by Clive James
In the Melbourne Botanical Gardens?
In those days you would often see the couples –
Well-dressed and softly spoken, arm in arm –
Of new Australians who had made a life
A long way from the wreckage of their homelands,
But this pair were exceptionally spruce,
Though easily the age that I am now.
They were reserved, but I was curious.
Two Poles, she from an Auschwitz labour camp,
He crippled by the walk home from Siberia,
They met in Krakow, married, and came here
On a migrant ship that docked at Woolloomooloo –
Which must have seemed a long way from Lwow,
Though the old name was in the new name somewhere.
Knowing my face from TV, the man told me
My jokes against the local intellectuals
Concerned about Australia’s vassal status
In a Western world controlled by the US
Were falling on deaf ears. “They’ve no idea,”
He said. She nodded in agreement, graceful
Like my mother, who would certainly have liked her.
“We walk here every day,” she said. “So peaceful.”
He nodded while he watched the currawongs.
Her first fiancé perished at Katyn,
The year my father sailed to Singapore.
Oval Room, Wallace Collection
Created purely for the court’s delight,
Pictures by Boucher and by Fragonard
Still work their charm no matter how we might
Remind ourselves how frivolous they are.
Surprised by Vulcan, Venus doesn’t care
A fig, and Mars is merely given pause.
The reason for the cuckold’s angry stare
Might be that her sweet cleft is draped with gauze.
Boucher does more of that when, held in thrall
By naked ladies, Cupid doesn’t seem
To grasp that he himself could have them all
If he were older. This is just a dream,
Even when Fragonard’s girl in the swing
Splays her long legs, kicks off one velvet shoe,
Knowing that boy down there sees everything.
He can’t believe such miracles are true,
And here they’re really not. In this whole room
All images save one are sex made tame
By prettiness, the pranks of youth in bloom,
Winsomely keen to join a harmless game.
But Boucher’s Pompadour is on her own.
Her poise commands us to include her out:
Such swinging scenes are a forbidden zone.
The kind of woman men go mad about,
Even in company her solitude
Was strictly kept. She never spilled a thing,
And what she might have looked like in the nude
No man alive could know except the king.
Always my visits here are made complete
By her, the stately counterpoint to these
Cavorting revellers. Aloof, discreet,
She guards the greatest of the mysteries:
How sensual pleasure feels. It can’t be seen,
So all this other stuff was just a way
To take the edge off how much love could mean
To win and lose, back then. Just like today.
Against Gregariousness
Facing the wind, the hovering stormy petrels
Tap-dance on the water.
They pluck the tuna hatchlings
As Pavlova, had she been in a tearing hurry,
Might once have picked up pearls
From a broken necklace.
Yellowfin drive the turbine of sardines
Up near the surface so the diving shearwaters
Can fly down through the bubbles and get at them.
Birds from above and big fish from below
Rip at the pack until it comes apart
Like Poland, with survivors in single figures.
The krill, as singletons almost not there
But en masse like a cloud of diamond dust
Against the sunlit flood of their ballroom ceiling,
Are scooped up by the basking shark’s dragline
Or sucked in through the whale’s drapes of baleen –
A galaxy absorbed into a boudoir.
Make your bones in a shark family if you can.
If not, be tricky to locate for sheer
Translucence, a slick blip that will become –
Beyond the daisycutter beaks and jaws –
A lobster fortified with jutting eaves
Of glazed tile, like the castle at Nagoya
Hoisted around by jacks and cranes, an awkward
Mouthful like a crushed car. That being done,
Crawl backwards down a hole and don’t come out.
Numismatics
Merely a planchet waiting to be struck,
The poem shapes up, but is not a coin
Until, by craft, and then again by luck,
He fashions clean devices fit to join
A scrupulous design that he would like
To look mint fresh and not like a soft strike –
It must be hard. “It must be hard,” they say.
But no, it isn’t, not when you know how.
Except he doesn’t. He just knows the way
To scratch and scrape until the coin says “Now”,
Boasting its lustrous proof against the sleaze
Of verdigris, that cankerous disease.
The scholar rediscovers the doubloon
Inside the encrustations we call Time.
The critic says it might shine like the moon
But pales in value next to a thin dime.
