by Clive James
Reaching up for my mother’s hand.
Six Degrees of Separation from Shelley
In the last year of her life I dined with Diana Cooper
Who told me she thought the best thing to do with the poor
Was to kill them. I think her tongue was in her cheek
But with that much plastic surgery it was hard to tell.
As a child she had sat on the knee of George Meredith,
More than forty years after he published Modern Love.
Though she must have been as pretty as any poppet
Who challenged the trousers of Dowson or Lewis Carroll,
We can bet Meredith wasn’t as modern as that.
By then the old boy wouldn’t have felt a twinge
Even had he foreseen she would one day arrive
In Paris with an escort of two dozen Spitfires.
The book lamented his marriage to one of the daughters
Of Peacock. Peacock when young rescued Shelley
From a coma brought on through an excess of vegetarianism
By waving a steak under his sensitive nose.
Shelley never quite said that the best thing to do with the rich
Was to kill them, but he probably thought so.
Whether the steak was cooked or raw I can’t remember.
I should, of course. I was practically there:
The blaze of his funeral pyre on the beach at night
Was still in her eyes. At her age I hope to recall
The phial of poison she carried but never used
Against the day there was nothing left to live for.
Occupation: Housewife
Advertisements asked ‘Which twin has the Toni?’
Our mothers were supposed to be non-plussed.
Dense paragraphs of technical baloney
Explained the close resemblance of the phoney
To the Expensive Perm. It worked on trust.
The barber tried to tell me the same sheila
With the same Expensive Perm was pictured twice.
He said the Toni treatment was paint-sealer
Re-bottled by a second-hand car dealer
And did to hair what strychnine did to mice.
Our mothers all survived, but not the perms.
Two hours at most the Toni bobbed and dazzled
Before the waves were back on level terms,
Limp as the spear-points of the household germs
An avalanche of Vim left looking frazzled.
Another false economy, home brew
Seethed after nightfall in the laundry copper.
Bought on the sly, the hops were left to stew
Into a mulch that grunted as it grew.
You had to sample it with an eye-dropper,
Not stir it with a stick as one mum did.
She piled housebricks on top, thinking the gas
Would have nowhere to go. Lucky she hid
Inside the house. The copper blew its lid
Like Krakatoa to emit a mass
Of foam. The laundry window bulged and broke.
The prodigy invaded the back yard.
Spreading across the lawn like evil smoke
It murdered her hydrangeas at a stroke
And long before the dawn it had set hard.
On a world scale, one hardly needs to note,
Those Aussie battlers barely had a taste
Of deprivation. Reeling from the boat
Came reffo women who had eaten goat
Only on feast days. Still, it is the waste
I think of, the long years without our men,
And only the Yanks to offer luxuries
At a price no decent woman thought of then
As one she could afford, waiting for when
The Man Himself came back from Overseas.
And then I think of those whose men did not:
My mother one of them. She who had kept
Herself for him for so long, and for what?
To creep, when I had splinters, to my cot
With tweezers and a needle while I slept?
Now comes the time I fly to sit with her
Where she lies waiting, to what end we know.
We trade our stories of the way things were,
The home brew and the perm like rabbit fur.
How sad, she says, the heart is last to go.
The heart, the heart. I still can hear it break.
She asked for nothing except his return.
To pay so great a debt, what does it take?
My books, degrees, the money that I make?
Proud of a son who never seems to learn,
She can’t forget I lost my good penknife.
Those memories of waste do not grow dim
When you, for Occupation, write: Housewife.
Out of this world, God grant them both the life
She gave me and I had instead of him.
Jesus in Nigeria
Let him so keen for casting the first stone
Direct a fast ball right between her eyes,
So it might be from one quick burst of bone,
Not from a mass of bruises, that she dies.
I’m pleased to see, of all you without sin,
The cocky dimwit is so young and strong
Who won the draw to let the games begin.
He looks the type, unless I’m very wrong,
Who’ll hog the glory with his opening shot.
With any luck at least he’ll knock her out.
His rivals in this miserable lot
Are hard-pressed to jump up and down and shout.
That old one there has just put out his back
Lifting a boulder he could barely throw
For half a yard without a heart attack,
But you can bet, just to be in the show,
He’d shuffle up and drop it on her head.
I hate to take my father’s name in vain
But God almighty, how they want her dead:
How sure they are that she should die in pain.
