by Clive James
And the shrieks of the dancing Queen as the hero splashed her
While her cheer-squad of ladies-in-waiting giggled on cue,
The eunuchs holding the towels.
With salt in her eyes did she wrinkle the perfect nose
Of which Pascal would later venture the opinion
That had it been shorter (he didn’t say by how much)
History would have been different?
They were probably both naked. What a servant saw
Did not count. They might even have boffed each other
Right there at the water’s edge like a pair of dolphins
Washed up in the middle of a mad affair,
With her unable to believe the big lunk would ever
Walk away from this, and him in his soul
Fighting to forget that this was R&R
And there was still the war.
There is always the war. The Aussies in Tobruk
Could hear the German bombers at El Adem
Warming up on the airfield
For the five-minute flight that is really the only distance
Between bliss and blitz.
Ears still ringing from kookaburras and whipbirds
Were heckled by Heinkels.
When Antony eyeballed her Coppertone tits and bum
He was looking at Actium.
Shake it, lady.
Shake it for the Afrika Korps.
Where the sea meets the desert there is always,
There is always the war.
The Lions at Taronga
The leaves of Tower Bridge are rigged to open
For any taxi I might chance to catch.
They say that when the ravens leave the Tower
It means they’ll use my rain-stained study skylight
As a toilet. I can see Canary Wharf,
A Russian rocket packed around with boosters
Lit up to launch at dawn from Baikonur.
The Blade of Light is cleared for butterflies
To crash-land. When that lens-shaped office block
Is finished it will bend a ray from space
To burn the Belfast like a sitting duck.
I’ve known the NatWest Tower since it was knee-high
To the Barbican, another high-tech know-how
HQ that used to look like the last word.
From my place I can see last words in vistas
As far downriver as the spreading spikes
Of the Dome, some sad bitch of a sea urchin
Losing its battle with a stray Dutch cap
While hothouse pleasure boats leak foreign voices
Like tourist minibuses nose to tail
In the corridors of Buckingham Palace.
Been there, done that. The Queen, she hung one on me.
I’ve got it in a box. The box to frame
My body will be built here, like as not,
And probably quite soon. I’ve lived in London
For longer than some people live all told.
Except for the way out, I know it backwards.
So at night when the lions at Taronga
Roar in my memory across the water
I feel the way they must have felt, poor bastards –
Gone in the teeth. The food dead. On display
All day and every day. Sleep in a fortress.
Every familiar walkway leads to strangers.
Dream Me Some Happiness
John Donne, uneasiest of apostates,
Renouncing Rome that he might get ahead
In life, or anyway not wind up dead,
Minus his guts or pressed beneath great weights,
Ascribed his bad faith to his latest flame
As if the fact she could be bent to do
His bidding proved that she would not stay true:
Each kiss a Judas kiss, a double game.
Compared with him, the mental muscle-man,
Successors who declared his numbers rough
Revealed by theirs they found the pace too tough:
The knotty strength that made him hard to scan
Left him renowned for his conceits alone,
Figments unfading as the forms of death
Prescribed for Catholics by Elizabeth –
Tangles of gristle, relics of hair and bone.
Brought back to favour in an anxious time
Attuned to his tormented intellect,
By now he charms us, save in one respect:
Framing his women still looks like a crime.
We foist our fault on her we claim to love
A different way. Pleased to the point of tears,
She tells us that the real world disappears.
Not quite the Donne thing, when push comes to shove:
He wrote betrayal into her delight.
We have a better reason to deceive
Ourselves as we help her help us believe
Life isn’t like that: at least, not tonight.
Deckard Was a Replicant
The forms of nature cufflinked through your life
Bring a sense of what Americans call closure.
The full-blown iris swims in English air
Like the wreckage of an airbag jellyfish
Rinsed by a wave’s thin edge at Tamarama:
The same frail blue, the same exhausted sprawl,
The same splendour. Nothing but the poison
Is taken out. In the gallery, that girl
Has the beauty that once gave itself to you
To be turned into marriage, children, houses.
She will give these things to someone else this time.
