by Clive James
And though sometimes the weather is extreme
It seems no more so than when we were young
Who soon will hear no more of this grim theme
Reiterated in the special tongue
Of manufactured fright. Sea Level Rise
Will be here soon and could do such-and-such,
Say tenured pundits with unblinking eyes.
Continuing to not go up by much,
The sea supports the sceptics, but they, too,
Lapse into oratory when they predict
The sure collapse of the alarmist view
Like a house of cards, for they could not have picked
A metaphor less suited to their wish.
A house of cards subsides with just a sigh
And all the cards are still there. Feverish
Talk of apocalypse might, by and by,
Die down, but the deep anguish will persist:
His own death, not the Earth’s, is the true fear
That motivates the doomsday fantasist:
There can be no world if he is not here.
Splinters from Shakespeare
My name is Shallow. Lend me credit, pray,
If I, at this stage, sound deep once or twice.
They called me “lusty Shallow” in my day,
But time ensured that I would pay the price,
Which is to wonder where my juices went.
Jesu, the mad, mad days that I have spent.
My cousin Silence would attest, were he
To find a voice, I left no woman cold.
This poor forked radish once was a green tree,
And now I hear Jane Nightwork has grown old
Who said she spurned me, but that was not true.
The death I owe to God has fallen due.
I heard the chimes at midnight with Sir John,
But he was stirring, even as he sighed.
He sucked up his great sack-butt and moved on,
And left me here alone to nurse my pride.
I, too, have lived: a small life, but not mean.
Jesu, Jesu, the days that I have seen.
Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub
But if you didn’t know, you’d never guess
Whose bath it was. You’d see only the woman,
So beautiful that since the time of Helen
She’s started wars, the perennial temptress,
But abstract nonetheless. You have to know her:
Picasso’s friend, an angel of adventure.
Sheer daring brought her sweet skin to this juncture
With porcelain that would look dull without her,
But not be famous now except the other
Bare bottom that once sat in it was his,
Killer of millions. Remember that this is
Only a footnote. Don’t get in a lather:
But while reflecting that a sponge wipes clean
Only so much, do take time to recall
That if this nymph were Leni Riefenstahl
There would be less, not more, for her to mean.
But we are safe, when contemplating this
Unsmiling incandescent odalisque,
From any hint of awe. That was the risk:
To gloss trash with a misplaced emphasis.
But me no buts. Enough to say that Lee
Was not just lovely but sane, smart and good.
By her, his squalor was well understood.
Bless her for throwing light on perfidy.
Sunt lacrimae rerum
There are tears in things. Things mortal touch the heart.
On the favela, sitting in the paste
Of clay and urine, in the fever season
At the festering tip of a high-level Hades,
Is the plastic duck of a little girl who died
Of typhus, and the image makes me blink,
Recalling the lost earring found inside
The crumpled dashboard of a crushed Mercedes.
Choral Service from Westminster Abbey
The Abbey choir sings “I Know Not the Hour”
And once again we all sit silent where
She, only, was not sighing for the waste
Of youth, health, beauty and the savoir faire
That might have served us all well later on
Had there not been the panic-stricken haste,
The concrete tunnel and the car’s crushed power,
Almost as if she wanted to be gone,
Even without a chance to say goodbye.
From my seat on the transept’s left-hand aisle
I saw the ceremony end. Six men
Shouldered the coffin and I could have sworn
That they brought her to me. You well might smile,
But she could smile as if she were the dawn
All set for a night out. That she would die
So soon, and never race your heart again,
Seemed not in nature. Then the guards wheeled right
A yard in front of me, and their slow march –
Spit-shine parade boots on a flagstone floor –
Down the side corridor beyond the arch
Crunched, boomed and whispered and went silent. So
She started her flight home. It felt like theft.
Until she vanished few of us could know –
And now all knew, and nothing was more sure –
A light could die just from the way it shone.
Her fantasy, or ours? I couldn’t say.
She pulled the names, she got them on her team:
No question. Think, though, of some crippled kid
She talked to a long time, and later on
Wrote letters to, and never said she did.
Tell yourself then that she was just a dream,
Gone when the soldiers carried her away.
Ayrton Senna Killed at Imola
Thousands of miles away in Buenos Aires
Juan Manuel Fangio, five times world champion,
Watched Senna hit the Armco and sit still.
The world over, we were all interpreting
The silence. Fangio needed only that first glance
And turned the TV off.
Such stillness was a language,
The signal that the angel had departed.
