But the man of Hippo, with an African blast,
Blasted this man of the cool north…
THE PRINCELY PROGRESS
To nubile Charles yet unennobled James
Presents this specimen of Higher Games
Assured though of at least an O.B.E.
Sooner or later for well let’s just see –
Skill in the dour destructive witticism
His services to television criticism?
Besides as is well known our Royal Family
Loves digs against Itself however hammily
Delivered. And again (let it be muttered)
The colonially bred must be well buttered.
Though unrelated to the Sage of Rye
And Lion of Lamb House, James trains one eye
Upon the intolerable pinnacles of Style,
Terse verse not poofter mandarin the while
He steeps the other in the pail of crystal
He weekly shatters with his fist or pistol
Nor is this Clive of India. He hails
From Empire’s shoddier jewel, New South Wales.
Where penal memories still rawly rankle:
Observe the chain-mark round the loose-socked ankle.
Though Cambridge-sleeked and London-tamed, at times
He plonks an Aussie phoneme in his rhymes.
Like martyred/started on Page 96
Of this new Hudibrastic instant mix
That mocks and makes the royal congeries
No more fantastic than it really is.
His epic subject is the Prince of Cymru
And all the flaming flim and flam and flummery
That have oppressed our future king’s career
From when he first cocked his cup-handle ear
(The image is from Marc on the dust-jacket)
In wonder at the loyal London racket
Which warmed the Arctic day that distant June
Whereon our second (Vivat!) mortal moon
Became state welfare’s onomastic bastion
And head of two ecclesiae – Erastian
And Presbyterian (both, in fact, Pelagian),
Through schools submissive to the harsh contagion
Of SS training camps commando courses,
Through mastery of ships, tanks, aircraft horses
(Though there his sister Anne carries the banner),
The uncondescending condescending manner,
Indeed the whole damned tough Encyclopaedia
Monarchica to bludgeons from the media –
Smiles of a playboy, morals of a monk:
One cherry brandy made the whole press drunk
Now nota bene: James’s spleen is shown
To the dirt-throwers never to the Throne.
Approving of the monarchy, its semper
Eadem, out of temper with the temper
Of Irish, wops and polacks in Australia
Who think the crown an old hat and a failure:
And can’t equate corruption with republics,
Demos, thinks James (here is his poem’s nub) licks
The dictatorial arse when kings and queens
Don’t give demotic lips and tongues the means
To kiss blue veins in dreams or, waking, cry:
‘God save the…’. James is right and so am I.
Funny enough, his book. You’ll meet them all:
Lady Jane Wellyboot, Lord Butterball,
Lord Nikon and Dame Helen Gardenome,
Esther Hotpantz (who’s she when she’s at home?),
Mark Pillocks, Shirley Whirley, Lord Lambchop,
AJP Tailspin, the whole butcher’s shop
And Lady Diana Seethrough-Spiffing ‘belle
Of the ball… no iced Pom sheila’, she as well.
A nice poetic tribute to the Prince.
Little to make Cape’s libel lawyers wince.
And there’s another rhapsody to come –
The Laureate’s epithalamium.
Though, since John Betje is a thrifty man,
He may retread the one for Princess Anne –
‘Glow white lily in London – ’ No, not that:
Charles is no flaming lily. And that’s flat:
At least one dinkum digger makes it clear,
So up with schooners down with the pig’s ear,
Rejoice with James and for Prince Charles a cheer.
FIVE REVOLUTIONARY SONNETS
From the novels Inside Mr Enderby and Enderby Outside
1
Sick of the sycophantic singing, sick
Of every afternoon’s compulsory games,
Sick of the little cliques of county names,
He let the inner timebomb start to tick –
Beating out number. As arithmetic
The plot took shape – not from divided aims,
But short division only. Then, in flames,
He read: ‘That flower is not for you to pick.’
Therefore he picked it. All things thawed to action,
Sound, colour. A shrill electric bell
Summoned the guard. He gathered up his faction,
Poised on the brink, thought, and created hell.
Light shimmered in miraculous refraction
As, like a bloody thunderbolt, he fell.
2
Bells broke in the long Sunday, a dressing–gown day.
The childless couple basked in the central heat.
The papers came on time, the enormous meat
Flowered in the oven. On deep carpets lay
Thin panther kittens locked, in clawless play –
Bodies were firm, their hair clean and their feet
Uncalloused. All their wine was new and sweet.
Recorders, unaccompanied, crooned away.
Coiled on the rooftree, bored, inspired, their snake
Crowed in Black Monday. A collar kissed the throat,
Clothes braced the body, a benignant ache
Lit up a tooth. The papers had a note:
That act may mean an empire is at stake.
Sunday and this were equally remote.
3
A dream, yes, but for everyone the same,
The thought that wove it never dropped a stitch.
