by Clive James
And no use asking if I would have died
Had this one nailed me. When a man is bald
And soon to face an aria from Tosca,
It’s not as if he needs a pile of crap
Dumped on his head from fifty thousand feet
By some Stealth fowl. And spare me the assurance
That it wipes off. I didn’t sign on for this.
Tramps and Bowlers
In the park in front of my place, every night
A bunch of tramps sleep on the wooden porch
Of the bowling green club-house. They shed no light.
No policeman ever wakes them with a torch,
Because no one reports their nightly stay.
People like me who take an early walk
Just after dawn will see them start the day
By packing up. They barely even talk,
Loading their duffel bags. They leave no trace,
Thus proving some who sleep rough aren’t so dumb.
Tramps blow their secret if they trash the place:
This lot make sure that, when the bowlers come,
There’s not a beer-can to pollute the scene.
And so, by day, neat paragons of thrift
And duty bow down to the very green
Which forms, by night, for scruffs who merely drift,
Their front lawn. If the bowlers only knew,
For sure they’d put in for a higher fence.
They’d have a point, but it would spoil the view
More than the tramps will, if they have the sense
To keep on cleaning up before they go,
Protecting indolence with industry:
A touch of what the bowlers value so.
Which way of life is better? Don’t ask me –
I chose both, so I’d be the last to know.
Fires Burning, Fires Burning
Over Hamburg
The Lancaster crews could feel the heat
Through the sides of the aircraft.
The fire was six thousand feet high.
At Birkenau
When burning a lot of bodies, the SS found
The thing to do was to put down a layer
Of women first.
They had more fat in them.
In Tokyo
Some people who survived in a canal
Saw a horse on fire running through the streets.
But few who saw it were left to remember anything:
Even the water burned.
In New York
Some couples, given the choice
Between the flames and a long fall,
Outflanked the heat and went down holding hands.
Come with me, you imagine the men saying,
I know a quicker way.
In Sydney
Next to my mother’s coffin
I gave thanks that she would shortly meet
A different kind of fire,
Having died first, and in due time.
Yusra
The Public Morals Unit of Hamas
Saw Yusra al-Azzuri, bold as brass,
In Gaza City, walk with her betrothed,
Her sister also present. Half unclothed,
All three behaved as if beyond the reach
Of justice. Laughing, dancing on the beach,
They almost touched. They thought to drive away.
The Unit followed them without delay.
Her young man drove. Beside him as they fled,
Yusra died quickly in a hail of lead.
The other two were hauled out of the car
And beaten senseless. With an iron bar,
The riddled corpse of Yusra, as the worst
Offender, was assaulted till it burst.
She would have prayed for death. It can be said,
Therefore, it was a blessing she was dead
Already. Thus we look for just one touch
Of grace in this catastrophe. Too much
To bear, the thought that those young men were glad
To be there. Won’t the memory drive them mad?
Could they not see the laughter in her face
Was heaven on earth, the only holy place?
Perhaps they guessed, and acted from the fear
That Paradise is nowhere if not here.
Yusra, your name too lovely to forget
Shines like a sunrise joined to a sunset.
The day between went with you. Where you are,
That light around you is your life, Yusra.
Private Prayer at Yasukuni Shrine
An Oka kamikaze rocket bomb
Sits in the vestibule, its rising sun
Ablaze with pride.
Names of the fallen are on CD-ROM.
The war might have been lost. The peace was won:
A resurrection after suicide.
For once I feel the urge to send my thoughts
Your way, as I suppose these people do.
I see the tide
Come in on Papua. Their troop transports,
The beach, our hospital. Over to you:
Why was one little miracle denied?
After they made our nurses wade waist deep
They picked their targets and they shot them all.
The waves ran red.
Somehow this is a memory I keep.
I hear the lost cries of the last to fall
As if I, too, had been among the dead.
Those same troops fought south to the Golden Stairs,
Where they were stopped. They starved, and finally
The last few fed
On corpses. And the victory would be theirs
If I were glad? That’s what you’re telling me?
It would have been in vain that your son bled?
But wasn’t it? What were you thinking when
Our daughters died? You couldn’t interfere,
I hear you say.
That must mean that you never can. Well, then,
At least I know now that no prayers from here
Have ever made much difference either way,
And therefore we weren’t fighting you as well.
