by Clive James
What if this upsurge is a weakness too,
The last flare of a fever overdue
To break these many years? But surely not:
Look at the park parade of what I’ve said –
A Chinese opera among table-tops,
The Russian Ballet and the Keystone Kops,
The dust of diamonds from a pepper pot,
Colours and metals out of Camelot –
And envy me as I trudge back to bed.
A whole new day is here, and still I live
To strut my stuff, give what I have to give.
Though it might not be much, it is my best
And while it comes to me I know no rest,
But must be at it, threading syllables,
Timing the wind chimes, balancing the bells,
Until each line reveals the harmony
Of its creation by destroying me:
Always my fate, still my imperative.
I serve the joy-spring of the language. Let
Me pass, therefore. I am not finished yet.
I merely need to sleep awhile, and then,
Perhaps before nightfall, begin again.
Final Reminder
Reading Laforgue, I love the way he crowds
The world of things into his racing frame
Yet makes them fit, like lightning in the clouds.
The toads, the vermin get their blaze of fame
In his high-speed, grab-bag democracy
Of thought, perception and the sheer desire
To live. Each stanza, as if meant for me,
Spits like an ember of his funeral pyre
Sculpted into a message of reproof
For any moment that I doubt the worth
Of effort, any wish to stand aloof
At long last from the turmoil of the Earth
Now my light fades. The stars are on display
In the dark night, not the bright sky of day.
Carpentry of the Quatrain
A four-square stanza is the magic box
Neat thoughts fit into and combine their glow
Into a furnace. Lucky the lid locks,
Or we’d see ashes fluttering like snow.
Given the chance I’d work no other way,
But there are ideas that refuse to fit,
The thought that needs more space to have its say
No matter how severe you are with it.
But even then, the best way to contain
The sprawl is to remember, flying blind,
Your ideal of the right cup for the rain.
With nothing spilled and everything designed,
Wish and fulfilment click, the whirlpool swirls
And freezes, and it’s there before your eyes:
The cubic lattice of selected pearls
Stacked rim to rim, the orderly surprise.
Head Wound
The carcinoma left a bullet hole
High on my forehead. It looked like a tap
By a pro hit-man. In fact the killer’s role
Was played not by a pistol-toting chap
But by a pretty female whose light touch
Sliced out the blob and pieced a flap of skin
Into the gap. It didn’t hurt that much.
When finally the pit was all filled in
A pink yarmulke of Elastoplast
Topped off the job. The whole thing happened fast.
The wound, alas, healed slowly, but the heap
Of duct-tape mercifully was replaced
By one neat bandage, though I had to keep
Changing it each second day. I faced
At least three weeks of wearing this square patch
And there were interviews for my new book
Demanding to be done. A tale to match
My rather daring James Bond sort of look
Seemed called for, so I mentioned MI5,
A mild gun battle. I got out alive.
No sooner did the first show go to air,
A dear old lady stopped me in the street
And said I really ought to take more care
In gun fights. I thought her a shambling dunce
But only for a moment. All the fault
Had been mine, for expecting that my smirk
Would flag the gag. Alas, there is a rule:
The straight-faced joke that might work on the page
Is death on TV. I should act my age.
Candy Windows
He runs in slo-mo with a wall of flame
Boiling behind him like Valhalla’s fall
In Götterdämmerung. He made his name
From being bullet-proof. He summons all
His skills to get the girl from Bucharest
To Rome or Paris or wherever suits
The budget. Somewhere she can get undressed:
The only scene for which we give two hoots.
The heavies blast the road or bomb the train.
The dialogue is dreck, the plot inane.
They make love. Breasts and bottoms fill the frame
When suddenly the whole motel explodes:
The bad guys in a tank. Devoid of shame,
He frisks her lovely corpse for the launch codes
Of the secret anthrax time-bomb missile thing.
They’re tattooed on her thigh. But look, she stirs.
The soundtrack fills with strings that soar and sing.
When has he ever seen a face like hers
Since his last movie? He, the Teflon star
Scoops up the jail-bait and runs for the car.
The enemy is an army: all the same
He kills the lot, but finds himself alone.
The girl is gone, and gradually the game
Changes. He fails to steal the new nose-cone
His HQ wants, and where once he could burst
Through candy windows, now he fears they might
Be real glass, and – much worse, the very worst –
The gathering night could really be the night
When he, immortal once, but not again,
Must bruise and bleed and die like other men.
