Sentenced to Life
Page 2
Into the singularity we fly
After a stretch of time in which we leave
Our lives behind yet know that we will die
At any moment now. A pause to grieve,
Burned by the starlight of our lives laid bare,
And then no sound, no sight, no thought. Nowhere.
What is it worth, then, this insane last phase
When everything about you goes downhill?
This much: you get to see the cosmos blaze
And feel its grandeur, even against your will,
As it reminds you, just by being there,
That it is here we live or else nowhere.
Nature Programme
The female panda is on heat
For about five minutes a year
And the male, no sprinter at the best of times,
Hardly ever gets there
Before she cools off again.
In the South Island of New Zealand
There is a rain forest
With penguins in it.
They trot along the dangerous trails
Towards the booming ocean
Where albatross chicks in training
For their very first take-off
Are snatched by tiger sharks
Cruising in water
No deeper than your thighs.
Doomed to the atrophy of lust,
Lurching with their flippers out,
Dragged under as they strain for flight,
They could be you:
Wonder of nature that you were.
Managing Anger
On screen, the actor smashes down the phone.
He wrecks the thing because he can’t get through.
He plays it stagey even when alone.
If you were there, he might be wrecking you.
Actors believe they have to show, not tell,
Any annoyance that the script dictates,
Therefore it’s not enough for them to yell:
They must pull down a cupboard full of plates.
An actor wrecks a room. The actress who
Is playing wife to him does not protest.
Perhaps she doesn’t have enough to do
All day, and thinks his outburst for the best.
For God forbid that actors bottle up
Their subterranean feelings so that we
Can’t see them. We must watch the coffee cup
Reduced to smithereens, the shelf swept free
Of all its crockery. Another take
Requires the whole set to be dressed again
With all the gubbins that he got to break
The first time. Aren’t they weary, now and then,
The poor crew, setting up the stuff once more
That some big baby trashes in a rage,
And all that fury faked? False to the core,
The screen experience gives us a gauge
For our real lives, where we go on for years
Not even mentioning some simple fact
That brings us to the aching point of tears –
Lest people think that it might be an act.
Echo Point
I am the echo of the man you knew.
Launched from the look-out to the other side
Of this blue valley, my voice calls to you
All on its own, and more direct for that.
My line of sweet talk you could not abide
Came from the real man. It will all be gone –
Like glitter back to the magician’s hat –
Soon now, and only sad scraps will remain.
His body that betrayed you has gone on
To do the same for him. Like veils of rain,
He is the cloud that his tears travel through.
When the cloud lifts, he will be gone indeed.
Hearing his cry, you’ll see the ghost gums break
Into clear air, as all the past is freed
From false hopes. No, I nowhere lie awake
To feel this happen, but I know it will.
At the last breath, my throat was full of song;
The proof, for a short while, is with you still.
Though snapped at sharply by the whip-bird’s call,
It has not stopped. It lingers for your sake:
Almost as if I were not gone for long –
And what you hear will not fade as I fall.
Too Much Light
My cataracts invest the bright spring day
With extra glory, with a glow that stings.
The shimmering shields above the college gates –
Heraldic remnants of the queens and kings –
Flaunt liquid paint here at the end of things
When my vitality at last abates,
And all these forms bleed, spread and make a blur
Of what, to second sight, they are and were.
And now I slowly pace, a stricken beast,
Across a lawn which must be half immersed
In crocuses and daffodils, but I
Can only see for sure the colours burst
And coalesce as if they were the first
Flowers I ever saw. Thus, should I die,
I’ll go back through the gate I entered when
My eyes were stunned, as now they are again.
My Latest Fever
My latest fever clad me in cold sweat
And there I was, in hospital again,
Drenched, and expecting an attack of bugs
As devastating as the first few hours
Of Barbarossa, with the Russian air force
Caught on the ground and soldiers by the thousand
Herded away to starve, while Stalin still
Believed it couldn’t happen. But instead
The assault turned out to be as deadly dull
As a bunch of ancient members of the Garrick
Emerging from their hutch below the stairs
To bore me from all angles as I prayed
For sleep, which only came in fits and starts.
Night after night was like that. Every day
Was like the night before, a hit parade
Of jazzed-up sequences from action movies.
While liquid drugs were pumped into my wrist,
My temperature stayed sky high. On the screen
Deep in my head, heroes repaired themselves.
