by Clive James
Who suffer from a perversion of religion –
Or, to put it in a less equivocating way,
Who suffer from an excess of religion –
Or, to come right out with it,
Who suffer from religion.
Let Him tell those catholic Protestants or protestant Catholics
Who in Northern Ireland go to bed on Saturday night
Looking forward to a morning of Holy Worship
That just this once they should make other plans –
Have a heavy cold, a stomach upset or a pulled hamstring
Severe enough to render them immobile,
With something similar for their children –
So that they will not be there to form a congregation
In a church just big enough for a small massacre.
Arrange this reprieve, Lord,
And if you can’t manage that much then for Christ’s sake
Hand the whole deal over to Allah.
May the Lord with the assistance of Allah
Give heed to the cries of those children in Beirut
Who have the dubious luck to be ten years old and under
While dwelling in the vicinity of a PLO faction
Currently being wiped out by another PLO faction,
And kindly swing it so that the incoming rockets
Do not dismember their small persons irreparably.
Children older than ten years we will give up on,
Not wanting the moon,
And their mothers, needless to say, are for the high jump.
Fix it, Lord. Get Al on to it,
And if it turns out to be more than you can handle
Raise Jehovah on the horn.
May the Lord and Allah with Jehovah’s proverbial
In-depth back-up and sales apparatus
Make a concerted effort to cut the crap,
For the following reasons among others:
Lest at least two kinds of Christians during their annual shoot-out
Bisect an old lady who hears the word ‘Duck!’
But can’t hit the deck because of sciatica
(May her stoop be steep) –
Lest the Druze and the Jews or the Juze and the Drews,
When shelling each other from somewhere each side
Of a ridge or a bridge,
Cascade hot shrapnel on the intervening hospital
Whose patients suffer from mental disorders,
And thus exacerbate in those inherently unstable minds
An already acute sense of insecurity
(May their straitjackets be flak jackets) –
Lest Iraq and Iran or Iran and Iraq go to rack and ruin
Not just in the standard Islamic manner
Of finding each other insufficiently fanatical,
But with an ironic new wrinkle
By which the hitherto unapproachably sordid
Ayatollah or Arsola
Is upstaged by his own appointee,
That even more sadistic fuckwit and fruitcake
The Hayula or Payola,
Who has women tortured in front of their husbands
As a forceful reminder, no doubt supererogatory,
That you can’t fight central mosque
(May their screams be deafening) –
Who also, if that doesn’t do the trick,
Has the children tortured along with their mothers
(May they all go crazy quickly),
The object being to make the fathers admit
That they plotted the regime’s overthrow –
A pretty fantastic charge when you consider
That the regime’s overthrow hasn’t yet been accomplished
By Allah functioning either on his tod
Or in combination with the Lord, Jehovah,
Buddha, the Great Spirit and each and every other
Recognized form of God –
Always supposing that They are working on it.
Always supposing that They care
About that or anything else.
But this is the sin of despair.
Echo Echo Echo
Changes in temperature entail turmoil.
Petits pois palpitate before they boil.
Ponds on the point of freezing look like oil.
And God knows what goes on below the soil.
God and the naturalists, who penetrate
With camera crews to depths as dark as fate
And shoot scenes hideous to contemplate
Where burrowing Attenboroughs fight and mate.
In outer space the endless turbulence
Seems too far gone to be at our expense.
One likes to think that if a bang’s immense
It didn’t happen in the present tense.
Still it’s unnerving when two galaxies –
One Catherine wheel and one like a Swiss cheese –
Get stuck in with sharp elbows and scraped knees,
Cancelling out their twin eternities.
As for inside the atom here at home,
It makes the cosmos look like jeu de paume
Played out around the Houston Astrodome.
We might as well be back in ancient Rome.
Random, unjust and violent universe!
We feel, and those less ignorant feel worse,
Knowing that what’s observed must soon disperse
And Phaethon’s car turn out to be a hearse.
Hence, or despite that, our concern with form,
Though even here outclassed by nature’s norm.
Snowflakes knock spots off Philibert de L’Orme
But something tells us that they are not warm.
Not that we are, compared with, say, the worms
Who live on lava, or are those the germs
That breed in butane and eat isotherms?
I’m not much good with scientific terms.
Even for Einstein it remained a dream
To unify the field, which makes it seem
Likely the rest of us won’t get a gleam
Of how, or if, the whole works fit a scheme.