Old people here saw the Missouri loom
Out in the bay
And thought the end had come. They couldn’t tell
That the alternative to certain doom
Would be pachinko and the cash to play
A game of chance, all day and every day.
In that bright shrine you really do preside.
What you have said
Comes true. The DOW is down on the Nikkei.
The royal baby takes a buggy ride.
The last war criminal will die in bed.
Naomi from Namibia
In the Brisbane Botanical Gardens,
Walking the avenue of weeping figs,
You can see exuded latex stain the bark
Like adolescent sperm. A metamorphosis:
The trunks must be full of randy boys.
At home, the Java willows
When planted alongside a watercourse
Were said to stem the breeding of mosquitoes.
Here, they have nothing else to do
Except to stand there looking elegant
In Elle McPherson lingerie.
From the walkway through the mangrove mud-flats
Spread south from overwhelming Asia,
You can see the breathing tubes of Viet Cong crabs
And imagine Arnie hiding from the Predator
Like a mud-skipper playing possum,
Although he did that, of course, in South America.
Below the tangled branches, bubbles tick.
For a century and a half, the giant banyan
Has grown like a cathedral heading downwards,
As a dumb Chartres might slowly dive for cover
Through shallows clear as air. In India
At least a dozen families would be dying
By inches in its colonnades.
; At the kiosk, Naomi from Namibia
Serves me a skimmed milk strawberry milkshake.
She has come here to lead her ideal life,
Like almost all these trees.
They get to stay, but she has to go back.
William Dobell’s Cypriot
The Cypriot brought his wine-dark eyes with him
Along with his skin and hair. He also brought
That shirt. Swathes of fine fabric clothe a slim
Frame with a grace bespeaking taste and thought.
Australia, 1940. There were few
Men native-born who had that kind of style.
Hence the attention Dobell gave the blue
Collar and cuffs, to make us pause awhile
And see a presence that did not belong.
This sitter, sitting here, caught by this hand?
Caught beautifully. No, there is nothing wrong
About this transportation to Queensland
Of ancient subtleties. It’s merely odd.
A man whom he had loved and seen asleep
The painter painted naked, a Greek god.
But then he had the sudden wit to keep
The clothes, and thus the heritage, in the next
Picture. A window from a men’s-wear store,
It doubles as the greatest early text
Of the immigration. What we were before
Looks back through this to what we would become.
We see a sense of nuance head our way
To make the raw rich, complicate the sum
Of qualities, prepare us for today.
Now that the day is ours, the time arrives
To remember destiny began as chance,
And history is as frail as human lives.
A young and foreign smile, love at first glance:
Painter and painted possibly first met
Just because one admired the other’s tie.
A year old then, I live now in their debt.
This is the way they live. I too will die.
Ghost Train to Australia
(Container Train in Landscape, 1983–84, by Jeffrey Smart)
I won’t this time. Silent at last and shunted
Into its siding in the Victorian Arts Centre,
The container train started its journey in Yugoslavia
Two years before it arrived in Gippsland
Among trees that echo Albert Namatjira.
The containers echo First World War dazzle paint
Whose solid planes of colour fooled submarines.
Everything in the picture echoes something,
Yet it all belongs to the painter’s unifying vision.
How does he do that? Perhaps as a consolation
For not being Piero della Francesca
And lacking Christ’s birth to celebrate in Arezzo,
He can alter the order of modern history’s pages
Though we might need our memories to catch him in the act:
All trains in Europe, for example, even today,
When they are drawn by electric locos and made of metal,
Remind us of boxcars full of unbelieving people
And the scenes on the platform when the train pulled in.
No amount of lusciously applied colour
Can cover all that stark grey squalor up
Or take away the shadow on a train’s fate.
Simply because it is a European train,
Even if it goes all the way to Australia
And terminates among the eucalypts
In a lake of perfect sunlight the whole sky deep
And everybody gets off and there are no searchlights
Or whips or wolf-hounds or cold-eyed efficient doctors
And the fathers go to work on the Snowy River
And the mothers learn the lemon meringue pie
And the children, after they have had their tonsils out,
Get Shelley’s lemonade and vanilla ice-cream
And all grow up to be captain of the school,
And the local intellectuals fly in like fruit-bats
To lecture the new arrivals about genocide,
The train, the train, the wonderful train
That found visas for all aboard and now finally sits
Shining in the bush like five bob’s worth of sweets –
Jaffas, Cherry Ripes, Hoadley’s Violet Crumble Bars
Glittering in the original purple and gold wrappers –
Is still the ghost train. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.
