stones
Made an Etruscan tower strong.
How now, she thinks, to right what's wrong?
She posts past olive grove and vine
And ripening figs and all she owns.
      
 
The young count is an acned boor.
The contessina  married down,
Failed as borghese, and gave in,
Humiliated, numbed....  Our sin,
The Countess thinks, at stable door,
Is being human:  clown, crown, clown
      
 
In twenty generations.  We
Are living ugly fairy-tales.
We're useless, tiresome, even sad.
How many lifetimes since we had
More than an endless pedigree?
It's clear what counts when all else fails.
      
 
Diana romps; Pompeo fawns.
Her vintner's come to say what ails
Last year's not-quite-perfected wine.
Her dwarf goat eyes the eglantine.
Fantails spell out above the lawns
What really counts when all else fails.

© Carl Selph, 1999

The Principessa

 
With old age gnawing at her bones
The Princess set her hair aflame,
To frighten off the starveling bitch.
She was amused by melodrame.
      
 
Though knocked down by a garbage truck
While halted by a sudden thought
That caught her half-across a street,
She stood up to Death's Juggernaut,
      
 
With trousers decked her mended limbs,
And soon once more was lunching out
On wry, sardonic anecdotes.
At night, at home, she did without.
      
 
The Almanach does not describe
Nobility of recent date,
A lack the Princess did not mind;
Her mien was more than adequate.
      
 
In sequins, net, and well-set paste
She left one evening for a ball --
Holding, since she'd not paid the bill,
A kitchen match to light the hall.
      
 
The portiere, at the dawn,
Found on the landing of the stair
A lady crumpled, cold and dead,
With scarlet nails and hennaed hair,
      
 
And crossed himself and telephoned
To notify the Powers that Be
Another piece could be retrieved
Of a deceased Society.

© Carl Selph, 1999

La Nobildonna

           
The seicento is my period.
I like the lesser masters of the baroque --
Italians, not the grand, German
Bach -- their simpler curves,
and convolutions more easily resolved.
Though I have lived a long, long life in grim old Florence --
the Palazzo Vecchio is an antique hypodermic needle --
Bernini might have laid out my mind,
designed those high and angel-thronged, rose-clouded reaches
where I have made my home.
      
I am thought eccentric, but nothing
is anachronistic which serves someone.
I heap the complicated on top of the difficult
in all external things. That is my style.
Etiquette, immutable ceremonious ways,
have distanced me, precisely as I wished.
It is the simplest strategem I found,
a well-clipped maze,
of which I've had the plan for quite some time.
      
No one has understood -- my mother or my father,
the man I married, or the child I bore,
who all too soon
I saw would turn out a simple country gentleman.
Like Sleeping Beauty I lay at the heart
of a castle girded by a thorny hedge.
The difference: while all the others slept
my eyes were open. I saw it all
and chose not to participate.
I have had my music and my books:
Vivaldi, Albinoni, Pico, Tasso, John Donne...,
the Mannerists -- their not-quite-appropriate elegance. 
My manner has opened vistas and has given me
at the same time near-perfect privacy --
my giardino segreto: my bower, my hermitage -- my lair!
I admire disdain, have scorned most of the world;
and those I've spurned have paid me back with curiosity.
I am -- or was -- a curiosity, I suppose,
to the few who tried for closer scrutiny.
      
Acquaintances see me as a rigid woman
armored by a way of life against life's thrusts.
No one has ever guessed -- and it amuses me --
I fly through private heavens,
free now as I have almost always been, thank God,
my goal, since I first thought of goals,
to be completely civilized.
If my designs have forced some "natural" streams
through straitened conduits, I do not care:
I have lived by an aesthetic, and I know
constriction makes for beauty and for strength.
      
This may divert you:  when I go to the Uffizi once a year
I make it a point to see the group of the Laocoön,
an object lesson in entanglements.
Refusal to intervene saves one.
The serpent is always there, rearing out of the sea;
but I have wielded fastidiousness like a flaming sword,
so well, so long, that now if I cared to look
i imagine I might note, beyond a wrinkled waste of water,
merely a setting sun.

*       *       *

The bells of Santo Spirito announce the Angelus.
Swallows are circling in the deepening sky.
Lights flicker from Fiesole to San Miniato.
Great domes and towers rise in air the gold of florins.
Monte Morello watches over us.
Between stone walls the green Arno flows toward our sea.

© Carl Selph, 1993 
    (excerpted from "Una Nobildonna",
      published in its entirety in Bellowing Ark)

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