Elephant in the Room
On slow last legs it comes to the right spot
Near the dried-up river bed where it may kneel
And die. The plain is open, with one clump of trees
Parched, bleached, more grey than green,
Much like the grass:
The perfect setting for what happens next.
What happens next is nothing. Still upright,
Precisely balanced on its bended knees,
The elephant decays. All by itself
It loses its last flesh with neither vultures
Nor hyenas to help with the unloading:
They seem to have been paid to stay away.
When all the meat is gone
There is only skin, draped thickly on its cage
Of bones. Perhaps the ants are in there
Like vagrants in the ruins of New York.
There might be termites cleaning out its tusks.
If so, it shows no signs of pain or anger.
Through hollow eyes it looks out of the screen
With what seems an inflexible resolve.
The shadow of its former self has timed
Its exit to sum up what it did best,
To bulk large as a thing of consequence
Even though emptied of its history.
A breath of wind will knock it down, an hour
Of rain wash it away, but until then,
Sustained by stillness, it is what it is:
A presence, a whole area in space
Transformed into a single living thing
That now, its time exhausted, lives no more.
Quiet Passenger
When there is no more dying left to do
And I am burned and poured into a jar,
Then I will leave this land that I came to
So long ago, and, havi
ng come so far,
Head home to where my life’s work was begun.
But nothing of that last flight will I see
As I ride through the night into the sun:
No stars, no ocean, not the ochre earth,
No patterns of dried water nor the light
That streams into the city of my birth,
The harbour waiting to take down my dust.
So why, in that case, should I choose to go?
My day is done. I go because I must:
Silence will be my way of saying so.
In Your Own Time
Ridi, Pagliaccio
Back to the gate, back to the lounge, back to
The shuttle bus, the same airport hotel,
This flight continues to go nowhere. You
Long ago realised that you would do well
Not to complain at one more wasted day:
The flight is going nowhere anyway,
And there is nothing wasted as you learn –
Almost as if life had begun again –
To use the time, to read, to write, to earn
Your keep. That you are frail like other men
Is now proved, with a force that even you
Can’t laugh off. What we are is what we do.
Back, then, to what you do best. Give a thought
The curve of words that makes a wing of it.
Get one more line to sing the way it ought.
Anything well expressed is holy writ:
Your occupation, even now, when time
Is almost gone, is honest. It’s no crime
To spend these stolen hours as if your fate
Depended on the balance of a phrase.
It always did, and even now, so late,
As your pen feels its way through the word maze,
The thrill of getting things exactly right
Prepares you for the long flight through the night.
The Back of My Hand
I used to know the back of my hand
Like the back of my hand
But things are happening now that I can’t
Quite, in my mind, command
To make sense of themselves.
On the smooth plateau from the root
Of the index finger
To the thumb joint where a light plane
Without the slightest danger
Could once have glided in for a dead-stick landing
There are bumps that would stop a truck.
It’s all so demanding,
This ageing business. It starts with
The simple exaggeration
Of veins making tracks like the river system
Of a whole new nation
Suddenly put in place by the Space Invaders,
The flyers from Atrophon
Who built all this stuff and then died out.
And now they are gone,
And the ruins of whoever saw them off
Are being overtaken
By other ruins: the product,
Unless I’m very much mistaken,
Of a people wedded to chaos
In the first instance,
Who keep what they take and cover it
With a carpet of decrepitude.
I was proud of these hands once.
Now I don’t even care to look.
It would be like sitting in a canvas
Chair at Angkor Wat
To watch the jungle taking back
That elegant structure
While some expert gave me a personal lecture.
Or do I mean Oaxaca? Carlos Fuentes told me
That was the place to see. In his last years
Did the backs of his hands still say “hold me”
To all those women who loved his eyes?
At least I have a voice,
Or I did until I started the new tablets.
But no one has a real choice
We have to take what’s given to us,
Especially in here
While the campfires of the onslaught
Draw nearer every night
To this place that I know by now
Like the back of my hand.
Take a look if you like. You know what this is?
It’s the Promised Land.
Ibrutinib
The Marvel Comic name should tip you off
That this new drug is heavy duty stuff.
You don’t get this one just to cure a cough.
A chemo pill, and powerful enough
To put the kibosh on your CLL,
It gets in there and gives the bastard hell.
