Collected Poems (1958-2015)

by Clive James

  Alas, what is this madness? Out of sight

  Like smoke mixed with thin air I seem to fly.

  Although her form, when he switched on the light,

  Was still there, he had heard her spirit die.

  To bring it back, he swore that he would go

  To hell for her. It would be always so,

  For he would live forever and defy

  The halls of Dis and the gigantic night.

  Having heard this from him, she smiled again,

  And in his arms came back to life as one

  Returning to the mortal world of men,

  Their ticking clocks, the race that they must run.

  Believing in their love: that was the task

  That these two faced. It seemed too much to ask,

  So moved were they when all was said and done –

  Knowing that it would stop, but never when.

  Silent Sky

  Peter Porter b. Brisbane 1929, d. London 2010

  The sky is silent. All the planes must keep

  Clear of the fine volcanic ash that drifts

  Eastward from Iceland like a bad idea.

  In your apartment building without lifts,

  Not well myself, I find it a bit steep

  To climb so many stairs but know I must

  If I would see you still alive, still here.

  The word is out from those you love and trust –

  Time is so short that from your clever pen

  No line of verse might ever start again.

  Your poems were the condensation trails

  Of a bright mind’s steady rush of soaring power,

  Which still you show. Though plainly you are weak

  In body, you can still talk by the hour.

  Indeed we talk for two, but my will fails

  Before the task of wishing you goodbye.

  There’s all our usual stuff of which to speak:

  Pictures and poems, things that never die,

  And then there’s history, which in the end

  No one survives, not even your best friend.

  No one like you to talk about Mozart

  Bad-mouthing Haydn: how the older man

  Forgave the coming boy. No one like you

  To bring it all alive, the mortal span

  Of humans who create immortal art:

  Your favourite theme. I ought to tell you now

  That I will miss you. But I miss my cue,

  Unless it’s tact, not funk, that tells me how

  To look convinced this visit need not be

  The last at which you’re here to welcome me.

  If I am mealy-mouthed, though, you are not.

  You say you hate to eat because it feeds

  The crab that’s killing you. I could well ask,

  If only to find out what fear it breeds,

  Whether you dread your death now that it’s got

  A grip the morphine can’t shake. That would be

  For me, however. Better to wear my mask

  Of good cheer and insist Posterity

  Cherishes you already while you live,

  And there will be more time, and more to give.

  Ten weeks? Ten poems? Scarcely, it transpires,

  Ten days. The planes can fly again. The phones

  That never stopped are saying you are gone.

  We try to give thanks that you made old bones,

  But still I see the beach at Troy, the fires

  For fallen heroes. This is an event

  Proving for all the great work that lives on

  A great life dies, and leaves an empty tent –

  An aching void to measure our time by

  As overwhelming as a silent sky.

  Special Needs

  In the clear light of a cloudy summer morning

  A stricken one, holding his father’s hand,

  Comes by me on the Quay where I sit writing.

  His father spots me looking up, and I don’t want

  To look as if I wished I hadn’t, so

  Instead of turning straight back to my books

  I look around, thus making it a general thing

  That I do every so often –

  To watch the ferries, to check out the crowd.

  The father’s eyes try not to say, “Two seconds

  Is what you’ve had of looking at my boy.

  Try half a lifetime.” Yes, the boy is bad:

  So bad he holds one arm up while he walks

  As if to ward off further blows from heaven.

  His face reflects the pain at work behind it,

  But he can’t tell us what it is:

  He can only moan its secret name.

  The Nazis, like the Spartans, would have killed him,

  But where are the Spartans and the Nazis now?

  And really a sense of duty set in early,

  Or at least a sense of how God’s ways were strange:

  After the death of Alexander

  The idiot boy Philip was co-regent

  To the throne of a whole empire,

  And lasted in the role for quite a while

  Before his inevitable murder,

  Which he earned because of somebody’s ambition,

  And not because he couldn’t clean his room.

  They’re gone. I can look down again, two thoughts

  Contesting in my head:

  “It’s so unfair, I don’t know what to do”

  Is one. The other is the one that hurts:

  “Don’t be a fool. It’s nothing to do with you.”

  A lady wants a book signed.

  I add “Best wishes” –

  All I will do today of being kind –

  And when I hand it back to her, the sun

  Comes out behind her. I hold up one arm.

  Pennies for the Shark

  Taronga Park Aquarium once had,

  When I was very young, a basement pool

  Inside a mocked-up sandstone cave. A sad

  Collection of big fish would, as a rule,

  Just steam around it slowly till the bell

  Rang for their feeding time. They didn’t eat

  Each other, which was strange, but just as well:

  They’d had more than their fair share of defeat.

  The giant rays, like blankets on patrol,

  Deferred to one thing only, the Grey Nurse:

  The lone shark, coloured between coke and coal,

  Whose very outline spelled death like a hearse,

  She was the reason that the pennies lay

  So thick on the pool’s floor. People would chuck

  One down. It slid off, if it hit a ray,

  But if it hit the shark it sometimes stuck.

  As I recall, the coins in the shark’s back

  Were flush or even countersunk like screws.

  New coins would glint but old ones turning black

  Still made their little circle. The real news,

  However, was about the ones that hit

  The pectoral fins and stayed put: battle scars

  In a fighter’s wings, or code meant to transmit

  Some foreign curse, like messages from Mars,

  To pay the shark back for the pain she might

  Have caused had she been free to roam at will

  And find fish hiding in the reef at night,

  Or humans in the surf. Licensed to kill,

  She was a draw because she was a threat,

  And would have shown you, had you fallen in,

  The last thing she was likely to forget

  Was how to deal with your white, gleaming skin.

  No doubt they cleaned the pool out once a week

  And picked bad pennies gently from the beast.

  For what she said, she didn’t need to speak,

  And every year her pulling power increased.

  She had to be looked after. You might think

  That by the standards of today her life

&nbs
p; Was torture, but the way she didn’t blink

  Told us the femme fatale lived by the knife.

  Nevertheless I sympathised. Aware

  In some vague way that nature suffered through

  This notion that an animal could bear

  Its prison if the roof was painted blue,

  I tossed half-hearted pennies from the rail

  Suspecting that she might be sick of things,

  That shark, in slow pursuit of her own tail,

  Pock-marked with pictures of the British kings.

  Butterfly Needles

  Having grown old enough to see the trellis buckle

  Like an embroidered dress

  Beneath so many decades weighed in honeysuckle,

  The old man’s idleness

  Is honoured by this house as he sits late.

  Until the fruit bats come he is content to wait.

  Here in England, this is a different garden from that other,

  Back at the start.

  Here you could kick and scream and call out for your mother

  Until you broke her heart

  And nothing quite the same would come except the butterflies,

  And even they with different squadron markings. Expert eyes

  Say butterflies at dusk grow dorsal portals for receiving

  Needles, or maybe pins.

  That sounds to me like Nabokov relieving

  The burden of his sins.

  Forget about it. Just give me that old nasturtium scent

  I breathed when young, and would again, now I am spent.

  The nasturtiums, into which my silver Spitfire crashing

  Made a banshee noise

  But climbed back to my fingertips with wingtips flashing:

  None of the other boys

  Had anything as good, which made my fighting talk sought-after,

  A first taste of the poisoned flower whose cordial is laughter.

  Take it easy, mister. Sniff the real estate you’re ruling:

  You, the last one here.

  A butterfly died once and now the whole damned planet’s cooling

  At the wrong time of the year.

  Stand up too quickly and you hear the headsman chuckle

  And the words “Sleep well” are far too near the knuckle,

  And for your next trick, you will disappear.

  Nimrod

  Some marched, some sailed, some flew to join the war,

  And not a few were brought home on their shields.

  My heart is with those voiceless ones. They were

  The harvest of the broken-hearted fields,

  And I drew fortune from their bitter lack

  Of any luck. Silent, my father stands

  Before me now, as if he had come back,

  While this lament, whose beauty never ends,

  Not even with its final grandeur, casts

  Its nets of melody to hold me still

  Beneath his empty eyes. How long it lasts,

  That spell, though it is just a little while.

  Then he is gone again. The world returns:

  Babylon, where the Tower of Babel burns.

  Culture Clash

  Beside the uniquely hideous GLC building

  On a nasty September day

  With a chill in the air and rain just starting to spit,

  The Japanese couple, only this minute married,

  Have come to be photographed,

  The Thames in the background looking as deadly dull

  As ditchwater by Dickens. Bill Sykes

  Was lucky to get himself hanged

  Half a mile downriver from here.

  When the sun goes in, it makes falling out of a window

  Seem like the thing to do. But just look

  At the bride. No, not at the groom, whose suit

  Would be a black-tie outfit if not in white

  With trimmings a duck-egg blue, the shirt all frills

  Like Tommy Steele playing Liberace’s houseboy.

  I mean look at her. Inside that three-tier cake

  Of a dress is a model for Utamaro.