The poet only knows that he can’t cheat
At any point, or else it’s counterfeit.
He must be definite yet open to
The second thought. He mustn’t make a mark
That falls short of the palpably brand new
Whose play of light pays tribute to the dark –
One solid, spinning, singing little disc
Perhaps not worth much, but still worth the risk.
Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
If there was one thing Egyptian Queens were used to
It was getting walled up inside a million tons
Of solid rock. Nefertiti had a taste of that
Before the painted head by which we know her –
That neck, that pretty hat, those film-star features,
The Louise Brooks of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms –
Emerged to start a tour of the museums
That finished in Berlin, almost for keeps.
It could have been the end, but for the flak tower:
With all the other treasures, she was brought there
And sat the war out barely shivering,
Deep in an armoured store-room built by slaves –
That old scenario again. During a raid
The guns sent up eight thousand shells a minute,
Some of them big enough to turn a whole
B-17 into a falling junk-yard,
But the mass concussion, spread through so much concrete,
Was just a rumbling tremble. In each tower
At least ten thousand quaking people sheltered,
Their papers having proved them Aryan.
When the war stopped, the towers fought one more day
Because the Russians couldn’t shoot a hole
To get in. Finally they sent an envoy.
The great Queen was brought out and rode in state
Back to her little plinth and clean glass case.
In Berlin in the spring, I cross the bridge
To the Museumsinsel just to see her
And dote on her while she gives me that look,
The look that says: “You’ve seen one tomb, you’ve seen
Them al
l.” For five long years the flak towers stood
Fighting the enemy armies in the sky
Whose flying chariots were as the locusts:
An age, but less than no time to Nefertiti,
Who looks as if she never heard a thing.
Spectre of the Rose
Goethe and Ulrike von Levetzow in Marienbad
You see this rose? This rose is not just you,
Crisp in the softness it makes visible,
With all its petals nourished by the dew
That wet its leaves last night and pumped it full
Of crimson lake before the rising sun
Reached down and opened it to be as one
Slow-motion cyclone of sheer loveliness,
Lush yet precise, contained in its excess,
A sumptuous promise to be always new,
Superbly poised as you when you undress:
This rose is also me, condemned to die.
The laws by which its nest of shells will fade
From the circumference inwards, it lives by
And follows to the end. So deep a grade
Of red is bought with borrowed time. The power
Of photosynthesis in plant or flower
That wrecks what has been built works even here,
Captured in such a jewel that it comes near
To matching you. You put it in the shade
I feel advancing with each precious hour.
Below it on the stem, regard the thorns
Meant to protect its frailty while it grew.
Doomed from the moment when the thoughtless dawn’s
Fatal initiative brought it to view,
It came here to this vase, and here it glows
For us, and it is yours and mine, this rose,
But it is also you and I. Two lives
United only for a time, it thrives –
Spreading its perfumed beauty as you do –
For just a while, and while it stays it goes:
Perfect too late for me, too soon for you.
The Same River Twice
Surely you see now that you gave your name
To the easy option. Nobody disagrees
About the infinitely shifting texture
Of the world. A malefactor loves the haze
Of boiling chance that blurs the total picture,
The fog you stand in up to your stiff knees,
Looking so wise, as if you’d solved the structure
Of all causality, when you, in fact,
Left out the thing we needed most to know –
That our character will leave us free to act
In contradiction to its steady flow
Only through our regretting that the river,
Though never still, is still the same as ever.
No man steps out of it, not even once.
On A Thin Gold Chain
Opals have storms in them, the legend goes:
They brim with water held in place by force
To stir the dawn, to liquefy the rose,
To make the sky flow. They are cursed, of course:
Great beauty often is. But they are blessed
As well, so long as she herself gives light
Who wears them. Shoulders bare, you were the guest
At the garden table on a summer night
Whose face lent splendour to the candle flame
While that slight trinket echoing your eyes
Swam in its colours. What a long, long game
We’ve played. Quick now, before somebody dies:
Have you still got that pendant? Can I see?
And have you kept it dark to punish me?
