Collected Poems (1958-2015)

by Clive James

  Reaching up for my mother’s hand.

  Six Degrees of Separation from Shelley

  In the last year of her life I dined with Diana Cooper

  Who told me she thought the best thing to do with the poor

  Was to kill them. I think her tongue was in her cheek

  But with that much plastic surgery it was hard to tell.

  As a child she had sat on the knee of George Meredith,

  More than forty years after he published Modern Love.

  Though she must have been as pretty as any poppet

  Who challenged the trousers of Dowson or Lewis Carroll,

  We can bet Meredith wasn’t as modern as that.

  By then the old boy wouldn’t have felt a twinge

  Even had he foreseen she would one day arrive

  In Paris with an escort of two dozen Spitfires.

  The book lamented his marriage to one of the daughters

  Of Peacock. Peacock when young rescued Shelley

  From a coma brought on through an excess of vegetarianism

  By waving a steak under his sensitive nose.

  Shelley never quite said that the best thing to do with the rich

  Was to kill them, but he probably thought so.

  Whether the steak was cooked or raw I can’t remember.

  I should, of course. I was practically there:

  The blaze of his funeral pyre on the beach at night

  Was still in her eyes. At her age I hope to recall

  The phial of poison she carried but never used

  Against the day there was nothing left to live for.

  Occupation: Housewife

  Advertisements asked ‘Which twin has the Toni?’

  Our mothers were supposed to be non-plussed.

  Dense paragraphs of technical baloney

  Explained the close resemblance of the phoney

  To the Expensive Perm. It worked on trust.

  The barber tried to tell me the same sheila

  With the same Expensive Perm was pictured twice.

  He said the Toni treatment was paint-sealer

  Re-bottled by a second-hand car dealer

  And did to hair what strychnine did to mice.

  Our mothers all survived, but not the perms.

  Two hours at most the Toni bobbed and dazzled

  Before the waves were back on level terms,

  Limp as the spear-points of the household germs

  An avalanche of Vim left looking frazzled.

  Another false economy, home brew

  Seethed after nightfall in the laundry copper.

  Bought on the sly, the hops were left to stew

  Into a mulch that grunted as it grew.

  You had to sample it with an eye-dropper,

  Not stir it with a stick as one mum did.

  She piled housebricks on top, thinking the gas

  Would have nowhere to go. Lucky she hid

  Inside the house. The copper blew its lid

  Like Krakatoa to emit a mass

  Of foam. The laundry window bulged and broke.

  The prodigy invaded the back yard.

  Spreading across the lawn like evil smoke

  It murdered her hydrangeas at a stroke

  And long before the dawn it had set hard.

  On a world scale, one hardly needs to note,

  Those Aussie battlers barely had a taste

  Of deprivation. Reeling from the boat

  Came reffo women who had eaten goat

  Only on feast days. Still, it is the waste

  I think of, the long years without our men,

  And only the Yanks to offer luxuries

  At a price no decent woman thought of then

  As one she could afford, waiting for when

  The Man Himself came back from Overseas.

  And then I think of those whose men did not:

  My mother one of them. She who had kept

  Herself for him for so long, and for what?

  To creep, when I had splinters, to my cot

  With tweezers and a needle while I slept?

  Now comes the time I fly to sit with her

  Where she lies waiting, to what end we know.

  We trade our stories of the way things were,

  The home brew and the perm like rabbit fur.

  How sad, she says, the heart is last to go.

  The heart, the heart. I still can hear it break.

  She asked for nothing except his return.

  To pay so great a debt, what does it take?

  My books, degrees, the money that I make?

  Proud of a son who never seems to learn,

  She can’t forget I lost my good penknife.

  Those memories of waste do not grow dim

  When you, for Occupation, write: Housewife.

  Out of this world, God grant them both the life

  She gave me and I had instead of him.

  Jesus in Nigeria

  Let him so keen for casting the first stone

  Direct a fast ball right between her eyes,

  So it might be from one quick burst of bone,

  Not from a mass of bruises, that she dies.

  I’m pleased to see, of all you without sin,

  The cocky dimwit is so young and strong

  Who won the draw to let the games begin.

  He looks the type, unless I’m very wrong,

  Who’ll hog the glory with his opening shot.

  With any luck at least he’ll knock her out.

  His rivals in this miserable lot

  Are hard-pressed to jump up and down and shout.

  That old one there has just put out his back

  Lifting a boulder he could barely throw

  For half a yard without a heart attack,

  But you can bet, just to be in the show,

  He’d shuffle up and drop it on her head.

  I hate to take my father’s name in vain

  But God almighty, how they want her dead:

  How sure they are that she should die in pain.