If this time seems the same time, it’s because
It is. The reason she is not for you
Is she already was. Try to remember
What power they have, knowing what sex is for:
Replacing us. The Gainsborough chatelaine
She studies wears a shawl dipped in the hint
Of jacaranda blossoms, yet it might
Remind her of sucked sweets, or the pale veins
Of her own breasts. Setting the Thames on fire,
The tall white-painted training ship from Denmark
Flaunts the brass fittings of the little ferry
That took you as a child to Kirribilli
On its way to Wapping, then the Acheron
And Hades. Those gulls that graze the mud
Took sixty years to get here from Bundeena.
At an average speed of forty yards an hour
They barely moved. It seems you didn’t either.
You stood still with your head wrapped in the armour
Of perception’s hard-wired interlocking habits.
Ned Kelly was the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
Dazzled by lipstick pulped from waratahs,
The smoker coughs, having been born again.
Lucretius the Diver
Things worn out by the lapse of ages tend
Toward the reef, that motley wrecking crew
Of living polyps who, to get ahead,
Climb ruthlessly all over their own dead,
But facts like those Lucretius never knew:
He merely meant we can’t long buck the trend
That winds up hard against a watershed.
Horace had godly names for every breeze.
Ovid himself was stiff with sacred stuff.
Virgil talked turkey just once, about bees.
Of ancient wits Lucretius alone,
Without recourse to supernatural guff,
Uncannily forecast the modern tone –
Viewing the world as miracle enough.
Imagine him in scuba gear, instead
Of whatever kit a Roman poet wore –
To find his fruitful symbol for the grave
Not just inevitable but alive
Would surely suit him down to the sea floor.
Suspended before such a flower bed
He’d bubble with delight be
neath the wave.
The reef, a daughter, and the sea, its mother,
In a long, white-lipped rage with one another
Would shout above him as he hung in space
And saw his intuition had been right:
Under a windswept canopy of lace,
Even down there in that froth-filtered light,
The World of Things is clearly the one place –
Death lives, life dies, and no gods intervene.
It’s all so obvious, would be his thought:
But then, it always was, at least to him,
And why the rest of them were quite so dim
On that point is perhaps a theme we ought
To tackle, realizing it could mean
Our chances going in are pretty slim
Of drawing comfort from a Golden Age
So lethally haphazard no one sane
Could contemplate the play of chance was all
There was to life. That took the featherbrain
Lucretius seemed to them, and not the sage
He seems to us, who flinch from his disdain
As he stares seaward at the restless wall
Of ruined waves, the spray that falls like rain.
One Man to Another
Salute me! I have tamed my daughter’s face
With hot oil, and my honour has been saved.
It’s not to be defied that I have slaved.
She talks a lot less now she knows her place.
Most of her mouth can still move, and one eye
Could stare in hatred if she wanted to.
I’m proud to say her protests have been few
Apart from that absurd initial cry.
That was the evil spirit leaving her.
She really should have dealt with it herself.
She said she’d rather end up on the shelf
Than marry our best choice. What thoughts occur
To girls nowadays! Next they will want a say
In what to wear and when to buy a book.
Here, take your mother’s mirror. Take a look.
What have you got in store for me today?
You thought to shake my faith? Well, you have found
My faith shakes you, and will again, I swear,
If you continue with that hangdog air:
If you continue with that whining sound.
Can’t you be grateful we still keep you here?
We could have sent you out there to the dust
Where people fight for every cowpat crust.
We don’t ask for a grin from ear to ear,
But now no man would want you, we still do,
So cut the sulky pout. To many another
Far worse than this has happened. Ask your mother.
I don’t know what the world is coming to.
See how she slinks inside. If not with grace
She seems to have accepted, more or less,
Some limit to a woman’s wilfulness.
The lesson hurt us both, but met the case.
Salute me! I have tamed my daughter’s face.
Stolen Children
From where I sit for cool drinks in the heat
The Covent Garden Jumpzone seems to fling
Kids over rooftops in a bungee dive
The wrong way, and the thrill it is to swing
Straight up and down you see when they arrive,
In Heaven as on Earth, with kicking feet,
And so depart. One flier takes the pip
By somersaulting in her harness when,
High overhead, there is a moment’s pause
For rubber to recuperate. Not then,
But later, as she signals for applause
With a slow stride instead of a last flip,
The penny drops. I’ve seen this girl before.