Five years’ remission and the beast is back.
It’s in your bones the way the Viet Cong
Poured through their tunnels to the Tet attack,
And what comes next might not last very long.
But let’s see what Ibrutinib can do
To win the war whose battlefield is you.
Ibrutinib, you little cluster-bomb
Of goodness, get in there and do your thing!
All that the bad guys seek is martyrdom:
Their own demise is in the death they bring.
They work in cells. There is no high command.
We drop you in and then it’s hand to hand.
Should you prevail, we promise you a role
From here on in until the natural end.
Just beat them back and it will be a stroll,
Unless you don’t, in which case things might tend
To go bananas in a serious way.
But not yet. Down the hatch. This is today.
Side Effects of Medication
I feel dull from the blue pill that I took,
Notoriously a flattener of mood.
I triple-read each sentence of my book
And by slow-loping furies am pursued;
Except they never reach me. Just their wheeze
And whine and whistle irritate my ear.
A Tiger tank is hidden in the trees:
Time’s chariot broods on ways to hurry near.
A whir, a blur, a whingeing void in flight,
Shaped flame eats into me and halves my weight.
The muscles in my legs are pipe-clay tight.
Time for another pill. It must be late:
It must be later than I think, I think.
Another dose of Nothing Done begins,
And there is lemon squash for us to drink.
May Christ forgive me for the worst of sins,
The one the old-style monks called accidie.
It meant to have an ice-field for a face.
I shave myself. I that knew ecstasy
Cope with the clean-up of my fall from grace,
And start another day on the inside.
I try to write. The pieces will not fit
Together. In the phrase “broke down and cried”
Note what comes first. There is no end to it.
Not Forgetting George Russell
How funny, in the sense of not being funny,
It ought to be that here, on the nut farm –
A Cambridge feature Rupert Brooke left out
For obvious reasons –
In a cool morning when all except the nurses
Are tranked out of their skulls,
I haunt the kitchen reading an old essay,
Trying to find my tone again –
The one about Ernst Robert Curtius,
The only modern scholar you called great –
In praise of Dante’s long love for his teacher.
You were Brunetto and I . . . Well, let that pass,
Though we, of course, were butch as panther sweat.
Ten years ago, when you were still alive
If only just, we met for one last time
When I came out to get my Hodgins medal,
The literary gong that I most prize.
It’s only justice if Les cops the Nobel,
Don’t you agree? They say
the A380
Airbus was built for getting him to Stockholm.
When he gets given it, it might do something
To tame our literati’s national sense
Of isolation that you found so foolish:
You that inhabited no other boundaries
Save those of Christendom.
From Adelaide I day-tripped to Mildura
And then by car out to Cullulleraine,
A six-house town parked in the open mulga
Where, in an easy chair on the veranda,
You lay with cling-film skin, and Isobel
Controlled the cakes: “Another Lamington?”
“There can’t be more,” I said. “The world supply
Is here,” you whispered. Loving to be teased,
She knew that these jokes might well be the last,
As you, the master of the ars moriendi,
Took in, with ruined lungs, just enough air
To prove you could still smile.
“Waste no time saying what need not be said”
Was what you’d taught me, but I had a plan:
A subtle plan for doing Dante over
In English. But you had enough to cope with
Just being proud of my wife, rising star
Of the Società Dantesca,
A ruthless cosa nostra. The prettiest
Of all your brilliant creatures had to shoot
Her way into that place and wade in blood.
I’m sure she told you, loving you as always,
When she came out to see you. But it’s time
For my Caped Hero to come bursting forth:
I, Dante, Flash of Lightning! At a cinema
Near you! I wonder if there is one. Never mind:
Books need no screens. This fanfare is a token
Of how I valued all the times we spoke:
Something to leave with you as I now leave you,
The same way you invariably left us
With some new thrill to chase up: Hindemith,
Matisse, Stravinsky . . . any works that burn
The brain like that are works of God, you said:
They speak of what He lost. And now at last
So say I, weeping, by my tears made blind,
As the nurse comes with her cup of colours
And your thin outline melts into the smoke.
—Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, UK, July 1, 2011
Imminent Catastrophe
The imminent catastrophe goes on
Not showing many signs of happening.
The ice at the North Pole that should be gone
By now, is awkwardly still lingering,