As I write this now
Schumacher is out walking at his home
On Lake Geneva,
Getting the exercise he just might need
If ever his mind comes back.
Moss when he spun across the grass
At Donington with me beside him looking
As if I had seen my own ghost;
Or Derek Warwick on the autostrada
Driving me down to Monza;
Or Alan Jones in that brutal Lamborghini
In Adelaide when we entertained the crowd
With our brilliant imitation of a champion driving
His panic-stricken friend to hospital . . .
But now all these faces are from long ago
And even
When Damon, in my dreams, comes back to drive me
Under police escort to the airport in Hungary,
I can’t believe how very young he looks.
Deborah, my elder daughter’s friend,
A magnet for adventurous men,
Was taken to a Grand Prix one weekend.
She got so bored she lay down for a sleep
Beside a pile of tyres.
When she woke up again she couldn’t see.
Her eyes were full of rain.
Verse Letter
In reply to Ann Baer, aged 101, of Richmond-on-Thames.
Your handwriting, so perfect for its style
And firmness, made me feel that this must be
A brilliant schoolgirl. Hence my knowing smile
At your comparing of my maple tree
With Tennyson’s. But further down the page,
And seemingly in passing, you revealed
The
secret of your learning: your great age.
In your day, verse was not a special field,
It was a language, so to speak: a tongue
For all who read books. No such luck today,
Alas. Just look at how it keeps you young,
This love for words that time can’t take away
From anyone touched with it early on.
No wonder that you write a hand so fair.
I swear that you’ll be here when I am gone,
Just as my fiery tree will still be there –
Bathed in its poetry, the rain, the air.
Aldeburgh Dawn
I
From slate sea that would gleam white were it not
The Gulf Stream cooled by nothing except England,
A run-down sun emerges to remind me
How far it came last night from where it always
Behaves as if it had never been to Europe
And burns your cheeks. This version chills them stiff.
The light is thin, even the wind is thin –
The strain of love as sung by Peter Pears –
And on the roofs of cars that shone before
Under the lamps but now are lit from space,
Those tears are not the dew of the Pacific,
Just drops of rain.
Three quarters of the poets
Here at the Festival speak double Dutch
From where I stand, still stuck with rhyme and rhythm.
This isn’t Edinburgh or Cheltenham:
It’s more like, well, a modest out-of-town
Gig with the smell of fish thrown in. You read,
Take questions, sign your books and hit the sack.
In charge, the fine young lady with the eyes –
Toast Catalogue meets Poetry (Chicago) –
Will spark a poem from the chap who looks
Like the top half of Ted Hughes, but that’s the lot,
Unless you clock the haddock they bring in
On toy boats with no names but only numbers,
To fill the crunchy gold beer-batter sleeves
In the restaurant your hotel is famous for.
II
But look, you must have done well. On the second
Pale morning when the same dawn walks again,
Poseidon, with his Maserati logo
Wrapped to the barbs in kelp and bladderwrack,
Comes bubbling up and shouts to you: “Good choice!
I make this scene at least one day a year.
You have to keep it real sometimes, and I
Get tired of Acapulco and the Hamptons.
Too many big yachts I can’t tower over.
Too many Russian girls. Too much Ralph Lauren.
Bling eats the soul.”
His beard, indeed, I note,
As well as all the standard shells and pearls,
Has plastic bags in it. What better warrant
For throttling back on pretty talk? And if
I can’t do that, what am I doing here,
Watching the nun-like progress of Aurora?
She bends to touch the ever-shifting shingle,
Her grey-on-grey cloak pink just at the edges,
And breathes cold light on salt-cured wildflowers –
Small, pinched, set wide apart. Lives of the poets.
III
The sun is up, the low clouds drained away
From the horizon, and beside the shell
Rigged on the beach as if for selling petrol
To veteran Ducks that got lost after D-Day,
I scan the flat sea and the pale blue vault
Streaked at the far edge with the vapour trails
Of the morning’s first jets racing into Holland.
This fan of metal Maggi Hambling built,
Apparently from concentrated rust,
Is hard edged, two men high, and takes the sun
No better than a half-track opened up
By a Typhoon’s rocket in the Falaise Gap,
But the rubric at its rim shines clear and bright:
“I hear those voices that will not be drowned.”
Words meant to make us think of Peter Grimes,
But I think of the Deutschland and the festivals
That Hopkins never went to. Pagan gods
Are all I see where he saw Christ in glory:
A matching shell, but this time luminous,
Awash with lustre, rises from the water,
And Venus speaks.
