by Clive James
Attacking out of retreat at Sidhi Barani,
But no, he stayed modestly in the background
While our cameraman, intrepid as all get out
Knocked off the required footage of lions and tigers
And cheetahs licking their lips, with even a glimpse of leopard,
Considered unfindable save by Denis’s sidekick
Kungu, who muttered comments in Swahili
Which Denis translated as ‘Leopard over there, I think.’
And there she was, a set of spots deep in a tree-clump
Stuck to the spot with her spots resolutely unchanging
For the full two hours till she finally took a crap.
‘A bowel movement, but at least she moved’ jested Denis
Who had a million of them.
So it went on:
Good usable stuff up till the day we rested
The crew, as the union dictates. Thank God for those rules
Or there would be crosses all over the Masai Mara
To mark the death by exhaustion of the modern impi,
The tough men in sleeveless bush shirts
With the tricep tattoos and a camera on their shoulder
That you and I could barely pick up. Our chap was Mike:
‘We’re doing OK so far but nothing fantastic,
So if you two see anything don’t for Christ’s sake tell me.’
Denis thought that an off-piste mini-safari
With me up front while Kungu taught me Swahili
And him in the back at ease like Diana Dors
In a Daimler (his showbiz images tended to be
A bit out of date, though it’s never wise to argue
With a man who actually knew Ava Gardner),
A trip to show me a few unscripted attractions
That often won’t sit still for a movie camera,
Would be a good thing. He was like a book collector
Showing you his library. I could tell from how he spoke
He was Africa mad, so he had his favourite locations
For shooting stills, like a ford five miles away
Of bumpy driving, nothing too bad, he promised.
And pretty, even if nothing happened. Well he
Was right, it was pretty. Just wrong about the nothing.
We stood on the inner bank of a curve in the river
And I had to take it on trust that under the surface
Was a shallow stretch the bigger beasts could walk on.
‘Elephant,’ he said ‘quite often cross here.
You see whole families of them at a time.’
As if on cue, three elephant, four elephant,
An entire family showed up out of the bush
Which guarded the other side like a crescent moon
And assembled on the bank. ‘Well, there you are’
Laughed Denis. ‘Your luck’s uncanny. Straight from the movies.
No wonder Kungu wants to touch you so often.’
But even as he spoke, there were lots more of them,
So the first ones had to move, like shunted box cars,
Into the oxtail water. More than thirty
Were now in the frame, except we had no frame;
But Denis’s Nikon made a rare appearance.
‘Well, Kungu can pick them. This is all your doing.
I’ve never seen this, never in all my time
In Africa. And neither has he.’
And Kungu was speaking:
In between the air-horn blasts from a New York gridlock
With half of downtown occupied by Mack ten-wheelers
I caught a few mentions of tembo, meaning elephant,
But the other words were double Dutch to me.
‘He hasn’t seen this since he was a boy.’
And there were more to come, but by now the Kombis
Of all the tourist firms were gathering
At the point where the first family were now emerging
To climb the bank on the side near us.
A lane was left
To let the elephant by, but the flashing lights
On the cameras must have seemed a storm. One tusker
Flared out its ears and bellowed. ‘By Christ’
Said Denis ‘If this one charges, they all will.’
They didn’t charge, but there was a bit of a panic,
And that was scary enough. I know I sound
Like Falstaff telling Hal how many thieves
He put to flight, but really there were fifty
Elephant tightly packed and churning around
To take their turn at scrambling from the soup.
In the river, the tots beside their mothers
Were near invisible, their little trunks
Held up like snorkels.
Open mouthed
(Like the Three Stooges, Denis later said,
Bang up to date as usual. Thanks a bunch.)
We watched one hip-deep mother tuck her trunk beneath
Her pup and hoik him out, swing like a crane
And put him on the bank. And guess who didn’t
Get the shot. ‘Oh blast!’ said Denis, fiddling
With the switches that had changed his life.
Kungu
Was of the opinion that the magic touch
Was mine, but he was also the first one –
As we bumped slowly home across the veldt –
To say what needed saying. Denis said
‘He says we have to keep our day a secret.’
I dumbly added ‘Especially from my crew.’
‘That’s who he meant,’ said Denis. Pale pink light
Was growing deeper in the sky
When we got back to camp. Cameraman Mike
Said ‘Anything good happen?’ From the way
We said it hadn’t he soon guessed that it had
But kept shtum for our young producer’s sake,
And anyway next day we filmed two leopard.