In Rambo First Blood, Sly Stallone sewed up
His own arm. Then Mark Wahlberg, star of Shooter,
Assisted by Kate Mara, operated
To dig the bullets from his body. Teeth
Were gritted in both cases. No-one grits
Like Sly: it looks like a piano sneering.
Better, however, to be proof against
All damage, as in Salt, where Angelina
Jumps from a bridge onto a speeding truck
And then from that truck to another truck.
In North Korea, tortured for years on end,
She comes out with a split lip. All this mayhem
Raged in my brain with not a cliché scamped.
I saw the heroes march in line towards me
In slow-mo, with a wall of flame behind them,
And thought, as I have often thought, ‘This is
The pits. How can I make it stop?’ It stopped.
On the eleventh day, my temperature
Dived off the bridge like Catherine Zeta-Jones
From the Petronas towers in Kuala Lumpur.
I had no vision of the final battle.
The drugs, in pill form now, drove back the bugs
Into the holes from which they had attacked.
It might have been a scene from Starship Troopers:
But no, I had returned to the real world.
They sent me home to sleep in a dry bed
Where I felt better than I had for months.
No need to make a drama of my rescue:
Having been saved was like a lease of life,
The thing itse
lf, undimmed by images –
A thrill a minute simply for being so.
The Emperor’s Last Words
An army that never leaves its defences
Is bound to be defeated, said Napoleon,
Who left them, and was defeated.
And thus I gather my remaining senses
For the walk, or limp, to town
Where I have a haircut and visit
The Oxfam bookshop near the bridge.
Only a day out of Addenbrooke’s
Where another bout of pneumonia
Damned near nailed me,
I walk slowly now, sitting on low brick walls.
But the haircut is successful,
Completing my resemblance to Buzz Aldrin
On the surface of Jupiter,
And in the bookshop I get, for my niece,
The Penguin Book of English Verse
(John Hayward’s excellent anthology)
And the old, neat, thin-paper OUP edition
Of the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation
Of War and Peace, so handy for the pocket.
Still in her teens, already reading everything,
She wants to be a writer, and when she visits me
She gets a useful lesson
On how a writer can end up.
But things could have been worse:
I could have been married to Laura Riding,
Whose collected poems I purchase for myself.
Have fifteen years of death improved her verses?
No, still stridently incomprehensible, befitting
The way she won an argument with Robert Graves
By throwing herself backwards from a window:
A token, no doubt, of an artistic commitment
The purity of whose achievements was proved
By being intelligible to nobody at all
Except her fellow fruit-cakes.
Well, she sure left her defences.
Almost everyone wants to be a writer.
My niece, however, has got the knack:
That feeling for a sentence, you can’t mistake it.
The only question is how far you will go,
Even walking ever so slowly,
Away from your fortress. All the way to Russia?
But Tolstoy, himself an awful husband,
Waits to make a midget of your memory.
You escaped from Elba
But not from St Helena.
Had you stayed in Corsica
None of this would have happened.
But you left, and now every nut ward in the world
Has one of you at least.
The Maudes were married more than fifty years.
In two days’ time, the Tour de France
Will go past here
Where I now sit to gather strength
For my retreat from this hot sun.
It’s time to go. High time to go. High time.
France, army, head of the army, Josephine.
Compendium Catullianum
My girlfriend’s sparrow is dead. It is an ex-sparrow.
Where once it hopped about between her knees,
Today it limps along the same dark road
I’ve come to know too well since she denied me
The pathway to her lap. Cruel Lesbia,
You asked for this, your sparrow with its feet
Turned upwards as yours were when in the throes
Of love. If I say ‘Screw it, it’s just a sparrow’
I court your wrath, or, worse, your cold rejection;
But I can live with that though you weep floods,
Since I have friends who steer well clear of war.
Give me charm over courage every time:
The ease of bantering chaps, a faithful love
From women or even for them, so long as they
Don’t pester me like you and your dumb sparrow.
Remember when I asked for a thousand kisses?
Let’s make it ten. Why not just kiss me once?
For I, tear-drenched as when my brother died,
Miss you the way you miss that stupid bird:
Excruciating. Let’s live and let’s love.
Our brief light spent, night is an endless sleep.
