by Clive James
So one day those who know my books may say
That this is where he signed his life away.”
Recollected in Tranquillity
You realise that this is no reprieve
But merely a delay?
The comedy must end. The way it ends
Has just been put off to another day.
Perhaps two months from now, perhaps two years,
It will be known to family and friends
That you, at last, are more dead than alive,
With nothing left to say.
When any tears there are will be their tears,
Not yours, the wave of silence will arrive
With which you leave.
So this must be the storm before the lull,
These webs of words
Slowly assembled at the summer’s peak
Here in the portico of your downfall,
As you sit watchfully to count the birds –
So few beside the Heathrow rush of spring –
Which in the garden briefly peck and preen
Before continuing
To Finland, Iceland, Baffin Land, wherever:
Your chance to speak before you never speak
Again, your next to final scene.
This peace, which will be perfect by and by,
Came out of chaos. When the drugs went wrong
It almost seemed a burden not to die
As I shared that Babelic rumpus room
With the trouser thief and the lady with one song
She sang forever. Racing, my brain teemed
With stuff to tell the doctors so they might
Unbolt the door, but that place was a tomb
Sealed tight. I ate my sleeping pills and dreamed
Of all I could have had –
The happiness I wasted. Now, set free,
I see that my whole life
Had been a greedy fever. A sad spell
Of frenzy only summed it up. My wife
And daughters built this studio for me
In which I read and write and rest. They know
Something ill-mended in my mind demands
I live alone. And so they come and go
To help me do that, and so all is well,
As I wait for the day the last bird lands
And nightfall finally
Blankets my vision of this bright arcade.
Outside, in that cane chair,
I sat to read The Faerie Queene and found
Garbled accounts of knights and damsels made
Melodic sense, in verse as light as air.
On this desk, crowded as a burial mound
With treasured papers, my Chinese notebook,
Full of unfinished thoughts, will still be there,
When I, at last, can’t reach it. Should things look
As if I knew despair, of this be sure:
I loved it here.
The Dark Roses
The roses that I sent on Mother’s Day
Maintained, in their glass vase, an after-glow
Of crimson lustre, but their late display
Of faded glory finally was gone
For good. Strange that the shape of every bloom
Remains, the outline of its folds more clear
Now than before. This I must dwell upon:
Here in the sunlight of this perfect room
These roses die well, though they bring night near –
For the darkness in their petals seeks me too,
And once inside it I won’t even know
How beautifully designed they are, how true
To life. But for the moment they are here
Where I can see them, as I pray that you
Will think of what I once was when I go:
Not beautiful, as these dead things are still,
But still too full of life for time to kill.
Summer Surprised Us
Supposing this is my last summer, let
What I see here, in all its glory, seem,
Come winter, splendid to my fading gaze
As it is now. Curse me if I forget
The luck that still brings me this waking dream
With such a freshness, here in my last days,
I feel that I was born to breathe the air
The rain has just drenched and cooled everywhere.
It needed cooling. Heat does not belong,
Where I lie down now, to the same degree
As it did there, when I had just been born
And started to grow up. It seems plain wrong
To feel my thin supply of energy
Depleted further, even though the dawn
Is such a flood of light it might as well
Be the Pacific sun. Clear as a bell,
Rinsed by this wetly gleaming afternoon,
The light still sparkles undiminished. When
The temperature retreats, as soon it must,
Things might look more like England, and the moon
Seem less a vast night-club for magic men,
Unless the rearrangement of its dust
Is permanent, and nothing from now on
Will cease from being changed or simply gone.
For how to know that these weeks have not been
The first three quarters of my final act
In which, bemused, my judgment quite undone,
I play Malvolio when, scene by scene,
He stumbles to his downfall? Won’t that fact –
Though punctuated by the sunset gun –
Not feel like this, a fantasy, with all
These other people in a fiction’s thrall?
I’ll ask my keen-eyed daughters. Am I here?
Is all this sunlight real? I hear surf boom
As if I, somehow soon, might swim once more.
But no, these waves are only in my ear:
Tricks, like the way the sunlight in this room,
Transposed through time, is light I saw before
And brings with it the young man I once knew
Who took one look and fell in love with you.
