Collected Poems: 1950 - 2002

By Carl Selph

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 13, 2007
• ISBN: 9781465322005

Carl Selph

Carl Selph was born in Sparkman, Arkansas, in 1931 and educated in Arkansas public schools and at Ouachita College, the University of Arkansas, and Columbia University. He has taught at the at the University of Arkansas, Auburn University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of North Carolina, Briarcliff College, the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and, for the University of Maryland, at U.S. military bases in Labrador, Newfoundland, the Azores, Iceland, and Italy. During a residence of twenty years in Florence he was co-owner of a language school and later of an export business. Returning to the United States, he sold antiques, before moving in 1990 to Mexico, where, with his partner, he now lives and designs and builds houses. In addition to poems, he has published short-stories and translations of Italian and Spanish poets.

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Copyright © 2007 by Carl Selph.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Acknowledgments: Versions of some of these poems, which were written in the years1950 through 2002, first appeared in Bellowing Ark, The Beloit Poetry journal, Blue Unicorn, The California Quarterly, The Colorado Quarterly, Descant, The Georgia Review, El Independiente, The Lyric, Mankato Poetry Review, Poetry Chap-Book, Poetry Motel, Prairie Schooner, Preview, San Miguel Writer, The University of Kansas City Review, Whetstone, and in two earlier collections—Two Poets (with Edsel Ford), 1951, and In a Galloping Wind, 1953.

My thanks to Nancy Phillips, Calvin Hennig, and Eliazar Torres for their help in preparing this book for publication.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

40298

Contents

Tulip, Ark.

Great-Grandpa Died on Monday

Great-Grandmother: A Reminiscence

Picnic

Boy on a Bicycle

Exodus

Winter from a Window

Blessings on All This Green Unpleasance

Note to a Contemporary, 1953

The White Crane

In the Museum

In Memory of Dylan Thomas

The Salesman who Reads Greek

Barbara Speaks to the River

Children Playing on Sunday

Notes on a Dead Love

Avis Compared

Her Complaint

The Survivors

On Corfu

On Mykonos

After Dinner, Saint-Tropez

Dream

View

The Expatriate

What Am I Doing

Volcanoes

In the Dead Hours

Clair de Lune

Air Base, Iceland, 1965

One of the Thoughtful Children

The Old Pirate

A Partial Insight

The Effects of Poison

Interior with Figures

A Thread

No Peace but Rage

In the Lobby

Orpheus Waking

Remembrance

Entering the Palazzo

Una Nobildonna

Glamour Girl, Firenze

Foreign Student

The Antiquarian

The Butcher

The Historian

The Greengrocer’s Daughter

On the Terrace of Casa Vivaio

Gino at Mass

Nobiltà Obbliga

The Marchesa

An Exile

The Contessa Mounted on her Arabian and at Home

The Principessa

The House in Tuscany

Song

For Two Men, Old Now

Art News

After Reading Claudia Roth Pierpoint

on Marina Tsvetaeva

Hibiscus Tea

Just off the Ring Road

How to Get to My House in Mexico

Mexico, La Noche

Family Outing

Poem

Ruminations

Losses

Calle Refugio

Letter from Lon

Long Distance

Visiting Graveyards

Butchering

Turning the Corner

To the Mountain

A Being in a Square

A Curse Upon a Rich Old Man

If God

News from the Cave

The Apostate’s Rhyme

Warning

Tool Talk

Bovinity

Letter to Italy

A Clear Day in Mexico

Targets

Mi Amor, My Love

Prayer on the Death of a Lady

of Perfect Taste

Adam Freeman

In memoriam

Albert Howard Carter

Edsel Ford

Nelle Martin Gibbins

Maggie Jacks

Hugh and Christine Selph

Tulip, Ark.

In Tulip there are no tulips

and in this sad south no magnolia trees.

Even way back the belles were big and countrified:

no brocade or satin

no small green velvet slippers

no colored aunts and uncles;

just pale blue eyes and red hands

homespun and cheap cotton.

The houses then were small

and gray from long dry spells

under a glittering polished sun

and small they are now

and yellow outside with dust by day

and yellow inside by night

with fly-specked naked bulbs.

No wide shady verandas

or fluted columns upholding classic porticoes

no grand pianos brought up from New Orleans

or floated down from St. Louis

no broad acres with singing field hands.

No, none of these ever

or ever

in this South

in this bleached dismisser of romance.

Almost there was glory once.

The old men kick the shavings

under lacy-whittled benches

and spit and talk of ifs and whens.

If Tulip had got two more votes

she would have beat Little Rock

and where we sit might be the hollow

underneath a marble dome.

This might be a big hotel

or streetcar tracks

or rich-men’s stores.

By the lack of just two votes

the dry bulb died that might have bloomed.

The people died.

The French schoolteacher moved away.

The old men sadly shake their heads

and bite fresh chews from strong brown twists.

The dust raised by a dusty car

stains the bright hard air.

In Tulip there are no tulips

and in this sad South no magnolia trees.

Great-Grandpa Died on Monday

Great-grandpa died on Monday

as he lay in his tall Victorian bed,

having completed nearly a hundred

plain, unselfconscious years.

He was not a man of battles.

Of the War all he remembered

was boiling the smokehouse earth for salt

and hefting his father’s one-shot pistol.

All his valor was expended

in the Ouachita river-bottom.

There he raised corn and cotton

and shot fox squirrels for meat and pleasure.

Kimbel fought in the Great War;

Ola married a heavy blacksmith;

the other children moved away,

till Grandpa and Grandma lived alone.

Grandpa repaired clocks and watches

and whittled trinkets from white pine.

And I remember the flop-eared mules

and Grandpa’s hands loose on the reins.

I’ve heard my father say of a man,

He was a good man. Yet I wondered,

is that enough, to be only good?

Grandpa was a good man who never wondered

if he was happy or fully aware.

He was busy fishing and raising peanuts

and singing on Sundays in the choir.

He was a good man and didn’t think of it.

I heard of his death through a letter.

I sat and thought, so Grandpa’s dead,

who carried me fishing in the wagon,

rattling along behind Sam and Kate.

My earnest manhood parted us,

for he knew already what