One merely hopes that we have made a start.
Our apprehensions might not melt the heart
Or even be heartfelt for the most part,
But from that insufficiency comes art.
We gather ourselves up from the abyss
As lovers after copulation kiss –
Lip-service which, while semaphoring bliss,
Puts in a claim that there was point to this.
Small wonder, therefore, that from time to time,
As dollar millionaires still nickel-and-dime,
The free-form poet knuckles down to rhyme –
Scared into neatness by the wild sublime.
The Anchor of the Sirius
Triangular Macquarie Place, up from the Quay,
Is half rainforest, half a sculpture park
Where can be found – hemmed in by palms and ferns,
Trees touching overhead – the Obelisk
From which, one learns, All Public Roads are Measured
Leading to the Interior of the Colony.
Skyscraper cliffs keep this green garden dark.
The Obelisk is sandstone. Thomas Mort
Is also present, bronze on a tall plinth –
His plain Victorian three-piece suit bulks large,
Befitting Sydney’s first successful exporter
Of refrigerated foods – while, lower down
This plush declivity, one finds a bubbler
Superfluously shaded by a small
But intricate gun-metal baldacchino,
Sure-footed as a Donatello font.
Thus in a sculpture court less up to date
Yet cooler than MOMA’s, leafier than the Frick,
One strolls encountering pieces carried out
In traditional materials and is lulled –
Till this free-standing object looms and startles
Like a Calder by Duchamp. It stops you cold,
The anchor of the Sirius. It hooks you
More firmly than the fluke which can’t be seen
(Because, presumably, buried in the earth)
Could ever have snared the bottom of Sydney Cove.
One is amazed by how it is not old –
Which means the Colony’s protracted birth
(The women were outscreamed by the flayed men)
Falls so far short of being long ago
It’s hard to grasp. The anchor was brought back
From where the ship ended its history –
I think it tried to sail through Norfolk Island –
To where it began ours. Yes, the First Fleet
Dropped its first anchor just one hundred yards
(Or metres, as they say now) down the street –
And this is it, not much more touched by time
Than now by me, a yokel in the museum.
The crops failed. Phillip was no dynamo,
But Macquarie was, and men like Mort could double
The town’s wealth in ten years. The scrub grew long
And lush like Joan Sutherland’s throat. Success
Went overseas, took umpteen curtain calls,
Was toasted and had toast named after it,
And now the audience is here. Out on the harbour
Captain Cook II jam-packed with Japanese,
Their Nikons crackling like automatic flak,
Goes swanning past the well-remembered line
Where the submarine nets were when I was young,
Forty years ago – i.e. a full
Fifth of the time Port Jackson’s had that name.
And after I’d grown up and gone away
Like the wool-clip to the other end of the world
(Where the wool was turned to suit-cloth and sent back
So Thomas Mort, full of ideas as Dickens,
Might look the part of the philanthropist)
The anchor of the Sirius had me pinned –
Spiked, rooted to the spot under these trees
Which filter what light’s left by the glass towers
They put up yesterday so that the banks –
Algemene Bank Nederland NV,
Dresdner Bank AG, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro,
Sumitomo International Finance Australia –
Might catch through tinted windows like hot news
Digits conveying all they need to know,
Drawn down from space by ranks of VDUs
And here made manifest as a green glow –
New York and London, Hong Kong, Tokyo,
Sucked in at once to this same lightning rod –
Completing their great journey from afar
As a tired sinner comes at last to God,
As a ship comes in and drops anchor.
The Ferry Token
Not gold but some base alloy, it stays good
For one trip though the currency inflates –
Hard like the ferry’s deck of seasoned wood,
The only coin in town that never dates.
Don Juan, as described by Baudelaire,
Before he crossed the Styx to the grim side
Paid Charon son obole, his ferry fare.
Was it this very token, worth one ride?
Of course it wasn’t. This poor thing will buy
The traveller no myth beyond the dark
Leonine Pinchgut with one beady eye
Fixed on the brilliant, beckoning Luna Park.
At most it takes you back to Billy Blue
Whose ferry linked the Quay to the North Shore
Somewhere about the year of Waterloo –
And probably more after than before.
There’s been so little time for grand events.
One ferry sank, but saying those who drowned
Contributed to our historic sense
Would be obscene and logically unsound.
Nevertheless nostalgia impregnates
This weightless disc as sunlight bleaches wood.