And Then They Dream of Love
“Were you not more than just a pretty face
And perfect figure,” he thought, kissing one
While clamped against the other, “this embrace
Would not be so intense.” But she was done
For now with doubts and fears. Her state of grace
Had come upon her like the rising sun.
He bathed in daybreak, loving its suddenness,
The way she shook, her look of sheer distress
That meant the opposite, and everything.
Back in the world, her limbs still trembling,
She said it all again, and this time he
Expressed himself in words as best he could –
“You must know you mean more than this to me” –
Merely to find himself misunderstood.
“You mean you don’t get lost in ecstasy
The way I do?” she said. “I want to be
All that you need of this.” He said, “You said
I only cared what you were like in bed.”
And so their bickering began again
About what you mean now and I meant then.
Only so long could they go on that way
Before they parted, worn out by their knack
For petty quarrels even when they lay
Replete. The things they said before came back
To plague them. If it matters what you say
It can’t last. Best to take another tack,
And meet for just this, very late at night.
Would she do that? No. He would. She was right.
Beachmaster
Scanning the face of a crestfallen wave
He sees his life collapsing to a close,
A foaming comber racing to its grave.
But after that one, there are all of those:
The ranks of the unbroken, the young men
Completely green, queuing to take their turn
To die so that the sea might live again.
That much it took him all his life to learn.
Propped on her elbow in the burning sand,
The latest Miss Australia views it all
As one vast courtship. With a loving hand
She strokes her thigh as one by one they fall,
Those high walls in the water. Look at her,
But shade your sad glance carefully, old man –
For she will never see you as you were,
A long way out, before the end began.
Continental Silentia
Neat name for the machine
On which the lists were done:
Quietly ordered violence.
Feathers by the ton.
The whisper of a tempest,
The ghost of a parade:
Pan-European silence,
A pop-gun fusillade,
A muted rat-tat-tat,
The excuse already ripe:
We knew nothing of all that.
All we did was type,
And corrections in those days
Had to be done with x’s.
You couldn’t just erase
And start again: wrong sexes,
Wrong spellings … it took ages.
Just to get it right
Meant black spots in the pages:
Blurs of a foggy night.
Unspoken and unsung,
Those names that didn’t matter.
Sonderbehandlung.
Just written, pitter-patter.
Continental Silentia
For all those in absentia
Respectable dementia
Sub rosa eloquentia
List, oh list
The rest is silence
Put to silence
Zum schweigen gebracht
Typewriter
Firelighter
Tap tap
Language Lessons
She knew the last words of Eurydice
In every syllable, both short and long.
Correcting his misuse of quantity,
She proved the plangent lilt of Virgil’s song
Depended on precision, while his hand,
Light as a mayfly coming in to land,
Caressed her cheek to taste the melody
Of such sweet skin, smooth as a silk sarong.
Give her the palm for speaking well, he thought,
But has she ever melted as she should
With no holds barred, or wept the way she ought?
His scraps of Greek, it seemed, were not much good.
He said the words for rosy-fingered dawn
And when she set him straight with laughing scorn
He spoke a tongue she barely understood,
Contesting her with kisses long and short.
In such a way they traded expertise
Until the day came it took half the night.
She gradually improved his memories
And he set loose her longing for delight.
The passion underneath the verse technique
She saw in its full force, and learned to speak –
Strictly, as always, but in ecstasies.
So finally, for both, the sound was right,
A compound language fashioned out of sighs
And poetry recited line by line.
Few lovers and few scholars realise
The force with which those separate things combine
When classic metres are at last revealed
As reservoirs where rhythms lie concealed
That sprang from heartbeats just like yours and mine,
Pent breath, and what we cry with flashing eyes.
In that regard they made a pretty pair:
He with his otherwise unhurried touch,
She with her prim and finely balanced air,
When they lay down together, came to such
An ending they were like a poem caught
In the last singing phrase of what it sought
To start with: to contain what means too much
Left lying loose. In something like despair,
Though it was joy, they would forget they knew
What anybody else had ever said
Of love, and simply murmur the poor few
Abstract endearments suitable for bed
Until they slept, and dreamed they’d never met
And none of this sheer bliss had happened yet.
One woke the other – which was which? – in dread:
Ah, Orpheus, what has lost us, me and you?