by Clive James
Of mental derangement.
I would not have been calling for Carling Bassett’s knickers
Or the tingling, Teddy Tinling B-cup brassiere
Of Andrea Temesvari.
Yet I denied myself.
I have denied myself too long.
If I had been Pat Cash at that great moment
Of triumph, I would have handed back the trophy
Saying take that thing away
And don’t let me see it again until
It spills what makes this lawn burst into flower:
Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini.
In the beginning there was Gorgeous Gussie Moran
And even when there was just her it was tough enough,
But by now the top hundred boasts at least a dozen knockouts
Who make it difficult to keep one’s tongue
From lolling like a broken roller blind.
Out of deference to Billie-Jean I did my best
To control my male chauvinist urges –
An objectivity made easier to achieve
When Betty Stove came clumping out to play
On a pair of what appeared to be bionic legs
Borrowed from Six Million Dollar Man.
I won’t go so far as to say I harbour
Similar reservations about Steffi Graf –
I merely note that her thigh muscles when tense
Look interchangeable with those of Boris Becker –
Yet all are agreed that there can be no doubt
About Martina Navratilova:
Since she lent her body to Charles Atlas
The definition of the veins on her right forearm
Looks like the Mississippi river system
Photographed from a satellite,
And though she may unleash a charming smile
When crouching to dance at the ball with Ivan Lendl,
I have always found to admire her yet remain detached
Has been no problem.
But when the rain stops long enough for the true beauties
To come out swinging under the outshone sun,
The spectacle is hard for a man to take,
And in the case of this supernally graceful dish –
Likened to a panther by slavering sports reporters
Who pitiably fail to realize that any panther
With a topspin forehand line drive like hers
Would be managed personally by Mark McCormack –
I’m obliged to admit defeat.
So let me drink deep from the bitter cup.
Take it to her between any two points of a tie-break
That she may shake above it her thick black hair,
A nocturne from which the droplets as they fall
Flash like shooting stars –
And as their lustre becomes liqueur
Let the full calyx be repeatedly carried to me.
Until I tell you to stop,
Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini.
Fridge Magnet Sonnets
Except for the punctuation and capitalization, these sonnets were assembled on a refrigerator door entirely within the restrictions imposed by the Basic Magnetic Poetry Kit and the Cerebra Supplemental Kit. Whether the resulting, apparently unavoidable, pastiche of Wallace Stevens was dictated by a propensity in the mind of the author or by the nature of magnetic poetry would be nice to know. If the latter, there must now be refrigerators all over the world that look like the galley proofs of Harmonium.
I
I ribald sophist, you deft paragon,
Whet in our cloister languid dreams of sweet
Tongue-worship for the storm we cudgel on
With profligate palaver of bare feet.
But fiddle as we may, the shadows fall
Blue, tawdry, obdurate and lachrymose –
A torpid, adolescent caterwaul
Like tumid skin of a morose morass.
‘So what?’ you cry, and quashed I must eschew
Arid alacrity of epithet,
Be cool, austere, brusque, trenchant, true like you,
Not vapid and verbose as I am yet:
From here on in spurn brazen lusciousness,
Fetter my fecund zeal and chant fluff less.
II
Unctuous misanthrope, abscond to life!
Pant in a lather for a peachy breast.
Ascetic gynophobes usurp their lust,
Rip with the tacit rusty temporal knife
Of stultifying pallid acumen
The gorgeous mist of frantic puppy love
And enervate it to the putative.
No affable abeyance can supplant
Hot need, stalwart pariah and miscreant.
Let unrequited priapism, then,
Capriciously lambaste banal repose,
Ache, pound, boil, heave, drool juice and fulminate.
Delirious love is never delicate:
A florid blood-red spring rain shakes the rose.
Go Back to the Opal Sunset
Go back to the opal sunset, where the wine
Costs peanuts, and the avocado mousse
Is thick and strong as cream from a jade cow.
Before the passion fruit shrinks on the vine
Go back to where the heat turns your limbs loose.
You’ve worked your heart out and need no excuse.
Knock out your too-tall tent pegs and go now.
It’s England, April, and it’s pissing down,
So realize your assets and go back
To the opal sunset. Even autumn there
Will swathe you in a raw-silk dressing gown,
And through the midnight harbour lacquered black
The city lights strike like a heart attack
While eucalyptus soothes the injured air.
