Collected Poems (1958-2015)

by Clive James

  The Rimbaud of the wheel just oozed romance –

  But where his class showed was in how that beast

  Ferrari drew sweet curves at his behest

  Instead of leading him St Vitus’ dance.

  He charged the earth but gave back art for pay.

  If she could see herself, the girl on skates –

  But she must work by feel in the event,

  Assured by how her heavy fingers burn

  As in mid-air she makes the triple turn

  Explosive effort was correctly spent

  And from the whirlpool a way out awaits.

  They say that Pipeline surfers deep in white

  Whipped water when wiped out may sip the froth

  Through pursed lips and thus drown less than they breathe

  While buffeted their helpless bodies writhe,

  Then once the ruined wave has spent its wrath

  Swim resurrected up to the bright light.

  Though children in deep shelters could not watch,

  Pathfinder flares were sumptuous where they burned

  And rustic simpletons found food for thought

  In how those coloured chandeliers would float

  As if the Son of Man had just returned –

  Before the earthquake made them a hotchpotch.

  Descending from heaped rubble, ‘I composed

  Der Rosenkavalier,’ Strauss told GIs

  Whose billet underneath the Führerbau

  Reminded them of their hometown hoosegow.

  At eighty he was right, if scarcely wise:

  From where he stood the episode was closed.

  And soon there was another Salome

  To propagate his long legato phrases,

  And, by their shapeliness made feverish,

  Lift high the prophet’s lopped head in a dish,

  And taste the everlasting fire that rages

  On those cold lips of papier mâché.

  She’s gone, perhaps to start again elsewhere.

  The freezing fens lock up their latent heat.

  The rime ice on the river to the touch

  Splits in a gash benign neglect will stitch.

  Full of potential like briquettes of peat

  Atomic bombs enjoy conditioned air.

  The Emperor’s portrait had survived the blast.

  We carried it to safety in the stream

  And took turns holding it aloft. The fire

  Arched overhead and we succumbed to fear.

  The surface of the water turned to steam.

  I must say we were very much downcast.

  Emerging from a silo of spun spunk

  To scan the killing ground with clustered eyes,

  The funnelweb when she appears in person

  Reveals a personality pure poison

  Should you be tempted to idealize

  Her gauze-lined bunker under the tree trunk,

  And yet how sweet a tunnel in the mist!

  Well might it fascinate as well as frighten.

  Looking along such lustrous holes in space

  Where indrawn starlight corkscrews down the sluice,

  You’ll feel your heart first hammer and then lighten

  And think God was a gynaecologist.

  The Sun so far has only twice touched Earth

  With its unmitigated baleful stare.

  Flesh turned to pizza under that hot look.

  From all the forms of death you took pot luck,

  But that by which the occasion was made rare

  Showed later on in what was brought to birth.

  At KZ Dachau the birthmarked young nun

  Beseeching absolution for that place

  Won’t turn her full face to your chapel pew.

  Only her murmurs will admonish you

  For thinking to give up pursuit of grace

  Simply because such dreadful things were done.

  High over Saipan when another plane

  Came back above us heading for Japan

  As we flew south for home, I never saw

  What would have been a chromium gewgaw,

  But only what it casually began –

  A long straight line of crystal flake cocaine.

  Your progeny won’t sit still to be told

  Nor can you point out through the window how

  Air battles of the past left vapour trails

  Swirling and drifting like discarded veils,

  Scarcely there then and not at all there now,

  Except you feel the loss as you grow old.

  Black-bottomed whiteware out of nowhere fast

  The Shuttle takes fire coming back to us,

  A purple storm with silence at the core.

  Simmering down, it is the dodgem car

  Daedalus should have given Icarus,

  Whose wings – a bad mistake – were built to last.

  To stay the course you must have stuff to burn.

  For life, the ablative is absolute,

  And though the fire proceeds against our wishes

  Forms are implicit even in the ashes

  Where we must walk in an asbestos suit:

  A smouldering tip to which all things return.

  We may not cavalierly lift the casque

  Which separates us from the consequences

  Of seeing how the godhead in full bloom

  Absolves itself unthinkingly from blame.

  It knows us as we know it, through our senses.

  We feel for it the warmth in which we bask –

  The flame reflected in the welder’s mask.

  A Valediction for Philip Larkin

  You never travelled much but now you have,

  Into the land whose brochures you liked least:

  That drear Bulgaria beyond the grave

  Where wonders have definitively ceased –

  Ranked as a dead loss even in the East.

  Friends will remember until their turn comes

  What they were doing when the news came through.