The woman taken in adultery:
It’s one of the best stories in my book.
Some scholars call it the essential me.
If my writ ran here, you could take a look.
Alas, it doesn’t. I wield little power
Even with my bunch, let alone with yours.
Long, long ago I had my public hour.
My mission failed. The maniacs and bores
Took over. I still weep, but weep in fear
Over a world become so pitiless
I miss that blessed soldier with the spear
Who put an early end to my distress.
Merely a thug and not a mental case,
He showed the only mercy I recall.
A dumb but reasonably decent face:
The best that we can hope for, all in all.
Step up, young man. Take aim and don’t think twice.
No matter what you both believe is true,
Tonight she will be with me in Paradise.
I’m sorry I can’t say the same for you.
The Place of Reeds
Kogarah (suppress the first ‘a’ and it scans)
Named by the locals for the creek’s tall reeds
That look like an exotic dancer’s fans
When dead, was where I lived. Born to great deeds
I stripped the fronds and was a warrior
Whose arrows were the long thin brittle stem
With a stiff piece of copper wire or
A headless nail to make a point for them.
The point went in where once the pith had been
Before it crumbled. The capillary
Was open at the other end. Some keen
Constructors mastered the technology
For fitting in a feathery tailpiece,
But they made model aeroplanes that flew.
Mine didn’t, and my shafts, upon release
Wobbled and drifted a
s all missiles do
With nothing at the back to guide their flight.
Still, I was dangerous. My willow bow
Armed an Odysseus equipped to smite
Penelope and let her suitors go.
The creek led through a swamp where each weekend
Among the tangled trees we waged mock war.
At short range I could sometimes miss a friend
And hit the foe. Imagine Agincourt
Plus spiders, snakes and hydroponic plants.
I can’t forget one boy, caught up a tree
By twenty others, peeing his short pants
As the arrows came up sizzling. It was me.
Just so the tribesmen, when our ship came in
Bringing the puffs of smoke that threw a spear
Too quick to see, realized they couldn’t win.
It was our weaponry and not their fear
Defeated them. As we who couldn’t lose
Fought with our toys, their young men dived for coins
From the wharf across the bay at La Perouse,
Far from us. Now, in age, my memory joins
Easy supremacy to black despair
In those enchanted gardens that they left
Because they knew they didn’t have a prayer:
Lately I too begin to feel bereft.
Led by the head, my arrow proves to be
My life. I took my life into my hands.
I loosed it to its wandering apogee,
And now it falls. I wonder where it lands.
Hard-Core Orthography
In porno-speak, reversion to the Latin
Consoles us. ‘Cum.’ Cum laude we construe
As an audible orgasm. By that pattern,
Cum grano salis overturns the salt
With a thrashing climax when her urge to screw
Right there at dinner must be satisfied.
Cum vulpibus vulpinandum. While with foxes –
Caught in flagrante, high-heeled shoes flung wide
In satin sheets – do as the foxes do.
With aching wrist and pouting like a dolt,
Linguistically we still tick the right boxes:
You made mecum, she moans as she comes to.
Thus moved, her airbag lips look cumbersome
In the best sense. Maybe she’s not so dumb.
Dum spiro, spero. How was it for you?
Flashback on Fast Forward
The way his broken spirit almost healed
When he first saw how lovely she could look,
Her face illuminated by a book,
Was such a holy moment that he kneeled
Beside her; and the way his shoulders shook
Moved her caressing hand. Their love was sealed.
They met again. A different, older place
Had drawn her to its books, but still the glow
Of white between the words lit up her face
As if she gazed on freshly fallen snow.
He knew his troubled heart could not forego,
Not even for her sake, this touch of grace.
He asked her hand in marriage. She said yes.
Later he often said she must have known
To be with him was to be left alone
With the sworn enemy of happiness,
Her house a demilitarized zone
At best, and peace a pause in the distress.
When finally it broke her, he helped bring
Her back to life. Give him that much at least:
His cruelty was but a casual thing,
Not a career. Alas, that thought increased
His guilt he’d talked her into sheltering
Him safe home from the storm that never ceased,
Nor ever would. And so the years went by,
And, longer wed than almost all their friends,
Always in silence they would wonder why,
And sometimes say so. When a marriage ends,
They noticed, it’s from good will running dry,
Not just from lack of means to make amends.
