Collected Poems (1958-2015)

by Clive James

  Or, if it hasn’t, to report on that –

  In my field over twenty years. The gun

  Is to my head and I will eat my hat

  Sooner than flinch, but my job’s too much fun,

  Too fissile, for a précis to get at.

  Leonie, let’s be frank. My discipline

  Is serious like Jack Benny’s violin.

  Mine is no academic bailiwick:

  In fact it is defined by being not one.

  Gowned bigwigs might well find it a bit thick

  To see my name among theirs. ‘That’s a hot one,’

  They’ll mutinously mutter. ‘This Osric

  Fronting a field of study: has he got one?’

  They’re right, I haven’t; but I do this stuff

  On the assumption they aren’t right enough.

  My territory’s the chattering hedgerow

  Between the neat fields forming the landscape

  Of proper scholarship. By now we know

  The ecosystem winds up out of shape

  When too much science grabs the soil to grow

  The pouffe-sized pumpkin and the pre-shrunk grape.

  We’ve organized the land to serve society

  So thoroughly we’ve wiped out its variety.

  Too bad, some say. We can’t eat singing birds –

  You see the way my metaphor is tending –

  Or cope with hedgehogs roaming round in herds:

  The cost of feeding them would be mind-bending.

  The same goes double for the world of words:

  The era of the ragged edge is ending.

  The kind of writing we can’t classify

  Might fairly soon have barely room to die.

  I mourn its passing, and guess you do too,

  Or A. D. Hope would not have dedicated

  His Roman letter to you. Knowing you

  Would get a kick from being celebrated

  In such a jeu d’esprit, a tiramisu

  Designed to leave you nothing but elated,

  Our mightiest poet tossed off something lightweight,

  Not doubting that that weight would be the right weight.

  Of all Hope’s poetry I found that letter

  The most amazing thing he’d written, ever.

  Had Byron ever done the same thing better?

  Had even Auden been so clearly clever?

  From then on I was Hope’s eternal debtor,

  Convinced, despite the times, the time is never

  To let one’s literary ambition stifle

  The urge to squander talent on a trifle.

  Always supposing talent’s what one’s got –

  But let’s take that for now as a donnée

  And ask if those of us who, on the spot,

  Can put a phrase together in a way

  That gets attention ought to, or ought not,

  Feel so responsible for what we say

  We don’t say anything, however witty,

  That might not please the Nobel Prize committee.

  I think not. Literature is out of hand.

  With so much genius jostling for position

  Shakespeare would have to fight for room to stand,

  Dante to kneel and pray. A mass emission

  Of deathless texts leaves nothing an den Rand

  Geschrieben. All’s composed on the condition

  We read it with the awe-struck, furrowed brow

  We’d read the classics with if we knew how.

  None of which means, of course, I want books burned.

  Heine foresaw the bonfire in Berlin.

  Men who burn books burn men: that much we learned

  Sifting the ashes of the loony bin.

  Now that some form of sanity’s returned

  We should be glad the age we’re living in

  Accords great writers every accolade

  From the T-shirt to the ticker-tape parade.

  The only problem is, no other kind

  Of writer except great’s thought worth attention.

  This attitude, in matters of the mind,

  To my mind robs us of a whole dimension.

  Intelligence just isn’t that refined:

  It’s less a distillate than a suspension,

  An absinthe we’d knock back in half a minute

  Without the cloud of particles within it.

  Just so, a living culture is a swarm

  Of moments that provide its tang and tingle:

  Unless it’s fuelled by every minor form

  From dirty joke to advertising jingle

  It ends up like Dame Edna’s husband, Norm,

  Stiff as a post. I think John Douglas Pringle

  Was first to spot our language, at its core,

  Owed its élan to how a wharfie swore.

  Shifting that notion further up the scale

  We soon discover it applies worldwide.

  The casual jotting priced for a quick sale

  Can be a bridesmaid that outshines the bride.

  There is a vantage point beyond the pale:

  To pull the inside job from the outside

  Confers on essayist or rogue reviewer

  The plus of knowing where to put the skewer.

  Nor need he specialize in kicking ass

  (Pro tem to bluster à l’américaine).

  In fact a gadfly’s likely to sound crass

  If all he ever does is dish out pain,

  Just as to pump the anaesthetic gas

  Of adulation backfires on the brain –

  Dooming the sycophant to a sclerosis

  Off-putting as the cynic’s halitosis.

  The voice I favour questions and enjoys.

  No pushover, it’s ready to submit.

  It homes on a clear signal through the noise

  Kicked up by the tumultuous cockpit

  We call the Arts, and from the girls and boys

  It separates the men and women. Wit,

  When true, well knows a show of cleverness

  Means least when it is most meant to impress,

  And yet a comprehensive lack of flair

  By no means guarantees the truly serious.

  It takes a cool, hard head to be aware

  How art is in its essence a mysterious

  Compound engendered by a gift as rare

  As hen’s teeth of the base and the imperious.

  It takes an artist, though that appellation

  Seldom adorns his dodgy reputation.