As if you were here now and not sky-high
Walking among the pitched roofs of Kashmir,
I long for you to stroll the quarter mile
From your side of the river and drop by,
Just to be asked if I am fading here
In this white stream of fire. Were you to smile,
I’d take that as a no, though I have learned
Richly to see the sky bleached, the air burned.
The truth is that I need no heat to melt
And die the puddled death of the snowman.
I do that from within. My memories
More than suffice to tell me I’ve been dealt
A fair hand if not better. I began
In light like this, and saw the burning trees
Cut swathes through mountain ranges. Far too small
Back then to really comprehend it all,
I almost do now. It is life, drawn from
The roaring force of nature, even here
In these polite, pampered gardens. If I live
To see again the cold Elysium
Which is the winter’s destiny, forgive –
As if it were a figment of the air –
The weakness I show now, if not the way
I thought it strength, back in a heedless day.
At some time or another, it must be
Near in the future now that I shall lose
My last contact with life, and so depart
To leave behind even the memory
Of those cross garters I was proud to choose.
But that absurd confusion spoke my heart:
I sought release in vain, but at the last
It seeks me with success. The die is cast:
This sudden touch of autumn has begun
At last to take the shine off all I see.
A hint of winter will be in the ai
r
As you fly back to us, but if the sun
Should shine at all, it will for you and me,
Blessing us here as first it blessed us there
When real waves roared and how far we would get
Together neither of us knew as yet.
Tactics of the Air Battle
(In this fantasy, one of the many young aircrew buried in the American cemetery outside Cambridge grows old in his home state, and writes to me.)
No sudden death was quite as quick as when
The enemy came from the front dead straight,
The closing speed six hundred plus, and then
In just one second, from the wings and snout
He sprayed the shells that ripped your flight deck open
And left an aimless wreck, which went straight down,
The waist and turret gunners jumping ship
If they were lucky. In a flank attack
Sometimes the rudder was shot off,
The flight crew keeping just enough control
To turn for England. But with two or more
Engines shut down and leaking so much fuel?
Forget it. Like unpacked smoke-puffs
Lone parachutes continued to appear
For miles on end. Imagine the mad violence
And then the slow admission of junk status
As their hulking power symbol fell apart.
Boys falling from the cold air, looking up,
Saw the undoing of their citadels.
You might ask why, then, the Krauts didn’t win.
The answer is, they ran out of trained flyers.
Our fighters cut theirs down at such a rate
Luftwaffe pilots rated Ace if they
Could land: forget about an actual fight.
Only old hands could even get that near.
The younger ones were heading for the wall
Their first trip out. The Mustangs ate them up:
The Mustangs and the Thunderbolts. P-47s
Could go downhill like dump-trucks and come back
Uphill like seagulls. None of the German planes
Could mix it with a Lightning. Their night-fighters
Stayed in the game because the British bombers
Were unprotected. Finally, of course,
Even the night-fighters went up by day,
With all their radar aerials still on them,
Cutting their speed. It was a turkey shoot:
A Ju-88 would last ten minutes.
The jets and rocket planes would certainly
Have made a difference, but they were too few
And far too late to count. I saw one once,
I mean a jet, the 262. It went
Across our nose as fast as you could blink
And rippled as it launched its bunch of missiles
At someone on the far side of the box
From us. Someone I didn’t know, thank Christ,
Was all gone in a flash. If that had happened
Ten times in one raid we’d have had to stop,
And send our bombs to Germany by mail.
But all we saw was nothing but the future
Just getting started, and we came home safe.
I got to die of old age, just like you.
Believe me, son, you didn’t miss a thing.
The Gods Make Mischief
The pliability of Jupiter
Is easily explained. When Juno pleaded
For Turnus, what she wished seemed granted her
By the great god. But her wish was not needed
To change his mind, which changed itself: the day
Of death for that young man was undecided
As yet, and in the long run Fate would say
When it would be. Her fervour was misguided:
She spoke too soon. My mother spoke too late.
Our God could not postpone her husband’s dying.
It was already done. Though God was great,
Deep into hell her cries of grief went flying,
And I began to be what I became,
Doing my level best to seem undaunted:
What use are gods, if Chance is their real name?
The lifelong question by which I was haunted –
Taunted, as if I were the one to blame.
The Smocking Brick
Across twelve thousand miles of land and ocean
I came here to get most of my work done.