Now London’s notion of a petty crime
Is simple murder or straightforward rape
And Oxford Street’s a bombing range, to go
Back to the opal sunset while there’s time
Seems only common sense. Make your escape
To where the prawns assume a size and shape
Less like a newborn baby’s little toe.
Your tender nose anointed with zinc cream,
A sight for sore eyes will be brought to you.
Bottoms bisected by a piece of string
Will wobble through the heat-haze like a dream
That summer afternoon you go back to
The opal sunset, and it’s all as true
As sandfly bite or jelly-blubber sting.
What keeps you here? Is it too late to tell?
It might be something you can’t now define,
Your nature altered as if by the moon.
Yet out there at this moment, through the swell,
The hydrofoil draws its triumphant line.
Such powers of decision should be mine.
Go back to the opal sunset. Do it soon.
Lament for French Deal
feror ingenti circumdata nocte
God bless the nurses of the Sacred Heart
Who bring His great gift, morphine, to annul
The agony which tears French Deal apart.
Heaven be praised
That Science makes her once keen senses dull.
We thought of wattle sprays and willow wands
When we first saw French Deal in those young years –
Of frangipani petals and palm fronds.
Lord, she was sweet:
Gamblers and poets were both moved to tears.
To tears of lust as well, for though her face
Beat any angel’s hollow, her loose limbs
And languorous figure had a pagan grace
To make a priest
Compose risqué new words for well-known hymns.
A gambler gave French Deal her name. Today,
Though sick himself, he sits beside her bed.
I know he will, while I am far away,
&
nbsp; Kiss her goodbye
On my behalf as I would in his stead.
He named her for a racehorse that came in.
Fresh from the country, Janet was impressed
And as French Deal embraced a Life of Sin –
Since in those days
Free love was damned no sooner than confessed.
But not so at the Royal George Hotel,
Headquarters of the Downtown Push, for there
Bohemians defied the threat of Hell.
Lapsed Catholics
Sang blasphemously to the evening air.
Hot nights, cold beer and filtered cigarettes
Plucked proudly from the new-style flip-top box!
Philosophers pronounced, gamblers made bets –
It was a home
Away from home, that thieves’ den by the docks.
Push women were the equals of their men,
Or so the theory went the men advanced
With all their other theories while, as then
Was still the rule,
The women were required to sit entranced.
Oasis faces in a boundless waste
Of words, and one face fairer than the rest:
Across the room, still smarting at the taste
Of my first beer,
I winced but gazed unblinking and felt blessed.
She was the gambler’s girl and not to be
Approached by one so clearly short of clues,
But when I sailed away her memory
Smoked in my mind,
A brand evoking all I stood to lose.
The white light, the sweet heat, the open air,
The opal sunset and the sudden dawn,
You saw them all when she swept back her hair –
Her upraised arms
Outlined the paradise where we were born.
London was cold and girls in pubs would show
No skin below the neck except their hands.
Only blood shining out made their skins glow:
No sun shone in.
A man’s eyes risked death in such frozen lands.
But come the second winter my despair
Cracked and dissolved. Out of the fog there stepped
French Deal and gathered me into her care.
Until the spring
It was together that we woke and slept.
She made it clear that she had come away
Only to show the gambler she was free.
For her this was a working holiday
From too much love,
A break from him. A bigger break for me,
My longed-for first great love affair unloosed
Not just desire but the desire to please.
Just as Narcissus was himself seduced
As he gazed down
To see the loved one’s face in ecstasies,
I made her gasp and took it for applause:
It was my wretched ego I caressed.
No doubt I had confused effect and cause,
But equally
There could be no doubt I had Passed a Test.
Bursting with butch conceit I said goodbye.
She sailed home to be married. I stayed on,
And fifteen years unravelled before I
Saw her again.
Sydney had changed a lot while I was gone.
The Opera House was finished, there were tall
Buildings ablaze at night behind the Quay.
The Royal George was lost beyond recall
In concrete roads
Whose coils had squeezed it dry of mystery.
But one thing had remained the same: French Deal.
Tea on the lawn in my case proved unwise.
Unused to it, I judged the sun unreal.
Spread at our feet
Careening Cove was too bright for my eyes.
Dazzled I listened while she told me how
Marriage had come and gone. She had been ill
With meningitis but was better now.