  I landed in Nairobi with eardrums

  Cracked by the flight from Kichwa Tembo. You

  Had gone, I soon learned, on safari too.

  Learned soon but too late, since no telephone

  Yet rings in the wild country where we’d been.

  No media penetration. On one’s own

  One wakes up and unzips the morning scene

  Outside one’s tent and always finds it green.

  Green Hills of Africa, wrote Hemingway.

  Omitting a preliminary ‘the’,

  He made the phrase more difficult to say –

  The hills, however, easier to see,

  Their verdure specified initially.

  Fifty years on, the place still packs a thrill.

  Several reserves of greenery survive,

  And now mankind may look but must not kill

  Some animals might even stay alive,

  Surrounded by attentive four-wheel-drive

  Toyotas full of tourists who shoot rolls

  Of colour film off in the cheetah’s face

  While she sleeps in the grass or gravely strolls

  With bloody cheeks back from the breathless chase,

  Alone except for half the human race.

  But we patrolled a less well-beaten trail.

  Making a movie, we possessed the clout

  To shove off up green hill and down green dale

  And put our personal safety in some doubt

  By opening the door and getting out.

  Thus I descended on the day you died

  And had myself filmed failing to get killed.

  A large male lion left me petrified

  But well alone and foolishly fulfilled,

  Feeling weak-kneed but calling it strong-willed.

  Silk brushed with honey in the hot noon light,

  His inside leg was colonized by flies.

  I made a mental note though wet with fright.

  As his mouth
might have done off me, my eyes

  Tore pieces off him to metabolize.

  In point of fact I swallowed Kenya whole,

  A mill choked by a plenitude of grist.

  Like anabolic steroids for the soul,

  Every reagent was a catalyst –

  So much to take in sent me round the twist.

  I saw Kilimanjaro like the wall

  Of Heaven going straight up for three miles.

  The Mara river was a music hall

  With tickled hippos rolling in the aisles.

  I threw some fast food to the crocodiles.

  I chased giraffes who floated out of reach

  Like anglepoise lamps loose in zero g.

  I chased a mdudu with a can of bleach

  Around my tent until I couldn’t see.

  Only a small rhinoceros chased me.

  The spectral sun-bird drew the mountain near,

  And if the rain-bird singing soon soon soon

  Turned white clouds purple, still the air was clear –

  The radiant behind of a baboon

  Was not more opulent than the full moon.

  So one more tourist should have been agog

  At treasure picked up cheaply while away –

  Ecstatic as some latter-day sea dog,

  His trolley piled high like a wain of hay

  With duty-free goods looted from Calais.

  For had I not enlarged my visual scope,

  Perhaps my whole imaginative range,

  By seeing how that deadpan antelope,

  The topi, stands on small hills looking strange

  While waiting for the traffic lights to change?

  And had I not observed the elephant

  Deposit heaps of steaming excrement

  While looking wiser than Immanuel Kant,

  More stately than the present Duke of Kent?

  You start to see why I was glad I went.

  Such sights were trophies, ivory and horn

  Destined for carving into objets d’art.

  Ideas already jumping like popcorn,

  I climbed down but had not gone very far

  Between that old Dakota and the car

  When what they told me stretched the uncrossed space

  Into a universe. No tears were shed.

  Forgive me, but I hardly felt a trace

  Of grief. Just sudden fear your being dead

  So soon had left us disinherited.

  You were the one who gave us the green light

  To get out there and seek experience,

  Since who could equal you at sitting tight

  Until the house around you grew immense?

  Your bleak bifocal gaze was so intense,

  Hull stood for England, England for the world –

  The whole caboodle crammed into one room.

  Above your desk all of creation swirled

  For you to look through with increasing gloom,

  Or so your poems led us to assume.

  Yet even with your last great work ‘Aubade’

  (To see death clearly, did you pull it close?)

  The commentator must be on his guard

  Lest he should overlook the virtuose

  Technique which makes majestic the morose.

  The truth is that you revelled in your craft.

  Profound glee charged your sentences with wit.

  You beat them into stanza form and laughed:

  They didn’t sound like poetry one bit,

  Except for being absolutely it.

  Described in English written at its best

  The worst of life remains a bitch to face

  But is more shared, which leaves us less depressed –

  Pleased the condition of the human race,

  However desperate, is touched with grace.

  The seeming paradox is a plain fact –

  You brought us all together on your own.

  Your saddest lyric is a social act.

  A bedside manner in your graveyard tone

  Suggests that at the last we aren’t alone.

  You wouldn’t have agreed, of course. You said

  Without equivocation that life ends

  With him who lived it definitely dead

  And buried, after which event he tends

  To spend a good deal less time with his friends.