“I’m stunned that you can face me.
When have you ever suffered for your art?
Men who weren’t mad for glamour gave their lives
To work here. You should try it for ten minutes.”
The men she meant, of course, were Britten’s crew:
Abbots of music I enjoy so little
I long for an old world put back together
So Erich Wolfgang Korngold might have written
A lot more operas. I made that much clear,
Yet still she lay down on the rug I’d brought,
Saying she didn’t feel the cold. I did:
I kept my clothes on and just looked at her,
Trying to tell myself it was enough
To see her, since the memory would serve,
And she need not appear to me again –
Not her nor any of the other gods
I stole from Bullfinch back in the year dot.
One last kiss, then. Roll up the empty rug,
And back to the hotel across the pebbles,
So far from the hot sand that formed my habit
Of softening reality with dreams.
High time, I thought, for putting paid to that:
If I see revenants, then they should come
From the latest burned-out girls’ school in the Valley
Of Swat, be cursed with sense enough to see
That this place – silent, bleak, so short of action
You can hear the lichen grow – is next to heaven.
IV
The second and last night, my main event:
On stage to talk about my favourite poems
By everyone but me. Points of technique.
(Nothing is catchier than talking shop.)
The audience has copies. I point out
Frost’s “Silken Tent” is put together like
Its subject – all the tensions are resolved,
Simply by balance, into relaxation –
While Larkin knows there is no sanctuary.
By which of them is beauty more hard-won?
Scanning the crowded hall, I duly note
That the top half of Ted Hughes is moving in
On the ash blonde with the Téa Leoni profile:
A legend now throughout the festival
For never having heard of Andrew Marvell.
There was a day – like, yesterday – when I
Would have cast her as Helen’s sister Phoebe,
The thoughtful one with the career-girl glasses
And a killing line in loose La Perla smalls,
But now my gaze is drawn to a young woman
Distinguished only by her concentration
As she takes notes. Later, I ask her why.
A schoolteacher, no vamp, except her eyes
Burn with her love of poetry, as if
It loved her in its turn. So what we said
Might have a further life beyond our time:
One quoted phrase, one line, one anecdote –
The only immortality that lasts.
No god for that save Mercury, the messenger.
V
Later, near midnight, on the esplanade,
A pair of ancient people hand in hand
Sit on a bench. Ideally they should be
The ghosts of Vishnevskaya and Rostropovitch,
Once happy to make music here. But no,
They’re real. “We liked that one about the tent.”
&nbs
p; Feeling my age, I go back to my room,
Make tea, and catch a re-run of The Wire.
Too Many Poets
Too many poets pack a line with thought
But melody refuses to take wing.
It’s not that meaning has been dearly bought:
It has been stifled, by a hankering
For portent, as if music meant too much.
Sidney called this a want of inward touch.
True poets should walk singing as they weep,
As Arnaut Daniel once epitomised;
But nothing written will be worth its keep
Composed by one who has not realised
This to be true, and tested his own song
On others, seeing if they listen long
Or turn away. Verse is a public act
To that extent at least. As cruel as love,
The wished-for gift declines to be a fact
Except for the elect. The gods above
Loll on their clouds and lazily look down
To choose who gets the laurels of renown
Even if deaf. For them, it’s just a game,
But not for us, and though there might well be
Too many poets, we all nurse the same
Faith in the virtue of our mystery.
Courage, my friend: the world will not forget
What you have written. Or at least not yet.
Apotheosis at the Signing Table
Looking ahead for places to sit down,
Come spring I might, one last time, limp downtown
And into Heffers, into Waterstones,
In either order, haul my creaking bones,
To stand, with a long-practised half-lost look,
Somewhere beside the stack of my new book
Until I’m asked to sign. As if surprised
I’ll sit down, slowly, seeming paralysed
By sheer humility as they bring stock
Of books that I forgot I wrote. I’ll sign
Each tempting title-page with my by-line
Like a machine for hours on end. The clock
Will seem not to exist. My signature
Will grow, however, steadily less sure,
Until, the felt-tip quivering in my grasp,
I scrawl the hieroglyphs of my last gasp.
A final short sip from my cup of tea
And I will topple, croaking tragically.
Slumped on the carpet, I will look around,
And all the walls of books in the background,
More splendid even than they were before,
Will seem to hear my small voice from the floor.
“Heffers or Waterstones, this is goodbye,
But I rejoice that I came here to die,