Writings that were no more than a mere notion
One day, and for a while were just begun,
Grew out of those few lines to their fruition
As if I were remembering the sun
And surf of my original condition,
When first I saw the shell the silkworm spun
Was like a golden thimble for my mother
As she worked at the smocking brick. No book
Could be so neatly written. Now no other
Memory haunts me like the pains she took
To decorate those tiny frocks. The weather
Has nothing here to match how thunder shook
Our windows, but still, floating like a feather,
Her needle hand, obeying her fixed look,
Would build neat lattices hour after hour.
Now, for her son, the hours grow few, and yet
I might, impelled by that first taste of power,
Write something to pay off an ancient debt
If I sit up till dawn. Down to the wire,
While I can still breathe I will not forget
Networks of silk that glowed with pastel fire
While she stitched through the day until sunset.
It all took time, and time is a wild river
That one day ceases to reflect the sky.
Eventually the spinning coin will shiver,
The rumble as it falls end with a sigh.
When there is honest toil in the endeavour
Piece-work is noble but cannot defy
The night, which will not wait for me forever.
Her work kept us alive, and as I die
I’m certain I will think of the precision
With which she placed the last stitch in a row.
Never until the failing of her vision
Did she cease to prepare her cloth and sew
With her fine thread the rhymed and scanned equation
Of pure expression and punctilio
That made each separate séance an occasion.
But why was she so quiet? Now I know.
I know now that the shadow of non-being
Will visit anyone who does these things
And stay till they are done. All I was seeing
Was somebody arranging offerings
Before an altar, but there is no saying
Which god was served. What grace such worship brings
Is slow to show itself. We just keep praying
Until that rapt moth spreads its perfect wings
And leaves a cracked cocoon to be translated
Into the luscious filament employed
When seeing squares of cotton recreated,
Making another mother overjoyed
At how her child, too young to get excited
By how she looks, in fact a bit annoyed,
Becomes a princess. Suitably requited,
The toiling seamstress profits from the void:
And finally a poem, too, must render
Obeisance to the dark where it can shine
As only one more star, for no defender
Of this art, which I still hope to make mine,
Denies the overstock we’re buckling under.
Yet the compulsion lives. Shaping a line
To mark the shock of recollected thunder,
I stitch the lightning into my design
And see again that tireless needle gleaming
As if its contrapuntal play of light
Were part of what was made. If I were dreaming
So clearly, or the frangipani blooming,
Their shades of butter in plush cusps of white.
But this is real, and now. The breakers booming
Spatter my eyes with salt tears as I write.
Intergalactic Junket
Junkets my mother made would float in space
Like flying saucers, which were all the rage
At that time. They would settle into place
On the kitchen table so a kid my age
Could listen to them hum and watch them glow
Before they disappeared without a trace
Into the chasm of a childish face,
A throat whose flattered gullet felt the flow.
Sprinkled with nutmeg from beyond the stars
The junket sat there tremulous in its plate
And yet unmoving. Visiting milk bars
When I was still too young to stay out late,
I had seen sundaes more superb than this,
But not with the divine tranquillity
My mother’s junkets had. It seemed to me
Their purity defied analysis.
Just once she made the junket pink, but I,
Craving vanilla, frowned at cochineal.
It went down fluently enough, but why
Fool with a classic product? Keep it real.
My eyes must have conveyed my faint disgust.
The visitant went back to being white
As if it had absorbed the years of light
It conquered spinning through the cosmic dust.
I grew up, ate the sundae any time
I felt like it, and never missed the bland
Sweet smoothness of the junket. Now I climb
Downstairs to see it coming in to land
There on the table as it used to do
So long ago, back when my life began.
I found it difficult to be a man.
This last feast seems more simple and more true.
Front Flip Half Twist
In the video from Wales, my granddaughter
Steps to the wall’s edge. Just a yard below
The beach begins, a long way from the water.
A pause for thought. She then proceeds to throw
A cartwheel through the air, and, when she lands,
Stand upright on the sand, all done no hands.
She came to her miraculous mastery
Of this manoeuvre by a strict process –
She still insists it was no mystery –
Of more and more to reach down less and less
Until, one day, the finished thing was there,
Made manifest entirely in mid-air.
I who can fly no longer feel I’m flying