The Absolute was anybody’s pitch,
For, when a note was struck, we knew its name.
That dark aborted any urge to tame
Waters that day might prove to be a ditch
But then where endless growling ocean, rich
In fish and heroes till the dredgers came.
Wachet auf! A fretful dunghill cock
Flinted the noisy beacons through the shires.
A martin’s nest clogged the cathedral clock,
But it was morning – birds could not be liars.
Keys cleft an age of rust in lock and lock.
Men shivered by a hundred kitchen fires.
4
They lit the sun, and then their day began.
What prodigies that eye of light revealed!
What dusty parchment statutes they repealed,
Pulling up blinds and lifting every ban.
The galaxies revolving to their plan,
They made the conch, the coin, the cortex yield
Their keys, and in a garden, once a field,
They hoisted up a statue of a man.
Of man, rather: to most it seemed a mirror:
Augustus on a guinea sat up straight
Proud of those stony eyes unfilmed by terror.
Though marble is not glass, why should they care?
Later the time for vomiting the error.
Someone was bound to find his portrait there.
5
Augustus on a guinea sat up straight
The sun no proper study but each shaft
Of filtered light a column: classic craft
Abhorred the arc or arch. To circulate
(Blood or ideas) meant pipes, and pipes were straight.
As loaves were gifts from Ceres when she laughed
Thyrsis was Jack, but Crousseau on a raft
Sought Johnjack’s rational island, loath to wait
Till sun, neglected, took revenge so that
The nodding columns melted, and were seen
As Gothic shadows where a goddess sat.
For, after all, that rational machine,
Granted to Jack’s tribe by the technocrat
Chopped logic, hence became his guillotine.
TO VLADIMIR NABOKOV ON HIS 70TH BIRTHDAY
That nymphet’s beauty lay less on her bones
Than in her name’s proclaimed two allophones,
A boned veracity slow to be found
In all the channel of recorded sound.
Extrude an orange pip upon the track,
And it will be a pip played front or back,
But only in the kingdom of the shade
Can diaper run back and be repaid.
Such speculations salt my exile too,
One that I bear less stoically than you.
I look in sourly on my lemon trees,
Spiked by the Qs and Xes of Maltese,
And wonder: Is this home or where is home?
(Melita’s caves, Calypso’s honeycomb).
I seek a cue or clue. Just opposite,
The grocer has a cat that loves to sit
Upon the scales. Respecting his repose,
One day he weighed him: just 2 rotolos.
In this palazzo wood decays and falls;
Buses knock stucco from the outer walls,
Slam shut the shutters. Coughing as they lurch,
They yet enclose the silence of a church,
Rock in baroque: Teresan spados stab
The Sacred Heart upon the driver’s cab,
Whereupon, in circus colours, one can read
That Verbum Caro Factum Est. Indeed.
I think the word is all the flesh I need –
The taste, and not the vitamins of sense,
Whatever sense may be. I like the fence
Of black and white that keeps those bullocks in –
Crossboard or chesswood. Eurish gift of Finn –
The crossmess parzel. If words are no more
Than pyoshki, preordained to look before,
Save for their taking chassé, they alone,
And not the upper house, can claim a throne
(Exploded first the secular magazines
And puff of bishops). All aswarm with queens,
Potentially, that board. Well, there it is:
You help me counter the liquidities
With counters that are counties, countries. Best
To read it: Caro Verbum Facta Est.
THE SWORD
De Kalb, De Kalb, Flatbush Avenue: there, that bright March Saturday, I stood
With sclerotic toothache in kalb or calf, heavy on my cane,
A third leg, a British sword sheathed in cherrywood
For passive support, no tool or weapon. Wind, pain
Toothached in from East River. Well then, I thought, here you are,
Middleaged, claudicant, ignominiously propped
On a sheathed sword, wanting a cab, while car after car
Grinned by under the sun, Saturday gift for those who shopped. No cab stopped.
So I claudicated to the subway, wanting Brooklyn Heights (Clark),
But, instead of the Tunnel train, I caught the one for the Bridge:
Miles of metal and river and light, no expected comfortable dark
Fit for a middleaged Saturday with, at the end, the hermitage
Of the warm apartment and time to make myself seem younger
Or, at least, less middleaged and put that sword away,
At least for the evening. Canal (Centre). The cabless street, the hunger
To bury sword and myself out of the shameless Manhattan day
Increasing to worse toothache, though I am sure it was the wind
That mocked-up wet self-pity. More and more angrily I waved
The sword at the mocking full cabs. But then a sepia-skinned
Cabman responded and stopped. I entered, I was saved.
Back to Brooklyn. The driver, Alvin Lewis, found the street
And I found my key, but, to my incredulous shock,
The apartment door would not open. In bathrobe and flat wet feet,
The woman below came up: no good: something wrong with the lock.