Our past is shallow but it scintillates –
Not gold but some base alloy, it stays good.
Funnelweb
The flame reflected in the welder’s mask
Burns the board-rider’s upstage fingertips
That cut a swathe across the curved sea wall
Inside the Banzai Pipeline’s tubular swell.
Sopranos feel the same fire on their lips
Kissing Jochanaan as befits the task.
The crank-winged Chance-Vought F4-U Corsair
When turning tightly spilled white vortices
Behind its wing tips in the cobalt blue.
A mere machine, a Running W
As once brought stuntmen’s horses to their knees,
And yet you can’t deny it carved the air.
Phenomena like these, it will be said,
Are only incidental at the most
And mostly trivial, to say the least:
Less the confetti at the wedding feast
Than the box it came in, spice without the roast,
Beaches at Tarawa without the dead.
A saturation diver sets his seal
Where even fish can’t see reflected flame.
A surfer in the folded tube may form
His signature unnoticed from the foam.
Night fighters’ ailerons worked just the same
And Salome might think of her next meal.
True, but not true enough, in my belief.
These things though tenuous aren’t set apart.
The casual grace note can’t help but imply,
If not the outline of the melody,
Then anyway the impulse at its heart –
And do so all the more for being brief.
Stillness in movement is a waking dream
Movement in stillness has refined from strength.
The riverbank must make the drift apparent
Of swans at evening plugged into the current,
But lest they be disorganized at length
Just out of sight they steer to point upstream.
Wristy Makarova’s Odette/Odile
(Two lovely people spinning on one toe)
Exemplifies the Body Beautiful
Consumed by its own power to appal.
Watch how the whiplash whirlwind sucks up snow –
A double helix drawn from sex appeal.
Woodcut adoring kings with narrowed eye
Quite clearly find the cradle-capped young Prince
Painful to look at, backed up by his nimbus.
Even His Mother, pierced by the columbus
And haloed in Her own right, seems to wince:
The sun is in the wrong part of the sky.
He could not save Himself, they said with scorn,
But always it has been supposed they erred
And that, armed by His power to distinguish
The star-bursts in His hands from human anguish,
He ultimately went out like a bird
The way that He came in when He was born.
Watching a dear friend go down fast with cancer
Like a raindrop down a window pane, I hold
Her hand of balsa clad with clear doped silk
Pulsating like the skin of simmering milk
Which must boil over soon and leave her cold.
Next time I’m coming back a necromancer.
The floorboards in Kyoto’s Nijo-jo
Will sing like flocks of birds from their sleeved nails
When someone walks, however light in weight.
Thus Tokugawa shoguns dreamed at night
Equating sudden death with nightingales,
And paper walls seemed real, this being so.
Saito himself committed suicide
The long way round by using the short sword
Before the banzai charge went in at dawn.
Three thou
sand died before the sun went down.
All night it sounded like a psycho ward.
We sacked out with the corpses open eyed.
What happened the next morning broke your heart.
We saw the whole thing from above the beach.
Mothers threw living babies from the cliff.
The sick lined up to have their heads hacked off.
Those soldiers that the non-coms couldn’t reach
Kissed a grenade and blew themselves apart.
Marines you’d swear would never shed a tear
On Saipan wept. And that was all she wrote.
We just got used to it, like swatting flies.
Not even Iwo came as a surprise.
The whole Jap nation would have cut its throat
I swear to God sure as I’m standing here.
For Lichtenberg, wit was a microscope,
Yet in between the lines he seemed to know
His fine analysis did not disperse,
But gave coherence to, the universe.
That strong light touch sums up the rococo:
An epoch blown from clear glass, not from soap.
So do the buildings of Cuvilliés,
The Wittelsbachs’ great court-dwarf architect,
Whose play of curlicue and arabesque
Like flame reflected in the welder’s mask
Suggests a brilliance beyond intellect,
Fulfilled creation singing its own praise.
His small theatre of the Residenz
In World War II was bombed to smithereens
Yet could be put back as it was, because
Its dazzling inner shell was lath and gauze,
A kit of plaster panels and silk screens
They stashed away until the world saw sense.
At Vegas, the last Grand Prix of the year
Before he died in Belgium, Gilles Villeneuve
Put on his helmet and I saw the sun
Fill up his tinted visor like white wine.
Few poets get the face that they deserve
Or, like Hart Crane, can travel in a tear.
Of course Villeneuve was handsome anyway –