Asma Unpacks Her Pretty Clothes
Wherever her main residence is now,
Asma unpacks her pretty clothes.
It takes forever: so much silk and cashmere
To be unpeeled from clinging leaves of tissue
By her ladies. With her perfect hands, she helps.
Out there in Syria, the torturers
Arrive by bus at every change of shift
While victims dangle from their cracking wrists.
Beaten with iron bars, young people pray
To die soon. This is the middle ages
Brought back to living death. Her husband’s doing,
The screams will never reach her where she is.
Asma’s uncovered hair had promised progress
For all her nation’s women. They believed her.
We who looked on believed the promise too,
But now, as she unpacks her pretty clothes,
The dream at home dissolves in agony.
Bashar, her husband, does as he sees fit
To cripple every enemy with pain.
We sort of knew, but he had seemed so modern
With Asma alongside him. His big talk
About destroying Israel: standard stuff.
A culture-changing wife offset all that.
She did, she did. I doted as Vogue did
On her sheer style. Dear God, it fooled me too,
So now my blood is curdled by the shrieks
Of people mad with grief. My own wrists hurt
As Asma, with her lustrous fingertips –
She must have thought such things could never happen –
Unpacks her pretty clothes.
Nina Kogan’s Geometrical Heaven
Two of her little pictures grace my walls:
Suprematism in a special sense,
With all the usual bits and pieces flying
Through space, but carrying a pastel-tinged
Delicacy to lighten the strict forms
&nb
sp; Of that hard school and blow them all sky-high,
Splinters and stoppers from the bombing of
An angel’s boudoir. When Malevich told
His pupils that their personalities
Should be suppressed, the maestro little knew
The state would soon require exactly that.
But Nina, trying as she might, could not
Rein in her individuality,
And so she made these things that I own now
And gaze at, wondering at her sad fate.
She could have got away, but wished instead
Her gift devoted to Utopia.
She painted trams, designed official posters:
Alive until the siege of Leningrad
And then gone. Given any luck, she starved:
But the purges were still rolling, and I fear
The NKVD had her on a list,
And what she faced, there at the very end,
Was the white cold. Were there an afterlife,
We might meet up, and I could tell her then
Her sumptuous fragments still went flying on
In my last hours, when I, in a warm house,
Lay on my couch to watch them coming close,
Her proofs that any vision of eternity
Is with us in the world, and beautiful
Because a mind has found the way things fit
Purely by touch. That being said, however,
I should record that out of any five
Pictures by Kogan, at least six are fakes.
Star System
The stars in their magnificent array
Look down upon the Earth, their cynosure,
Or so it seems. They are too far away,
In fact, to see a thing; hence they look pure
To us. They lack the textures of our globe,
So only we, from cameras carried high,
Enjoy the beauty of the swirling robe
That wraps us up, the interplay of sky
And cloud, as if a Wedgwood plate of blue
And white should melt, and then, its surface stirred
With spoons, a treasure too good to be true,
Be placed, and hover like a hummingbird,
Drawing all eyes, though ours alone, to feast
On splendour as it turns west from the east.
There was a time when some of our young men
Walked plumply on the moon and saw Earth rise,
As stunning as the sun. The years since then
Have aged them. Now and then somebody dies.
It’s like a clock, for those of us who saw
The Saturn rockets going up as if
Mankind had energy to burn. The law
Is different for one man. Time is a cliff
You come to in the dark. Though you might fall
As easily as on a feather bed,
It is a sad farewell. You loved it all.
You dream that you might keep it in your head.
But memories, where can you take them to?
Take one last look at them. They end with you.
And still the Earth revolves, and still the blaze
Of stars maintains a show of vigilance.
It should, for long ago, in olden days,
We came from there. By luck, by fate, by chance,
All of the elements that form the world
Were sent by cataclysms deep in space,
And from their combination life unfurled
And stood up straight, and wore a human face.
I still can’t pass a mirror. Like a boy,
I check my looks, and now I see the shell
Of what I was. So why, then, this strange joy?
Perhaps an old man dying would do well
To smile as he rejoins the cosmic dust
Life comes from, for resign himself he must.
Change of Domicile
Installed in my last house, I face the thought
That fairly soon there will be one house more,
Lacking the pictures and the books that here
Surround me with abundant evidence
I spent a lifetime pampering my mind.