So what could I do but do the rounds of the bars –
Harry’s, the Golden Rose, Jed’s Bar and Grill
And the nameless others? Martinis, cheap cigars,
The nameless others, underwater caves with the shrill
Radio the voice of up there, the TV images like divers
Looking in on this mouthing world, fish, drinking like fish,
Lonely men glass-twirling, making it last, and truck-drivers
Swilling one down, then away, and no matter how much I would wish
To clean off the middleage for the evening and her, I had to accept my dirt
And the dirty brown taste of my mouth, unanaesthetised
By the ice, my flat wet feet and limp wet shirt
And earwax in my oxters, and brain that was only surprised
Out of its boredom by each radio chime
Showing it was earlier than I’d thought it could possibly be.
But time, as we know, must in time get the better of time,
So time came for slurred and claudicant me
To know I might be late, and, as the lights came on all down the river,
Brandish that snugly latent sword at the cabs with lights
Until Jack Greenbaum contracted to deliver
The sclerosis and the cane and the gin of Brooklyn Heights
And, somewhere inside, me, not claudicant but palpitant now.
Hundredth-and-tenth Street, the pay-off, the elevator,
Her door, she, in in quick, with ‘I can’t allow,
I can’t really, it won’t do, you know it won’t do’. And she: ‘Later:
Time for that later. Be calm, be calm.’ But I’d gotten into the way
Of thrusting that hidden steel, and I thrust, to protect her youth,
To protect me from her youth. She grasped, and it came away,
Sweetly, the cherrywood, and there, like attenuated truth,
The sword flashed. I said: ‘It’s only to lean on, to strengthen the cane.’
‘Yes’, she said, ‘yes’. It flashed, strong and straight. ‘Well’, she said,
And she felt the edge, the point. I tried to sheathe it again,
But she said: ‘Lay it there on the bed,
In the middle.’ So there it lay,
Virtue’s protector in the old courting custom. Still, it flashed. I washed off the day
And middleage. Clean and hungry, I breathed
More calmly now, and while she brought food, I looked at it unsheathed,
At least it was unsheathed, at last it was unsheathed.
O LORD, O FORD, GOD HELP US, ALSO YOU
A New Year’s Message for 1975
Unhouse that calendar: her dates are done,
Her whorings over. Get another one,
Try to pretend that a new year has begun,
The diary, blank, apes sinlessness. This is
The most pathetic of all fallacies –
The springs-eternal hope of a ‘fresh start’
In the core of winter of, down under, heart
Of summer (the same season, after all:
Both lack the sharp élan of spring or fall,
So very and oppressively much here).
The church is realistic: its new year
Does not begin until Easter. New Year’s Day
Is part of Christmas time, roughly halfway,
Marked by the Circumcision – snip and bless
And bow half-heartedly to cleanliness.
But w
e, who groan from drink or, showering, sing,
Believe the first of January can bring
Regeneration magically about
Both in our psyches and the world without.
On Jan 6, 10 – in other words, a bit
Later, we will, we vow, get down to it.
Nonsense – it can’t be done: that’s definite.
Spring brings the true new, nature’s statements are
Simple enough: all the change is circular.
The firm ascending straight progressive line
Is dream geography, that’s all. In fine,
This Nineteen-Seventy-five will see us still
Churning in Seventy-four’s Satanic Mill.
Has any twelvemonth fed us more with fear?
Was ever a more salutary year?
At least we’re learning and no more pretend
That history moves to a Hegelian end.
Utopia spells Erewhon, the earth’s
Resources are not infinite, a birth’s
Another burden in a hungry world,
Man’s gobbed up the soil and also hurled
His poisons in the water and the air,
Hell is a fact and no mere Sunday scare,
America as Eden’s dead and gone,
The Devil rides, and so on and so on.
Men we thought big are now revealed as little,
Conniving and contriving, mean and brittle,
Power-hungry merely, greedier than us,
Vindictive, vulgarians, and ugly too
(Truth’s beauty, and the antithesis is true).
I gawped at New York television while
Your Ford, unflawed by an ironic smile,
Announced to the whole world: Truth is a glue.
O Lord, O Ford, God help us, also you.
Half a millennium has gone by since
Great Niccolò penned precepts for a Prince.
But in those unregenerate days at least
A prince, however hard he played the beast,
Saw statues hovering over him and read
Plato and Aristotle: the huge dead
Were still alive. But now, alas, it looks
As if the drughead’s Nothin’, man, in books
Infects the castles where our rulers sit
(History, that other Ford once said, is sh—t).
The men that British rotten boroughs sent
To hector in a venal Parliament
Fulfilled no democratic precepts, yet
Saw that their own mean times were soundly set
In an unfolding swathe of destiny;
Collected Poems Page 31