by Clive James
Propellers of the Normandie,
Those museum-forecourt-filling pieces of sculpture
(37 tons each of cast manganese bronze)
That transmitted the electric
Power to the water,
Giving the ship her all-conquering speed,
Not to mention her teeth-rattling vibration
Even in First Class –
The cost of elegance, as the Victor Hugo clematis
Costs me my equilibrium,
Until I wonder: don’t I mean the narrow-bladed
More-wood-than-metal airscrew
Of a WWI Armée de l’Air bomber?
Say a Breguet 14, faster than a Fokker D VII?
Perhaps that would be better:
I grow uncertain, I have to look things up,
And stuff that I thought I knew for sure
Turns out to be wrong.
Inelegantly reclining in my liner chair
As the evening sunlight finally fades,
I watch the flowers, that were never really my thing,
Glowing their last and blacking out closer
And closer to me
(When the dancing finished in the Grand Salon
At one o’clock in the morning
They brought back and unrolled the half-ton weight
Of the world’s biggest ocean-going carpet
To cover the parquetry floor
Copied from the throne-room in Versailles)
While the great poet’s record-breaker of a funeral
Still stretches half way across Paris –
Well, it does in my mind –
And the rockets and flares go up to look for Gothas –
I can see the colours burst and fall, going dry
Like the baby dribble of cherubim
On a black velvet bib –
And the pinwheel flower, even in silhouette,
Drills a sibilant echo of Cocteau’s voice through my brain’s ruins:
The Victor Hugo clematis is a madman that thinks
It is Victor Hugo.
Mystery of the Silver Chair
As if God’s glory, with just one sun-ray,
Could not burn craters in a chromosome,
We call it kindly when it works our way,
And, some of us with tact, some with display,
Arrange the house to make it feel at home.
With votive tokens we propitiate
Almighty God. Just to be neat and clean –
Running the water hot to rinse the plate,
Chipping the rust-flakes from the garden gate –
These things are silent prayers, meant to be seen.
Strange, though, when parents with a stricken child
Still cleanse the temple, purify themselves.
They were betrayed, but how do they run wild?
With J-cloth and a blob of Fairy Mild
They wipe the white gloss of the kitchen shelves.
They, least of all, are likely to let go
Completely, like the slovens down the street:
The ones who could conceal a buffalo
In their front lawn and you would never know,
Yet somehow they keep their Creator sweet.
Unjust, unjust: but only if He’s there.
The girl with palsy looks you in the eye,
Seeming to say there is no God to care.
Her gleaming wheel-chair says He’s everywhere,
Or why would the unwell try not to die?
And why would those who love them give the best
Years of their lives to doing the right thing?
Why go on passing a perpetual test
With no real hope and with so little rest?
Why make from suffering an offering?
Why dust the carpet, wash the car, dress well?
If God were mocked by those who might do that
With ample cause, having been given Hell
To live with, we could very quickly tell –
Somebody would forget to feed the cat.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes the spirit kneels.
But when those with the least take pride the most,
We need to bend our thoughts to how it feels.
Shamed by those scintillating silver wheels,
We see the lightning of the Holy Ghost.
The Genesis Wafers
Genesis carried wafers in her hold
To catch the particles sent from the sun.
Diamond, sapphire, gold
Were those fine webs, as if by spiders spun
Beside whom specks of dust would weigh a ton.
A million miles from Earth, in the deep cold,
The particles collected in the skeins.
Diamond, sapphire, gold,
They flowered like tiny salt pans in the rains –
Fresh tablecloths distressed with coffee stains.
Back in the lab, the altered wafers told
A story of how poetry is born:
Diamond, sapphire, gold
Serenities invaded by stuff torn
From the incandescent storm that powers the dawn.
Museum of the Unmoving Image
The objects on display might seem to lack
Significance, unless you know the words.
The final straw that broke the camel’s back,
The solitary stone that killed two birds.
Does this stuff really merit a glass case?
A tatty mattress and a shrivelled pea,
A shadow that somebody tried to chase,
A rusty pin that somehow earned a fee?
That gilded lily might have looked quite good
Without the dust that you won’t see me for.
But where’s the thrill in one piece of touched wood?
I think we’ve seen that uncut ice before.
A strained-at gnat, how interesting is that?
The bat from hell looks pitifully tame,
As do the pickled tongue got by the cat,
The ashes of the moth drawn to the flame.
Spilled milk, rough diamond, gift horse, gathered moss,
Dead duck, gone goose, bad apple, busted flush –
They’re all lined up as if we gave a toss.
Try not to kill each other in the crush.
They’ve got an annexe for the big events:
Burned boats and bridges, castles in the air,
Clouds for your head to be in, rows of tents
For being camp as. Do we have to care?
What does this junk add up to? Look and learn,
The headphones say. They say our language grew
Out of this bric-a-brac. Here we return
To when the world around us shone brand new,
Lending its lustre to what people said;
Their speech was vivid with specific things.
It cries out to be brought back from the dead.
See what it was, and hear what it still sings.
Statement from the Secretary of Defense
This one we didn’t know we didn’t know:
At least, I didn’t. You, you might have known
You didn’t know. Let’s say that might be so.
You knew, with wisdom granted you alone,
You didn’t know. You say, but don’t say how,
You knew we didn’t know about abuse,
By us, in gaols of theirs that we run now.
Well, now we all know. I make no excuse:
In fact it’s far worse than you think. You thought
You knew how bad it was? If you could see
The photos in this classified report
You’d know you knew, as usual, less than me.
You want to see a stress position? Look
At how I crouch to meet the President
And tell him this has not gone by the book.
How do I know he won’t know what I meant?
I just know what he’ll say, with hanging head:
&n
bsp; ‘They don’t know what pain is, these foreign folks.
Pain is to know you don’t know what gets said
Behind your back, except you know the jokes.’
I feel for that man in his time of trial.
He simply didn’t know, but now he knows
He didn’t, and it hurts. Yet he can smile.
Remember how that Arab saying goes –
The blow that doesn’t break you makes you strong?
They’ll thank us when they get up off the mat.
They didn’t know we knew what they knew. Wrong.
Even our women can do stuff like that.
Fair-weather friends who called our cause so good
Not even we could screw it, but now say
We’ve managed the impossible – I’ve stood
All I can stand of petty spite today,
So leave no room for doubt: now that we know
We might have known we didn’t know, let’s keep
Our heads. Give history time, and time will show
How flags wash clean, and eagles cease to weep.
The Australian Suicide Bomber’s Heavenly Reward
Here I am, complaining as usual to Nicole Kidman
(‘Sometimes I think that to you I’m just a sex object’)
While I watch Elle McPherson model her new range
Of minimalist lingerie.
Elle does it the way I told her,
Dancing slowly to theme music from The Sirens
As she puts the stuff on instead of taking it off.
Meanwhile, Naomi Watts is fluffing up the spare bed
For her re-run of that scene in Mulholland Drive
Where she gets it on with the brunette with the weird name.
In keeping with the requirements of ethnic origin
Naomi’s partner here will be Portia de Rossi,
Who seems admirably hot for the whole idea.
On every level surface there are perfumed candles
And wind chimes tinkle on the moonlit terrace:
Kylie and Dannii are doing a great job.
(They fight a lot, but when I warn them they might miss
Their turn, they come to heel.)
Do you know, I was scared I might never make it?
All suited up in my dynamite new waistcoat,
I was listening to our spiritual leader –
Radiant his beard, elegant his uplifted finger –
As he enthrallingly outlined, not for the first time,
The blessings that awaited us upon the successful completion
Of our mission to obliterate the infidel.
He should never have said he was sorry
He wasn’t going with us.
Somehow I found myself pushing the button early.
I remember his look of surprise
In the flash of light before everything went sideways,
And I thought I might have incurred Allah’s displeasure.
But Allah, the Greatest, truly as great as they say –
Great in his glory, glorious in his greatness, you name it –
Was actually waiting for me at the front door of this place
With a few words of his own. ‘You did the right thing.
Those were exactly the people to lower the boom on.
Did they really think that I, of all deities,
Was ever going to be saddled with all that shit?
I mean, please. Hello? Have we met?’
And so I was escorted by the Hockeyroos –
Who had kindly decided to dress for beach volleyball –
Into the antechamber where Cate Blanchett was waiting
In a white bias-cut evening gown and bare feet.
High maintenance, or what?
No wonder I was feeling a bit wrecked.
‘You look,’ she said, ‘as if you could use a bath.’
She ran it for me, whisking the foam with her fingertips
While adding petals of hydrangeas and nasturtiums.
Down at her end, she opened a packet of Jaffas
And dropped them in, like blood into a cloud.
Diamond Pens of the Bus Vandals
Where do bus vandals get their diamond pens
That fill each upstairs window with a cloud
Of shuffled etchings? Patience does them proud.