The new place will be of a different sort,
Dark and austere, and I will have to find
My way along its unforthcoming walls.
Help is at hand here should I fall, but there
There will be no-one to turn on the lights
For me, and I will know I am not blind
Only by glimpses when the empty halls
Lead me to empty rooms, in which the nights
Succeed each other with no day between.
I may not see my tattered Chinese screen
Again, but I shall have time to reflect
That what I miss was just the bric-a-brac
I kept with me to blunt my solitude,
Part of my brave face when my life was wrecked
By my gift for deceit. Truth clears away
So many souvenirs. The shelves come clean.
In the last, the truly last house there will be
No treasured smithereens to take me back
To when things hung together. I’ll conclude
The way that I began so long ago:
With nothingness, but know it fit for me
This time around, now I am brought so low,
Yet ready to move soon. When, I can’t say.
Rounded with a Sleep
The sun seems in control, the tide is out:
Out to the sandbar shimmers the lagoon.
The little children sprint, squat, squeal and shout.
These shallows will be here until the moon
Contrives to reassert its influence,
And anyway, by then it will be dark.
Old now and sick, I ponder the immense
Ocean upon which I will soon embark:
As if held in abeyance by dry land
It waits for me beyond that strip of sand.
It won’t wait long. Just for the moment, though,
There’s time to question if my present state
Of bathing in this flawless afterglow
Is something I deserve. I left it late
To come back to my family. Here they are,
Camped on their towels and putting down their books
To watch my grand-daughter, a natural star,
Cartwheel and belly-flop. The whole scene looks
As if I thought it up to soothe my soul.
But in Arcadia, Death plays a role:
A leading role, and suddenly I wake
To realise that I’ve been sound asleep
Here at my desk. I just wish the mistake
Were rare, and not so frequent I could weep.
The setting alters, but the show’s the same:
One long finale, soaked through with regret,
Somehow designed to expiate self-blame.
But still there is no end, at least not yet:
No cure, that is, for these last years of grief
As I repent and yet find no relief.
My legs are sore, and it has gone midnight.
I’ve had my last of lounging on the beach
To see the sweet oncoming sunset light
Touching the water with a blush of peach,
Smoothing the surface like a ballroom floor
As all my loved ones pack up from their day
And head back up the cliff path. This for sure:
Even the memories will be washed away,
If not by waves, by rain, which I see fall,
Drenching the flagstones and the garden wall.
My double doors are largely glass. I stand
Often to contemplate the neat back yard
My elder daughter with her artist’s hand
Designed for me. This winter was less hard
Than its three predecessors were. The snow
Failed to arrive this time, but rain, for me,
Will also do to regis
ter time’s flow.
The rain, the snow, the inexorable sea:
I get the point. I’ll climb the stairs to bed,
Perhaps to dream I’m somewhere else instead.
All day tomorrow I have tests and scans,
And everything that happens will be real.
My blood might say I should make no more plans,
And when it does so, that will be the deal.
But until then I love to speak with you
Each day we meet. Sometimes we even touch
Across the sad gulf that I brought us to.
Just for a time, so little means so much:
More than I’m worth, I know, as I know how
My death is something I must live with now.
Elementary Sonnet
Tired out from getting up and getting dressed
I lie down for a while to get some rest,
And so begins another day of not
Achieving much except to dent the cot
For just the depth appropriate to my weight –
Which is no chasm, in my present state.
By rights my feet should barely touch the floor
And yet my legs are heavy metal. More
And more I sit down to write less and less,
Taking a half hour’s break from helplessness
To craft a single stanza meant to give
Thanks for the heartbeat which still lets me live:
A consolation even now, so late –
When soon my poor bed will be smooth and straight.
Leçons de ténèbres
But are they lessons, all these things I learn
Through being so far gone in my decline?
The wages of experience I earn
Would service well a younger life than mine.
I should have been more kind. It is my fate
To find this out, but find it out too late.
The mirror holds the ruins of my face
Roughly together, thus reminding me
I should have played it straight in every case,
Not just when forced to. Far too casually
I broke faith when it suited me, and here
I am alone, and now the end is near.
All of my life I put my labour first.
I made my mark, but left no time between
The things achieved, so, at my heedless worst,
With no life, there was nothing I could mean.
But now I have slowed down. I breathe the air
As if there were not much more of it there
And write these poems, which are funeral songs
That have been taught to me by vanished time: