Injury Time

by Clive James

  CLIVE JAMES

  Injury Time

  PICADOR

  To the nurses, doctors and staff of

  Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, England:

  with all my thanks for these unexpected recent years.

  simplex munditiis

  Plain in thy neatness.

  – Horace

  An author is not to write all he can, but only all he ought.

  – Dryden

  Foreword

  When I locked up the final text for my previous volume of short poems, Sentenced to Life, I thought, rather grandly, that there would be no time left except perhaps for a long poem that might gain in poignancy by being left unfinished. I should have known better than to flirt with the metallic music of downed tools. Before my avowedly last collection was even in proof, new short poems had begun to arrive, and after a year or so it was already evident that they might add up to a book, once I solved the problem of how to write about, say, the death of Ayrton Senna. (Surely an appropriate obsequy would need a thousand-horsepower sound-track.) In my experience, it’s never a book before certain key themes have been touched on, but once they are, it always is, or anyway it’s going to be. It helps, of course, to have a publisher who thinks the same; and on that point Don Paterson at Picador was once again the ideal mentor.

  For this collection, I have kept the rule of providing notes at the end of the volume, but only if they help to explain factual points that might be obscure. If the note explained the poem itself, the poem would be incomplete. In my later stages I have got increasingly keen on that precept. Explaining itself is what a poem does. Helping me to be certain that any new project really did have something intelligible to say for itself, David Free, Stephen Edgar, Tom Stoppard, my wife Prue Shaw and my elder daughter Claerwen James saw nearly all these poems in their early stages, and often I would also run them past Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. Though not all of these busy people thought everything I had written was marvellous, if any of them showed doubts it was always enough to make me think twice. But the day has not yet quite arrived when circulation by e-mail will count as tending an audience. Print still rules, and finally the editors of the periodicals will have to see and judge what the author fancies to be a finished product.

  Once again I must especially thank Alan Jenkins of the TLS, Dan Johnson of Standpoint, Paul Muldoon of the New Yorker, Tom Gatti of the New Statesman, Sam Leith of the Spectator and Les Murray of Quadrant, while welcoming a new and generous grandee to my range of principal editorial mentors: Sandy McClatchy of the Yale Review. I should also thank the Kenyon Review, one of whose operatives has only just now written to discuss a printing schedule for a couple of poems that I can’t remember having sent. I go to sleep and dream of editorial ninjas breaking into my study and microfilming the MS of the unfinished epic in my bottom drawer. Remembering how wrong I turned out to be when I thought the poems in Sentenced to Life would be my last, I should say at this point that I had to think twice before giving this book a title suggesting that the game might soon be over. As it happens, I am writing this introductory note on the morning after an operation at Addenbrooke’s in which items of machinery – some of them, in my imagination, as big as the USS Nimitz – had been sent sailing up my interior in search of organic damage. I would have liked to be awake, in order to pick up the running commentary of my lavish range of nurses and surgeons. Alas, the relaxing agent they had given me relaxed me all the way to sleep, so the only interesting dialogue I heard was from the actors in Fantastic Voyage, which, by a trick of senescent memory, had been running in my waking brain for days beforehand, and was now running, even more vividly, in the depths of my slumber. From dreams of Raquel Welch navigating between the platelets I awoke to be told that I could once again safely have breakfast.

  Or perhaps even safely begin writing something new. And indeed even now, a full six years into the trajectory of my dying fall, I do still have plans for other books, including a funeral oratorio which might celebrate at some length the very fact that my confidently forecast imminent demise turned out to be not as imminent as all that. There could also be a clinching volume of memoirs, its credibility endorsed by the bark of a Luger from my study late at night.

  But I can be fairly sure that I am by now more or less done with the short lyrics. They take more concentration, and therefore more energy, than any other form of writing. I used always to keep the rule that if a poem started forming in my head then I should stick with it until it was finished. Here in my hideout in the Cambridge fens, in the middle of a dreary winter, with the prospect of further medical intervention retreating only to loom again, that rule begins to look too expensive. I can still imagine myself, however, feeling compelled to break it. Finally a poem can demand to be read only because it demanded to be written, and it is notable that the dying Hamlet is still balancing his phrases even when young Fortinbras has arrived outside in the lobby. At one stage I thought of calling this little volume The Rest Is Silence, but that would have been to give myself airs. It is quite pretentious enough to evoke the image of an exhausted footballer still plugging away with legs like lead.