She dropped a hint:
She and the gambler were true lovers still.
Long before sunset she took me inside
To lavish lotion on my burning skull.
I heard the ripple of the ebbing tide
Rocking a boat:
The chink of wind chimes and the slapping hull.
From that night on for fifteen years again
Whenever I flew home I came to tea,
And so in her life’s prime the same two men
She started with
Shared her affection and her courtesy.
The gambler got the lion’s share, of course:
To throw his life away yet keep her near
Was his reward for backing the right horse.
Each evening there
He warmed to her while it was morning here.
Conversely in my night she took the train
To Burwood where her girls thought her the best
Teacher in history and offset the pain
Of childlessness –
While he made sure he got a lot of rest.
Yes, all the time I toiled with diligence,
Apart from placing bets his only fame
He got from demonstrating in defence
Of a few trees –
His colleagues in the vegetation game.
Two men who scarcely added up to one,
One work-shy and the other a machine:
Both, when they sat beside her in the sun,
Were at their best.
Each was the better man he might have been.
Born of the fragile truce between us two,
Who never met except in her regard,
Her love life lasted yet was always new –
An ebb and flow
Like the tide at the foot of her front yard.
By rights we should all three have gone to hell
Together, but blind chance chose her to face
The silent forecast of her own death knell –
A cruel shadow
Which will soon, says the Sister’s voice through space,
At last have done. The roses that I left
Fade in their vase. Bending to kiss her eyes
He can precisely see himself bereft
Where I must guess –
Yet I can paint the picture when she dies.
On High Street wharf at midnight she alone
Waits for the small white ferry with no crew
To grumble close. Its soft ropes on their own
Throw quiet loops.
Weightless she steps aboard as we will do
When our turn comes, gambler: but not tonight.
Tonight we are those two gulls overhead
Gliding against the wind to match our flight
With the ghost ship
That will not cross the harbour, but instead
Slips on the tide towards the open sea
Whose darkness, which already reaches deep
Into the brilliant city, soon will be
All that there is,
As she sails out across the curve of sleep –
Too far to follow, even for you and me.
The Eternity Man
Never filmed, he was photographed only once,
Looking up startled into the death-trap flash
Like a threatened life form.
Still underlining his copybook one-word message
With the flourish that doubled back under the initial ‘E’,
He was caught red-eyed with the stark white chalk in his hand
Writing Eternity.
Before he died in 1967
At the age of eighty-eight
He had managed to write it five hundred thousand times,
And always in copperplate script.
Few streets or public places in the city of Sydney
Remained unmarked by the man with a single obsession –
Writing Eternity.
Wherever you lived, s
ooner or later he’d reach you.
Hauling their billycarts up for the day’s first run
Small boys swarmed when they came to the word
Arrestingly etched in the footpath.
It was self-protected by its perfect calligraphy –
The scrupulous sweep of a hand that had spent its lifetime
Writing Eternity.
He was born in a Balmain slum and raised underneath it,
Sleeping on hessian bags with his brothers and sisters
To keep beyond fist’s reach of his dipso parents.
His name was Arthur Stace.
He had no one to use it apart from his family.
His fate was to die as a man and return as a portent,
Writing Eternity.
His sisters grew up to be prostitutes. He was a pimp,
But in 1930, in his early forties, on meths,
He heard the Reverend John Ridley at Burton Street
Baptist Church, Darlinghurst,
And scrapped his planned night in the down-and-out sanctuary.
The piss artist had his vocation revealed unto him –
Writing Eternity.
‘I wish I could shout one word through the streets of Sydney!’
The Reverend Ridley shouted. ‘Eternity! You
Have got to meet it! You! Where will you spend
Eternity?’ Alone in his pew,
Avoided by all for his smell strong enough to see,
A man reborn saw the path stretch ahead he would stoop to,
Writing Eternity.
In New South Wales for more than a hundred years
We all had to learn that script in school,
But what school did he ever go to, and where
Did his chalk come from? How did he eat?
These nagging conundrums were mulled over endlessly
As he roamed unseen through the city without rhyme or reason
Writing Eternity.
In a blaze of glory the Thousand Year Reich was announced.
Old Bolsheviks shyly confessed with downcast eyes
And the first reffos arrived at Woolloomooloo.
Our troops sailed off to prop up the Middle East