He could not save himself: that much she knew.
Perhaps she’d felt it forty years before
When he quaked where he knelt, and what was more
She was aware that saying ‘I love you’
To one who hates himself can only store
Up trouble earthly powers can’t undo.
But revelation can. There at the start,
It came again to mark their closing years.
Once more, and this time through and through, his heart
Was touched. The ice he half prized turned to tears
As the last hailstone melts and disappears
In rain. By just a glass door set apart,
She in her study, he in the garden, they
Looked separate still, but he saw, in her eyes,
The light of the white paper. How time flies
Revealed its secret path from their first day.
He did a dance to make her look his way.
She smiled at him, her devil in disguise,
Almost as if at last he had grown wise.
PARODIES, IMITATIONS AND LAMPOONS
From Robert Lowell’s Notebook
Notes for a Sonnet
Stalled before my metal shaving mirror
With a locked razor in my hand I think of Tantalus
Whose lake retreats below the fractured lower lip
Of my will. Splinter the groined eyeballs of our sin,
Ford Madox Ford: you on the Quaker golf course
In Nantucket double-dealt your practised lies
Flattering the others and me we’d be great poets.
How wrong you were in their case. And now Nixon,
Nixon rolls in the harpoon ropes and smashes with his flukes
The frail gunwales of our beleaguered art. What
Else remains now but your England, Ford? There’s not
Much Lowell-praise left in Mailer but could be Alvarez
Might still write that book. In the skunk-hour
My mind’s not right. But there will be
Fifty-six new sonnets by tomorrow night.
Revised Notes for a Sonnet
On the steps of the Pentagon I tucked my skull
Well down between my knees, thinking of Cordell Hull
Cabot Lodge Van du Plessis Stuyvesant, our gardener,
Who’d stop me playing speedway in the red-and-rust
Model A Ford that got clapped out on Cape Cod
And wound up as a seed shed. Oh my God, my God,
How this administration bleeds but will not die,
Hacking at the ribcage of our art. You were wrong, R. P.
Blackmur. Some of the others had our insight, too:
Though I suppose I had endurance, toughness, faith,
Sensitivity, intelligence and talent. My mind’s not right.
With groined, sinning eyeballs I write sonnets until dawn
Is published over London like a row of books by Faber –
Then shave myself with Uncle’s full-dress sabre.
Notes for a Revised Sonnet
Slicing my head off shaving I think of Charles I
Bowing to the groined eyeball of Cromwell’s sinning will.
Think too of Orpheus, whose disembodied head
Dumped by the Bacchants floated singing in the river,
His love for Eurydice surviving her dumb move
By many sonnets. Decapitation wouldn’t slow me down
By more than a hundred lines a day. R. P. and F. M. F.
Play eighteen holes together in my troubled mind,
Ford faking his card, Blackmur explicating his,
And what is love? John Berryman, if you’d had what it took
We could have both blown England open. Now, alone,
With a plush new set-up to move into and shake down,
I snow-job Stephen Spender while the liquor flows like lava
In the par
lour of the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava.
R. S. Thomas at Altitude
The reason I am leaning over
At this pronounced angle is simply
That I am accustomed to standing
On Welsh hillsides
Staring out over escarpments stripped
And pitiless as my vision,
Where God says: Come
Back to the trodden manure
Of the chapel’s warm temptation.
But I see the canker that awaits
The child, and say no.
I see the death that ends
Life, and say no.
Missing nothing, I say
No, no.
And God says: you can’t
Say no to me, cully,
I’m omnipotent.
But I indicate the
Flying birds and the
Swimming fish and the trudging
Horse with my pointing
Finger and with customary
Economy of language, say
Nothing.
There is a stone in my mouth,
There is a storm in my
Flesh, there is a wind in
My bone.
Artificer of the knuckled, globed years
Is this your answer?
I’ve been up on this hill
Too long.
Edward Estlin Cummings Dead
what time el Rouble & la Dollar spin
‘their’ armies into ever smaller change,
patrolling Kopeks for a Quarter search
& Deutschfranc, after decimating Yen
inflates with sterling Rupee in a ditch
(what time, i.e., as moneys in their ‘death’
throes leave room for unbought souls to breathe)
that time, perhaps,
I’m him believing (i.
e., cummings
hold it
CUMMINGS) dead (
p e g g e d o u t
) & I will leave him lie