  Cambridge, 2017

  Contents

  Return of the Kogarah Kid

  Anchorage International

  Hiatus

  Visitation of the Dove

  The Gardener in White

  This Coming Winter

  Finch Conference

  The Rest is Silence

  Edith Piaf on YouTube

  A Heritage of Trumpets

  Panis Angelicus

  Sweet Disaster

  Declaration of Intent

  Initial Outlay

  Night-Walker’s Song

  Final Reminder

  Carpentry of the Quatrain

  Head Wound

  Candy Windows

  Elephant in the Room

  Quiet Passenger

  In Your Own Time

  The Back of My Hand

  Ibrutinib

  Side Effects of Medication

  Not Forgetting George Russell

  Imminent Catastrophe

  Splinters from Shakespeare

  Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub

  Sunt lacrimae rerum

  Choral Service from Westminster Abbey

  Ayrton Senna Killed at Imola

  Verse Letter

  Aldeburgh Dawn

  Too Many Poets

  Apotheosis at the Signing Table

  Recollected in Tranquillity

  The Dark Roses

  Summer Surprised Us

  Tactics of the Air Battle

  The Gods Make Mischief

  The Smocking Brick

  Intergalactic Junket

  Front Flip Half Twist

  Use of Space

  Photo File

  Injury Time

  This Being Done

  Notes on the Text

  Letter to a Young Poet

  Return of the Kogarah Kid

  Inscription for a small bronze plaque at Dawes Point

  Here I began and here I reach the end.

  From here my ashes go back to the sea

  And take my memories of every friend

  And love, and anything still dear to me,

  Down to the darkness out of which the sun

  Will rise again, this splendour never less:

  Fated to be, when all is said, and done,

  For others to recall and curse or bless

  The way that time runs out but still comes in,

  The new tide always ready to begin.

  Do the gulls cry in triumph, or distress?

  In neither, for they cry because they must,

  Not knowing this is glory, unaware

  Their time will come to leave it. It
is just

  That we, who learned to breathe the brilliant air

  And first were told that we were made of dust

  Here in this city, yet went out across

  The globe to find fame, should return one day

  To trade our gains against a certain loss –

  And sink from sight where once we sailed away.

  Anchorage International

  In those days Russia was still closed. My flight

  Would cross the Pole and land at Anchorage

  To refuel. Many times, by day or night,

  I watched them shine or blink, that pilgrimage

  Of planes descending from the stratosphere

  Down some steep trail. As if I’d come to stay,

  I lived in that lounge, neither there nor here:

  The still point of transition. I would pay

  For drinks with cash, it was so long ago –

  But now, again, it is a place I know.

  I’ve changed a lot, but these seats look the same,

  Except there are so few of us who wait.

  It’s like a party but nobody came.

  There is no voice that calls us to the gate,

  For no procession interrupts the sky.

  It seems that this time I will not move on.

  I have arrived. With nowhere left to fly,

  I need not leave: I have already gone.

  There’s almost nothing left to think about

  Except the swirl of snow as I look out.

  Here in this neutral zone at last we learn

  That all our travelling must come to rest

  In stillness: no way forward, no return.

  We once thought to keep moving might be best

  Until we reached the end, but it was there

  From the beginning. Darkness gave the dawn

  Its inward depth. The lights in the night air

  That came down slowly were us, being born

  Alive. The silver points in the pale blue

  Of daylight were us dying. Both were true.

  I bought your small white boxes marked Chanel

  At Anchorage. I must have used a card.

  Did I? I can’t remember very well.

  In these last, feeble days I find it hard

  To fix a detail of the way things were

  And set it in its time. Soon there will be

  Only one final thing left to occur,

  One little thing. You need not fear for me:

  It can’t hurt. Of that much I can be sure.

  I know this place. I have been here before.

  Hiatus

  In February, winter was undone.

  Day after day a honeysuckle sun

  Glowed in the windows. Though the nights were long,

  And from one bird song to the next bird song

  Took half the morning, still it worked like spring.

  I breathed the yielding air and felt it bring

  My lost life back to me, at least in part:

  Enough, at any rate, to keep my heart –

  The one intact component that I’ve got –

  From breaking at the thought that I might not

  Summon the strength to see the season through

  And all the sweet world properly made new.

  We old and ill must measure time that way.

  When young, we scarcely saw the interplay

  Of life and the surrounding atmosphere:

  We just lived in it. Now the truth is here:

  Existence wants us gone. The oxygen

  We once wolfed down now fuels a fire, and when

  The air is cold the flames reach deep within,

  Reminding us that we can never win

  This battle. Only let the air turn mild,

  However, and the power of hope runs wild:

  It makes a fool of me, as if I could

  Begin again, and be both strong and good.