Bugsy Siegel’s Flying Eye
In Havana, at the hotel Nacional,
Lucky Luciano, or so the story goes,
Persuaded a reluctant Meyer Lansky
That Bugsy Siegel, who had squandered the mob’s money
On taking years to finish the Flamingo
And might even have skimmed from the invested capital,
Would need to have his venture in Las Vegas
Brought to a sudden end.
But the execution happened in LA
With Bugsy unwisely sitting near a window.
The first bullet took out his right eye
And flung it far away across the carpet
Into the tiled dining area.
He should have known that something bad would happen
Because when he got home he had smelled flowers
And when there are no flowers in the house
But you still smell them, it means death.
After the window shattered, the smell of jasmine
Seeped through the house, but that was no premonition,
Because Bugsy was already dead.
Scholars still ask the question why
He never guessed that he would soon get hit,
Even after closing down his dream-land
For yet another re-design. He was
An artist among gangsters. The others weren’t.
When I got to Vegas, the original Flamingo
Had been torn down, with a garden on the site,
But in Havana, at the Nacional,
I met the waiter who had built a long career
Out of once having slept with Ava Gardner,
And I sat to drink mojitos where Meyer Lansky
And Lucky Luciano might once have done the same
While they pondered what to do about Bugsy.
Maybe they did. It was mob business
So nothing got written down. Nobody can be sure
Of anything except that flying eye.
Only the Immortal Need Apply
‘I am as the demon of the tumult’
– Gabriele d’Annunzio, quoted by Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Pike
In Paris, at Diaghilev’s Cleopatra –
Décor by Bakst, choreography by Fokine,
Ida Rubinstein in the title role –
D’Annunzio and his powerful halitosis
Sat beside Robert de Montesquieu,
The model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus.
Rubinstein, who could not dance a step,
Merely stood there looking beautiful
Or adopted the occasional Egyptian pose,
While d’Annunzio laid his plans.
Backstage in her crowded dressing-room
The Nile-nymph recovered from her exertions
By lying back in her couch.
D’Annunzio was six inches shorter than she was
But her posture put him within range.
He fell to his knees and kissed her lovely legs
Upward from toes to crotch.
As he plunged his face into the tarte tatin,
Barrès and Rostand bowed their heads in awe
And Montesquieu adjusted his moustache.
Later on a man in the street was arrested
And charged with not being famous.
He remains nameless to this day.
Plot Points
On the rafting ice
The afterbirth of seals
Leaves stains like pink blancmange.
Glyco proteins in the fish
Keep them from freezing.
M13 in Hercules
Is a globular star cluster –
A glitterball that my mother
Could have danced the Charles
ton under.
She had lovely hands.
Renoir, choosing models, always looked
At their hands first.
After the war, at Lodz,
On a tour of the concentration camp,
Rubinstein said ‘I was born here.’
In Melanesia, the House of Memories
Contains the treasures of the tribe.
The Somme chalk was good for tunnels.
When the barrage broke them,
The parapet bags spat white.
At Kokoda, the treetop phosphorescence
Turned the night to Christmas.
The Aussies in Tobruk
Brushed dust from bully beef.
In the dry valleys of Antarctica
Dust is raised by the katabatic wind.
With the Wehrmacht stalled in front of Moscow,
Even the grease froze. The 88s
Were jammed by their own shells.
Rasputitsa was the mud
Of spring thaw and autumn rain.
On a hard day in the Alhambra
The Sultan sent an apple
To the virgin of his choice.
The logo on your Macbook
Is an echo of the manner
In which Alan Turing killed himself.
In the battle for Berlin
The last panzers were overrun
Before they reached the start-line.
A dead hippo in the Tiergarten
Had an unexploded mortar bomb
Sticking out of its side.
While you were reading this
Millions of stars moved closer
Towards their own extinction
So many years ago –
But let’s believe our eyes:
They say it’s all here now.
One Elephant, Two Elephant
Denis Zafiro, Last of the Great White Hunters –
Reduced now, a fact worth blessing, to the role of guide –
No rifle any more, just a mid-range Japanese camera
And even that he would keep under wraps. ‘The last
Of the great white photographers.’ One of his jokes –
Took Hemingway out on the almost fatal safari
In which Papa, extravagantly even for him,
Contrived to be in a plane crash twice, thus smashing
Himself up good, so that on his epaulettes
Could be seen, Denis said, grey muck coming out of his skull
Like oatmeal porridge.
Last of the great white contacts,
Denis, when our safari left Nairobi
Could have ridden up front like Rommel in his staff car