  The woman taken in adultery:

  It’s one of the best stories in my book.

  Some scholars call it the essential me.

  If my writ ran here, you could take a look.

  Alas, it doesn’t. I wield little power

  Even with my bunch, let alone with yours.

  Long, long ago I had my public hour.

  My mission failed. The maniacs and bores

  Took over. I still weep, but weep in fear

  Over a world become so pitiless

  I miss that blessed soldier with the spear

  Who put an early end to my distress.

  Merely a thug and not a mental case,

  He showed the only mercy I recall.

  A dumb but reasonably decent face:

  The best that we can hope for, all in all.

  Step up, young man. Take aim and don’t think twice.

  No matter what you both believe is true,

  Tonight she will be with me in Paradise.

  I’m sorry I can’t say the same for you.

  The Place of Reeds

  Kogarah (suppress the first ‘a’ and it scans)

  Named by the locals for the creek’s tall reeds

  That look like an exotic dancer’s fans

  When dead, was where I lived. Born to great deeds

  I stripped the fronds and was a warrior

  Whose arrows were the long thin brittle stem

  With a stiff piece of copper wire or

  A headless nail to make a point for them.

  The point went in where once the pith had been

  Before it crumbled. The capillary

  Was open at the other end. Some keen

  Constructors mastered the technology

  For fitting in a feathery tailpiece,

  But they made model aeroplanes that flew.

  Mine didn’t, and my shafts, upon release

  Wobbled and drifted a
s all missiles do

  With nothing at the back to guide their flight.

  Still, I was dangerous. My willow bow

  Armed an Odysseus equipped to smite

  Penelope and let her suitors go.

  The creek led through a swamp where each weekend

  Among the tangled trees we waged mock war.

  At short range I could sometimes miss a friend

  And hit the foe. Imagine Agincourt

  Plus spiders, snakes and hydroponic plants.

  I can’t forget one boy, caught up a tree

  By twenty others, peeing his short pants

  As the arrows came up sizzling. It was me.

  Just so the tribesmen, when our ship came in

  Bringing the puffs of smoke that threw a spear

  Too quick to see, realized they couldn’t win.

  It was our weaponry and not their fear

  Defeated them. As we who couldn’t lose

  Fought with our toys, their young men dived for coins

  From the wharf across the bay at La Perouse,

  Far from us. Now, in age, my memory joins

  Easy supremacy to black despair

  In those enchanted gardens that they left

  Because they knew they didn’t have a prayer:

  Lately I too begin to feel bereft.

  Led by the head, my arrow proves to be

  My life. I took my life into my hands.

  I loosed it to its wandering apogee,

  And now it falls. I wonder where it lands.

  Hard-Core Orthography

  In porno-speak, reversion to the Latin

  Consoles us. ‘Cum.’ Cum laude we construe

  As an audible orgasm. By that pattern,

  Cum grano salis overturns the salt

  With a thrashing climax when her urge to screw

  Right there at dinner must be satisfied.

  Cum vulpibus vulpinandum. While with foxes –

  Caught in flagrante, high-heeled shoes flung wide

  In satin sheets – do as the foxes do.

  With aching wrist and pouting like a dolt,

  Linguistically we still tick the right boxes:

  You made mecum, she moans as she comes to.

  Thus moved, her airbag lips look cumbersome

  In the best sense. Maybe she’s not so dumb.

  Dum spiro, spero. How was it for you?

  Flashback on Fast Forward

  The way his broken spirit almost healed

  When he first saw how lovely she could look,

  Her face illuminated by a book,

  Was such a holy moment that he kneeled

  Beside her; and the way his shoulders shook

  Moved her caressing hand. Their love was sealed.

  They met again. A different, older place

  Had drawn her to its books, but still the glow

  Of white between the words lit up her face

  As if she gazed on freshly fallen snow.

  He knew his troubled heart could not forego,

  Not even for her sake, this touch of grace.

  He asked her hand in marriage. She said yes.

  Later he often said she must have known

  To be with him was to be left alone

  With the sworn enemy of happiness,

  Her house a demilitarized zone

  At best, and peace a pause in the distress.

  When finally it broke her, he helped bring

  Her back to life. Give him that much at least:

  His cruelty was but a casual thing,

  Not a career. Alas, that thought increased

  His guilt he’d talked her into sheltering

  Him safe home from the storm that never ceased,

  Nor ever would. And so the years went by,

  And, longer wed than almost all their friends,

  Always in silence they would wonder why,

  And sometimes say so. When a marriage ends,

  They noticed, it’s from good will running dry,

  Not just from lack of means to make amends.