  Another month, and still the freeze is slow

  To come back to the lawns and wreck their show

  Of ground-based blooms. But I have seen before

  How March can throw a quick switch, and restore

  The temperature to what it ought to be

  In any keyhole not blocked with a key,

  And how the caught-out flowers pay the cost

  Of misplaced confidence. Felled by the frost,

  Here without leave and gone without a fight,

  Where do they go? They vanish overnight.

  This time, perhaps not. Maybe death will take

  A whole new attitude, just for my sake.

  Visitation of the Dove

  Night is at hand already: it is well

  That we yield to the night. So Homer sings,

  As if there were no Heaven and no Hell,

  But only peace.

  The grey dove comes down in a storm of wings

  Into my garden where seeds never cease

  To be supplied as if life fits a plan

  Where needs are catered to. One need is not:

  I do not wish to leave yet. If I can

  I will stay on

  And see another autumn, having got

  This far with all my strength not yet quite gone.

  When Phèdre, dying, says that she can see

  Already not much more than through a cloud,

  She adds that death has taken clarity

  Out of her eyes

  To give it to the world. Behold my shroud!

  This brilliance in the garden. The dove flies.

  The Gardener in White

  The Reaper sobers you. You will be stirred

  By just how serious you tend to get

  When he draws near and has his quiet word.

  His murmur is the closest you’ve heard yet

  To someone heavy calling in a debt.

  No gun, no flick-knife: none of that gangster thing.

  Just you, him, and the fear that you might die,

  As the fluff-ball tern chick under its mother’s wing

  Senses the black-back gull in the clear sky,

  And shivers from the knowledge in its blood.

  The end of life is like a flower’s bud

  Formed from the code of its unfolding bloom,

  Which carries, in its turn, the burst of light

  That lies ahead, the blinding crack of doom

  When petals in the rain are shaken dry

  By the whisper of the Gardener in White.

  This Coming Winter

  This coming winter I will say goodbye –

  In case I do not live to see the spring –

  To all my loved ones one by one. That way,

  Taking my time each time, I need not be

  Besieged at the last hour, with the fine thing

  Eluding me that I wished to convey

  To each face, always granted I could tell

  Which one was which as they, around my bed,

  Vied not to notice that my mouth no more

  Could shape the easy phrase. Nothing said well

  To suit the occasion: mutterings instead,

  And then not even those. No, long before

  That night I’ll call them separately aside

  And speak my heart so as to save my pride

  From injury when I search for a word

  And finally words fail me. All will hear

  My fond farewells ahead of time, save one:

  Only my granddaughter will not have heard

  How sad I am to bow out. Not from fear

  Of hurting her will I leave this undone:

  My aim is otherwise. I’d like to keep

  Her thinking that I’m in some way still there

  When she laughs, as we did together when

  Basil in all his tallness took a steep

  Dive as he rushed behind the counter. Where

  Was Manuel? She knew. Basil forgot again!

  Miraculous, the way she understood

  That how the scene was built
made it so good.

  Let me be part, then, of her memory

  Each time the comedy of life strikes her

  As wonderful. In that way to live on

  Is my wish, though I’ll not be there to see

  A single giggle. That my last days were

  Lit by her friendship until I was gone

  Is not for me to tell her, at her age.

  Let any last words that she hears from me

  Be about Johnny English and the scene

  In which he wrecks the sushi bar. A page

  Of my book will turn soon, and it might be

  The last, but I would want my death to mean

  No more to her than our shared sense of doom

  When Basil takes charge of the dining room.

  Until that day, and never before then,

  Let there be no big talk of what is lost

  When one friend stays, the other goes away,

  And all their sprightly chat comes to an end.

  Think rather of the continuity

  Prepared for her if she, in times to come,

  At any moment when her heart is light,

  Should cast her mind back to these laughing hours

  And think me part of them. A tiny part

  Will do. She’ll have her own concerns.

  There must be independence for the heart:

  It is by cutting loose that the mind learns,

  And therefore, wishing to transfer my powers –

  To give her, for her life, the memory

  Of how I laughed when she made fun of me –

  I shall renounce them at the fall of night

  As I move on to find Elysium.

  Finch Conference

  Known as a charm, the bunch of goldfinches,

  Polished so prettily from head to heels,

  Do girl-group step routines like the Ronettes.

  You would not be astonished if Phil Spector

  Showed up by limo to collect the money.

  The chaffinch arrives solo like Karsavina

  On the first night of The Firebird in Paris,

  When no one credited her speed on stage.

  If she would just stay still, that russet bodice

  Would look like satin dyed and draped by Bakst.

  After her triumph, in the dressing room,

  The new star, sitting down to darn her tights,

  Was told that from now on she didn’t have to.