Above the birthplace of the Son of God
It had pleased Botticelli to impose
The perfect circle of a trained cheer-squad
Dancing barefoot with light fantastic toes
As angels do, the cloudless blue their floor.
The second from the left was my dream girl.
Outside, Trafalgar Square filled up with snow.
Winter in England was a culture shock
More ways than one. The gallery’s warm glow
Seemed concentrated in a flowing frock,
A flash of ankle gleaming like a pearl.
Back down with us, she saunters past my chair.
About thirteen, with more than blips for breasts,
She wasn’t born before I saw her first
On a glass board surfing the troughs and crests
Of the air waves. Nor was her mother. Worst
Of all is how the longing lingers there
Yet leaves us nothing else to bless at last
Except our luck that we were not insane.
The Standard says the missing girls are still
Not found. A man is held. The writers strain
The law’s pale letter, closing for the kill
As once the mob did, not far in the past.
Suppose he did it, don’t I know that face?
I shave it every morning. The same eyes
Plead innocent. In his case, one loose screw
Switched the desire a priest can’t neutralize
To children, and permitted him to do
What we don’t dream of even when God’s grace
Stuns us with glory walking in the sky.
Grace, but not justice. If an impulse makes
Mere fools of most but monsters of the rest,
A balance sheet of what it gives and takes
Implies a mediator who knows best
If you can just surrender. Nor can I.
Think of the fathers, praying. They must know
No one exists to listen who did not
Choose them for this, but where else can they ask
The same exemption all the others got
By chance? They beg for mercy from a mask.
Had it a mind, they’d not be weeping so.
Time to go home. The things I tried to tell
My own two daughters churn in my hot head.
The stranger won’t come on like Captain Hook.
He’ll laugh like me, crack jokes, yet want you dead.
Good story, Dad. I turn for one last look
At Paradise, and how we rose and fell.
Young Lady in Black
The Russian poets dreamed, but dreamed too soon,
Of a red-lipped, chalk-white face framed in black fur:
Symbol of what their future would be like –
Free, lyrical and elegant, like her.
In the love songs of their climacteric
I met you before I met you, and you were
The way you are now in these photographs
Your father took outside the Hermitage.
You stand on snow, and more snow in the air
Arrives in powdered form like rice through space.
It hurts to know the colour of your hair
Is blacker than your hat. Such is the price
Figments exact by turning real: we care
Too much. I too was tricked by history,
But at least I saw you, close enough to touch,
Even as time made touch impossible.
The poets never met their richly dressed
Princess of liberty. The actual girl
Was lost to them as all the rest was lost:
Only their ghosts attended the snowfall
The camera stopped when you stood in the square,
Fiction made fact at long last and too late.
My grief would look like nothing in their eyes.
I hear them in the photographs. The breath
Of sorrow stirs the cold dust while hope dies
The worst way, in the vision of rebirth,
As by whole generations they arise
From pitted shallows in the permafrost
And storm the Winter Palace from the sky.
Each spirit shivering in a bead of light,
They fall again for what they once foretold –
For you, dawn burning through its cloak of night.
They miss what I miss, and a millionfold.
It all came true, it’s there in black and white:
But your mouth is the colour of their blood.
In Town for the March
Today in Castlereagh Street I
Felt short of breath, and here is why.
From the direction of the Quay
Towards where Mark Foy’s used to be,
A glass and metal river ran
Made in Germany and Japan.
Past the facade of David Jones
Men walked their mobile telephones,
Making the footpath hideous
With what they needed to discuss.
But why so long, and why so loud?
I can recall a bigger crowd
In which nobody fought for space
Except to call a name. The face
To fit it smiled as it went by
Among the ranks. Women would cry
Who knew that should they call all day
One face would never look their way.
All this was sixty years ago,
Since when I have grown old and slow,
But still I see the marching men,
So many of them still young then,
Even the men from the first war
Straight as a piece of two-by-four.
Men of the Anzac Day parade,
I grew up in the world you made.
To mock it would be my mistake.
I try to love it for your sake.
Through cars and buses, on they come,
Their pace set by a spectral drum.
Their regimental banners, thin
As watercolours fading in
The sun, hint at a panoply
Dissolving into history.
As the rearguard outflanks Hyde Park,
Wheels right, and melts into the dark,
It leaves me, barely fit to stand,