Les Saw It First
I swam across the creek at Inverell.
The guard of jacarandas bled their blue
Into the water. I recall it well,
But partly I do that because of you.
I was a city boy. A country trip
Was rare, and so the memories were sparse.
I helped to plait a cracker for a whip,
But when I swung the thing it was a farce.
At Tingha, where they used to mine the tin,
I searched for sapphires all day and found none.
I briefly rode a horse and barked my shin
When I got off, and couldn’t stand the sun
That bleached the fence-rails to a dry, pale grey
A hundred years before and there they were,
Just looking wooden and what can you say?
Sit on a stump and blink into the blur.
I had been long away when I looked back
Through your books and at last saw what I’d seen:
The blue-tongue in the gum beside the track,
The headless black snake limp as Plasticine.
The snake was in a trench they called a race.
Somebody threw it there when it was dead.
Now I remember how fear froze my face
When, further on, I found its yawning head.
The country built the city: now I know.
Like it or not, it got to even me,
And not just through the Royal Easter Show,
But the hard yakka of its poetry.
Now I can hear the shouts of the young men
Out after rabbits with a .22.
I wasn’t there long, but I’m there again,
Collecting trinkets as the magpies do.
It’s part of me, and partly because of you.
Signed by the Artist
The way the bamboo leans out of the frame,
Some of its leaves cut short by the frame’s edge,
Makes room for swathes of air which you would think,
If it were sold in bolts, would drape like silk.
Below, where one pond spills from the stone ledge
Into the next, three carp as white as milk
Glow through the water near the painter’s name,
A stack of characters brushed in black ink.
The open spaces and the spare detail
Are both compressed into that signature:
He made his name part of the work of art.
Slice of crisp leaf, smooth flourish of fish fin
Are there to show you he is very sure
Of how the balance of things kept apart
Can shape a distance. On a larger scale
He still leaves out far more than he puts in.
We’re lucky that he does. What he includes,
Almost too beautiful to contemplate,
Already hurts our hearts. Were he to fill
The gaps, the mind would have no place to rest,
No peace in the collected solitudes
Of those three fish, in how each leaf is blessed
With life. Easy to underestimate
A name like his. No substance. Too much skill.
Return of the Lost City
How far was Plato free of that ‘inflamed
Community’ he said we should avoid?
Sofas, incense and hookers: these he named
Among the habits not to be enjoyed,
And if you did,
you ought to be ashamed.
But can’t we tell, by how he sounds annoyed,
That his Republic, planned on our behalf,
Was where his own desires had the last laugh,
If only as the motor for his sense
Of discipline? Even the dreams were policed,
By the Nocturnal Council. Such immense
Powers of repression! What would be released
Without them? The Republic was intense:
The fear of relaxation never ceased.
Hence the embargo on all works of art,
However strict in form, that touched the heart.
No poetry. No poets! No, not one –
Not even Homer, if he were to be
Reborn – could be admitted, lest the sun
Set on the hard-won social harmony,
And that obscene night-life which had begun
In man’s first effort at society,
Atlantis, should come flooding back, the way
The sea did, or so story-tellers say.
But Plato knew that they’d say anything:
For money or applause or just a share
Of an hetaera, they would dance and sing
And turn the whole deal into a nightmare.
The very prospect left him quivering
With anger. There is something like despair
Haunting the author of the ideal state,
A taunting voice he heard while working late:
Atlantis made you. It is what you know,
Deep down. Atlantis and its pleasures drive
Your thoughts. Atlantis never lets you go.
Atlantis is where you are most alive –
Yes, even you, you that despise it so,
When all mankind would love it to arrive
Again, the living dream you try to kill
By making perfect. But you never will.
Anniversary Serenade
You are my alcohol and nicotine,
My silver flask and cigarette machine.
You watch and scratch my back, you scrub me clean.
I mumble but you still know what I mean.
Know what I mean?
You read my thoughts, you see what I have seen.
You are my egg-flip and my ego trip,
My passion-fruit soufflé and strawberry whip.
When the dawn comes to catch you on the hip
I taste the sweet light on my fingertip.
My fingertip?
I lift it to my quivering lips and sip.
Homecoming Queen and mother of our two
Smart daughters who, thank God, take after you,
This house depends on what you say and do –