  He could not save himself: that much she knew.

  Perhaps she’d felt it forty years before

  When he quaked where he knelt, and what was more

  She was aware that saying ‘I love you’

  To one who hates himself can only store

  Up trouble earthly powers can’t undo.

  But revelation can. There at the start,

  It came again to mark their closing years.

  Once more, and this time through and through, his heart

  Was touched. The ice he half prized turned to tears

  As the last hailstone melts and disappears

  In rain. By just a glass door set apart,

  She in her study, he in the garden, they

  Looked separate still, but he saw, in her eyes,

  The light of the white paper. How time flies

  Revealed its secret path from their first day.

  He did a dance to make her look his way.

  She smiled at him, her devil in disguise,

  Almost as if at last he had grown wise.

  PARODIES, IMITATIONS AND LAMPOONS

  From Robert Lowell’s Notebook

  Notes for a Sonnet

  Stalled before my metal shaving mirror

  With a locked razor in my hand I think of Tantalus

  Whose lake retreats below the fractured lower lip

  Of my will. Splinter the groined eyeballs of our sin,

  Ford Madox Ford: you on the Quaker golf course

  In Nantucket double-dealt your practised lies

  Flattering the others and me we’d be great poets.

  How wrong you were in their case. And now Nixon,

  Nixon rolls in the harpoon ropes and smashes with his flukes

  The frail gunwales of our beleaguered art. What

  Else remains now but your England, Ford? There’s not

  Much Lowell-praise left in Mailer but could be Alvarez

  Might still write that book. In the skunk-hour

  My mind’s not right. But there will be

  Fifty-six new sonnets by tomorrow night.

  Revised Notes for a Sonnet

  On the steps of the Pentagon I tucked my skull

  Well down between my knees, thinking of Cordell Hull

  Cabot Lodge Van du Plessis Stuyvesant, our gardener,

  Who’d stop me playing speedway in the red-and-rust

  Model A Ford that got clapped out on Cape Cod

  And wound up as a seed shed. Oh my God, my God,

  How this administration bleeds but will not die,

  Hacking at the ribcage of our art. You were wrong, R. P.

  Blackmur. Some of the others had our insight, too:

  Though I suppose I had endurance, toughness, faith,

  Sensitivity, intelligence and talent. My mind’s not right.

  With groined, sinning eyeballs I write sonnets until dawn

  Is published over London like a row of books by Faber –

  Then shave myself with Uncle’s full-dress sabre.

  Notes for a Revised Sonnet

  Slicing my head off shaving I think of Charles I

  Bowing to the groined eyeball of Cromwell’s sinning will.

  Think too of Orpheus, whose disembodied head

  Dumped by the Bacchants floated singing in the river,

  His love for Eurydice surviving her dumb move

  By many sonnets. Decapitation wouldn’t slow me down

  By more than a hundred lines a day. R. P. and F. M. F.

  Play eighteen holes together in my troubled mind,

  Ford faking his card, Blackmur explicating his,

  And what is love? John Berryman, if you’d had what it took

  We could have both blown England open. Now, alone,

  With a plush new set-up to move into and shake down,

  I snow-job Stephen Spender while the liquor flows like lava

  In the par
lour of the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava.

  R. S. Thomas at Altitude

  The reason I am leaning over

  At this pronounced angle is simply

  That I am accustomed to standing

  On Welsh hillsides

  Staring out over escarpments stripped

  And pitiless as my vision,

  Where God says: Come

  Back to the trodden manure

  Of the chapel’s warm temptation.

  But I see the canker that awaits

  The child, and say no.

  I see the death that ends

  Life, and say no.

  Missing nothing, I say

  No, no.

  And God says: you can’t

  Say no to me, cully,

  I’m omnipotent.

  But I indicate the

  Flying birds and the

  Swimming fish and the trudging

  Horse with my pointing

  Finger and with customary

  Economy of language, say

  Nothing.

  There is a stone in my mouth,

  There is a storm in my

  Flesh, there is a wind in

  My bone.

  Artificer of the knuckled, globed years

  Is this your answer?

  I’ve been up on this hill

  Too long.

  Edward Estlin Cummings Dead

  what time el Rouble & la Dollar spin

  ‘their’ armies into ever smaller change,

  patrolling Kopeks for a Quarter search

  & Deutschfranc, after decimating Yen

  inflates with sterling Rupee in a ditch

  (what time, i.e., as moneys in their ‘death’

  throes leave room for unbought souls to breathe)

  that time, perhaps,

  I’m him believing (i.

  e., cummings

  hold it

  CUMMINGS) dead (

  p e g g e d o u t

  ) & I will leave him lie