  But you aren’t here to argue. Where you are

  By now is anybody’s guess but yours.

  I’m five miles over Crete in a Tristar

  Surrounded by the orchestrated snores

  Induced by some old film of Roger Moore’s.

  Things will be tougher now you’ve proved your point,

  By leaving early, that the man upstairs

  Neither controls what happens in the joint

  We call the world, nor noticeably cares.

  While being careful not to put on airs,

  It is perhaps the right time to concede

  That life is all downhill from here on in.

  For doing justice to it, one will need,

  If not in the strict sense a sense of sin,

  More gravitas than fits into a grin.

  But simply staying put makes no one you.

  Those who can’t see the world in just one street

  Must see the world. What else is there to do

  Except face inescapable defeat

  Flat out in a first-class reclining seat?

  You heard the reaper in the Brynmor Jones

  Library cough behind your swivel chair.

  I had to hear those crocodiles crunch bones,

  Like cars compressed for scrap, before the hair

  Left on my head stood straight up in the air.

  You saw it all in little. You dug deep.

  A lesser man needs coarser stimuli,

  Needs coruscating surfaces … needs sleep.

  I’m very rarely conscious when I fly.

  Not an event in life. To sleep. To die.

  I wrote that much, then conked out over Rome,

  Dreamed I’d been sat on by a buffalo,

  Woke choking as we tilted down for home,

  And now see, for once cloudless, the pale glow

  Of evening on the England you loved so

  And spoke for in a way she won’t forget.

  The quiet voice whose resonance seemed vast

  Even while you lived, and which has now been set

  Free by the mouth that shaped it shutting fast,

  Stays with us as you turn back to the past –

  Your immortality complete at last.

  Jet Lag in Tokyo

  Flat feet kept Einstein out of the army.

  The Emperor’s horse considers its position.

  In Akasaka men sit down and weep

  Because the night must end.

  At Chez Oz I discussed my old friend’s sex change

  With a lovely woman who, I later learned,

  Had also had one. The second movement

  Of the Mahler Seventh on my Boodo Khan

  Above the North Pole spoke to me like you.

  Neutrinos from 1987A

  Arrived in the Kamiokande bubble chamber

  Three hours before the light. Shinjuku neon

  Is dusted with submicroscopic diamonds.

  Our belled cat keeps blackbirds up to scratch

  With the fierce face of a tiger from the wall

  Of the Ko-hojo in the Nanzen-ji, Kyoto.

  You would not have been looking for me,

  God told Pascal,

  If you had not found me.

  What will we do with those Satsuma pots

  When the sun dies? Our Meissen vieux Saxe girl

  Was fired three times. The car will be OK:

  A Volkswagen can take anything.

  An age now since I wrote about your beauty,

  How rare it is. Tonight I am reminded.

  Sue-Ellen Ewing says Gomen nasai.

  Perhaps the Emperor’s horse is
awake also.

  I think this time I’ve gone too far too fast.

  The Light Well

  Nacimos en un país libre que nos legaron nuestros padres, y primero se hundirá la Isla en el mar antes que consintamos en ser esclavos de nadie.

  Fidel Castro, La historia me absolverá

  From Playa Girón the two-lane blacktop

  Sticks to the shoreline of the Bay of Pigs –

  The swamp’s fringe on your left showing the sea

  Through twisted trees, the main swamp on your right –

  Until the rocks and tangled roots give way

  To the soft white sand of Playa Larga,

  The other beach of the invasion. Here

  Their armour got stopped early. At Girón

  They pushed their bridgehead inland a few miles

  And held out for two days. From the air

  Their old B-26s fell in flames.

  High-profile Shermans doddered, sat like ducks

  And were duly dealt with. Fidel’s tanks,

  Fresh in from Russia and as fast as cars,

  Dismembered everything the Contras had,

  Even the ships that might have got them out.

  Also the People, who were meant to rise –

  Chuffed at the thought of being once again

  Free to cut cane all day for one peso

  On land owned by the United Fruit Company –

  Unaccountably stayed where they were. The swamp

  Didn’t notice a thing. The crocodiles

  Haven’t given it a thought in years,

  Though wayward bombs from 4.2″ mortars

  Must, at the time, have made some awfully big

  Holes in the mud. Apart from the vexed question

  Of which genius ever picked it as the venue

  For a military initiative whose chance

  Paled beside that of a snowball in Hell,

  The area holds no mysteries. Except one.

  Somewhere about a mile along the road,

  Look to the right and you can see a hint

  Of what might be a flat spot in the swamp.