  Do they have another ceremony at home

  With all the traditional rigour?

  And is it a gaijin flaunting his arrogance

  To wish her lifted out of this concrete mess

  And taken home by JAL to the rooms of paper,

  The laths of wood and the properly arranged flowers,

  With kimono and her hair pinned up to frame

  The fresh snow of her beauty?

  Look at the line of her cheek as once the painter

  Would have looked at it in the Floating World

  When he spoke to her with the reverence of a duke

  To the Lady Murasaki.

  Ah, Butterfly, you have failed to understand.

  You must not come to us. We must come to you.

  Fashion Statement

  I see it now, the truth of what we were

  Back then when we were young and Sydney shone

  Like a classic silver milkshake canister

  Trapping the sunlight in a cyclotron

  Of dented brilliance. In our student kit

  We were dandies. We just didn’t look like it.

  This year I almost died. Propped up in bed

  I went back to that time and saw them all,

  Even the ones who are already dead.

  In the cloisters, encamped on the stone wall

  Outside the library staircase, we cracked wise

  As pretty girls went by, their shining eyes

  Lit up, we fancied, by the flash word-play

  Of drawling fops who didn’t look the part.

  But that was what our dress-sense had to say:

  Farewell to choking collars. Hail the start

  Of dressing down to suit the heat and light.

  It took thought, though. You had to get it right.

  We wore the first T-shirts. The desert boots,

  The lightweight army surplus khaki drills –

  These were our standard gear, the business suits

  Of young men with no business. How it fills

  My mind with longing now, the memory

  Of lurking off with endless energy

  To read the poets – seldom on the course –

  To write a poem – never quite resolved –

  To be removed from Manning House by force –

  It was where the women were – to be involved

  Completely – never fear what might befall –

  In the task of doing nothing much at all.

  For some, that task became their whole career,

  But even they lived better for the style

  We forged then over reservoirs of beer

  With leave to sit around and talk awhile –

  Well, talk forever. So the time slid by

  Into a lifetime. Who can wonder why?

  And as for those who burned to make a mark,

  We made it with the tongue we mastered where

  It felt like daylight even after dark,

  So soothing was the heat, so sweet the air:

  The perfect atmosphere for epigrams

  To flaunt their filigree like toast-rack trams.

  To see the harbour glittering in the sun

  Like fields of diamonds and the squall arrive

  Across the water sudden as a gun

  Was bound to bring the optic nerve alive

  Searching for words, and we who wrote them down

  Might not have looked it, but we owned the town.

  For nothing rules like easy eloquence

  Tied to the facts yet taking off at will

  Into the heady realms of common sense

  Condensed and energised by verbal skill:

  It has no need to check before a glass

  The swerve of a frock coat around its arse.

  Already ugly and with worse to come

  Yet lovely in its setting past belief,

  T
he city got into our speech. Though some

  Were burdened by their gift and came to grief,

  And some found fortune, but as restless men,

  We were dandies. We just didn’t see it then.

  Paper Flower Maiden

  Screwed up in every sense, she occupied

  The smallest space that she could organise:

  The country mouse of all church mice. Inside,

  Her soul, whose only outlet was her eyes,

  Was dying of compression sickness. Then

  She met him, the most confident of men.

  Her agonies of manifold self-doubt

  Were foreign to him utterly. One touch

  From him, and she began to open out

  Like a chrysanthemum. This is too much,

  She told herself: I’ll use up all the air.

  He kissed her mouth and she was everywhere,

  A tide of petals that filled up the hall

  And climbed the stairs. She screamed to be put back

  The way she was. He, trapped against a wall,

  Struggled for breath till everything went black.

  He woke to find her gone. The trail of scent

  She left behind her everywhere she went

  Led him towards her but he never quite

  Caught up with her, until he realised

  She was the flower garden which, at night,

  He roamed in, half entranced, half traumatised

  By how the beauty he’d set loose had no

  Need of him now, yet would not let him go.

  On Reading Hakluyt at High Altitude

  High in the stratosphere, I speed toward

  Australia’s share of history’s cruelty,

  Reading of caravels with priests aboard

  Who landed on Ormuz to hack a tree

  Into the deadly stakes that served the sword

  Of Christ the Merciful, his soldiery,

  And captured Christians died, though, truth to tell,

  Our Great Queen likewise would have marked for hell

  All sailors who were not True Protestants

  Had they been less intent to spread her name

  World wide, in script light-footed as a dance

  To us, but back in those days smoke and flame

  Wreathed every letter. Be it high romance

  Or merest greed, unless they’re both the same,