Think of Spinoza when he ground a lens.
A fog in London used to be outside
The bus, which had to crawl until it cleared.
Now it’s as if the world had disappeared
In shining smoke however far you ride.
You could call this a breakthrough, of a sort.
These storms of brilliance, light as the new dark,
Disturb and question like a pickled shark:
Conceptual art free from the bonds of thought,
Raw talent rampant. New York subway cars
Once left poor Jackson Pollock looking tame.
Some of the doodlers sprayed their way to fame:
A dazzled Norman Mailer called them stars.
And wasn’t Michelangelo, deep down,
Compelled to sling paint by an empty space,
Some ceiling he could thoroughly deface?
The same for Raphael. When those boys hit town
Few of its walls were safe. One cave in France
Has borne for almost forty thousand years
Pictures of bison and small men with spears –
Blank surfaces have never stood a chance
Against the human impulse to express
The self. All those initials on the glass
Remind you, as you clutch your Freedom Pass,
It’s a long journey from the wilderness.
The Zero Pilot
On the Hiryu, Hajime Toyoshima
Starred in the group photos like Andy Hardy,
He was so small and cute.
His face, as friendly as his first name
(In Japanese you say ‘Hajime’ at first meeting),
Could have been chirping, ‘Hey, why don’t we
Put the show on right here in the barn?’
After Pearl Harbor he was one of the great ship’s heroes
And the attack on Darwin promised him yet more glory,
But his engine conked out over Melville Island
From one lousy rifle bullet in the oil system.
Caught by natives, he should have done it then,
If not beforehand when the prop stopped turning.
Instead of hitting the silk
He could have nosed over and dived into the ground
But he didn’t. When the natives closed in
He could have shot himself with his .32
But he didn’t do that either.
Under interrogation he was offered chocolate
Which he ate instead of turning down.
What was he thinking of?
He didn’t get it done
Until a full two and half years later –
After the Cowra breakout, which he helped
To lead, madly blowing a stolen bugle,
Psyched up to guide his party of frantic runners
All the way to Japan. Upon recapture
He finally did it with a carving knife,
Sawing at his own throat as if to cancel
That sweet, rich taste of surrender,
The swallowed chocolate. His ruined Zero
Is on display in Darwin. The empty bulkhead
Is torn like silver paper where the engine roared
That once propelled him through the startled sky
At a rate of roll unknown to Kittyhawks.
Paint, cables, webbing, instruments and guns:
Much else is also missing,
But the real absence is his,
And always was.
‘Hajime’ is short for
‘Our acquaintanceship begins:
Until now, we did not know each other.
From this day for
th, we will.’
Well, could be,
Though it mightn’t be quite that easy.
Buried at Cowra,
He probably never knew
That the Hiryu went down at Midway,
Where the last of his friends died fighting –
Still missing the cheery voice
Of their mascot, named always to say hello,
Who never said goodbye.
Iron Horse
The Sioux, believing ponies should be pintos,
Painted the ones that weren’t.
When they saw the Iron Horse
They must have wondered why the palefaces
Left its black coat unmarked.
Bruno Schulz said an artist must mature
But only into childhood.
He called our first perceptions
The iron capital of the adult brain.
I would like to think my latest marquetry
Was underpinned by Debussy’s Images
Or the chain of micro-essays
In Adorno’s Minima moralia,
But a more likely progenitor
Entered my head right here in Sydney:
The first aesthetic thrill that I remember.
In a Strand Arcade display case
A tiny but fine-detailed model train
Ran endlessly around a plaster landscape.
On tip-toe, looking through the panorama
Rather than down on it, I formed or fed
Lasting ideals of mimesis, precision
And the consonance of closely fitted parts
Combined into a work that had coherence
Beyond its inseparable workings.
Later, at the flicks, when the Iron Horse
Was attacked by yelping braves,
I heard their hoof-beats on a marble floor,
And later still, having read about steam power
In my Modern Marvels Encyclopaedia,
When I realised the little train
Had been pulled by an illusionary loco –
Directly turned by an electric motor,
The wheels propelled the rods and not vice versa –
My seeing through the trick only increased
The recollection of intensity,
Immensity compressed into a bubble,
The macrosphere in miniature.
But mere shrinkage didn’t work the magic:
There had to be that complicated movement
Of intricate articulation
As in an aero-engine like the Merlin
Or the H-form Napier Sabre.
In the Hermitage, a Fabergé toy train
Was not so precious, didn’t even go,
Was hopelessly disfigured by its jewels.