  Just such an artist was my most revered

  Role model from the old world Hitler wrecked,

  Alfred Polgar, who, as the menace neared,

  Focused despair to such a fine effect

  His feuilletons teem with all that disappeared.

  Schatzkammer snow-domes of the intellect,

  Polgar’s packed paragraphs reintegrate

  A time bomb getting set to detonate.

  He and the other refugees who scattered

  To the Earth’s four corners not excluding ours

  Personified the unity left shattered

  Where once they had devoted first-rate powers

  To the ephemeral as if it mattered.

  Their fate proved that it had. The topless towers

  Of Ilium arise from the hubbub

  Of the bazaar, the throb of the nightclub.

  It is the wasted talents that I sing,

  The ones that might have climbed to high renown,

  Have done great things, had they done the done thing

  And steered clear of the demi-monde downtown.

  A nation needs them the same way a king

  Lost on the heath should listen to his clown,

  Lest literature withdraw to a top shelf

  And vivid language serve only itself.

  Australia Felix, sea-girt land most fair –

  Fair go, fair suck, fair prospects of success

  For all – there’s an equality more rare

  Even
than these, though it be cherished less:

  A mental life that everyone may share.

  Its secret lies in the receptiveness

  Of how we speak, our tongue that makes a poet

  In two weeks of a taxi-driving Croat.

  Whole cultures in our time razed to the ground

  Enriched us with their homeless destitute,

  A thriving proof the Promised Land is found

  Where all is hallowed save the absolute.

  That thought revives my hopes as, with one bound,

  Like Emile Mercier’s Wocko the Beaut,

  I fly to my reward at your fair hand.

  Lady, I’m blushing. Will there be a band?

  from Angels Over Elsinore

  Windows Is Shutting Down

  Windows is shutting down, and grammar are

  On their last leg. So what am we to do?

  A letter of complaint go just so far,

  Proving the only one in step are you.

  Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.

  A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad

  Before they gets to where you doesnt knows

  The meaning what it must of meant to had.

  The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,

  But evolution do not stop for that.

  A mutant languages rise from the dead

  And all them rules is suddenly old hat.

  Too bad for we, us what has had so long

  The best seat from the only game in town.

  But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?

  Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.

  Angels Over Elsinore

  How many angels knew who Hamlet was

  When they were summoned by Horatio?

  They probably showed up only because

  The roster said it was their turn to go.

  Another day, another Dane. Too bad,

  But while they sang their well-rehearsed lament

  They noticed his good looks. Too soon, too sad,

  This welcome home for what seemed heaven sent.

  Imagine having been with him down there!

  But here I dream, for angels do not yearn.

  They take up their positions in the air

  Free from the passions of the earth they spurn.

  Even their singing is done less from joy

  Than duty. But was this the usual thing?

  Surely they gazed on that recumbent boy,

  Clearly cut out one day to be a king,

  And sang him to his early rest above

  With soaring pride that they should form the choir

  Whose voices echoed all the cries of love,

  Which, even when divine, implies desire?

  But soft: an ideal world does not exist.

  Hamlet went nowhere after he was dead.

  No angel sighed where lovers never kissed,

  And there was nothing in what his friend said.

  Hamlet himself knew just what to expect:

  Steady reduction of his body mass

  Until the day, his very coffin wrecked,

  Some clown picked up his skull and said, ‘Alas.’

  No, there would be no music from on high.

  No feather from a wing would fall, not one.

  Forget it all, even the empty sky –

  What’s gone is gone, sweet prince. What’s done is done.

  Exit Don Giovanni

  Somewhere below his pride, the Don’s bad dreams

  Fashioned the statue that would take him down.

  Deep underground, the tears were there in streams.

  The man who had the only game in town,

  In Spain, in Europe, when it came to love,

  Sensed that there had to be a reckoning.

  The boundaries he claimed to soar above

  Meant nothing to him except everything.

  Why the defiant stance, if not from shame?

  And why deny that truth, if not from fear?

  The bodice-ripper made his famous name

  By staying buttoned up. His whole career

  Came back to haunt him in a stony glance.

  Transfixed, he followed where the statue led.

  Below, tips of hot tongues began to dance.

  Further below, it was a sea of red.

  There was a jetty. Next to it, a raft

  Held every name on Leporello’s list,

  Even from just last week. The statue laughed

  And left. The women, modelled out of mist,

  Were images, as they had always been

  To him, but strong enough to ply the sweeps.

  They would not meet his eye, having foreseen

  What waited for him on the burning deeps.

  A long way out, they paused, and one by one

  They disappeared, each hinting with a smile,

  But not to him, their work had been well done.

  He was alone. To cry was not his style,

  But then he reached down through the surface fire

  Into the water. Almost with relief

  He learned at last the flames of his desire

  Had floated on the ocean of his grief.

  Had he known sooner, what would that have meant?

  Less to regret, and little to admit?

  The raft burned: final stage of his descent.

  Hell was on Earth. Now he was out of it.

  My Father Before Me

  Sai Wan War Cemetery, Hong Kong

  At noon, no shadow. I am on my knees

  Once more before your number and your name.

  The usual heat, the usual fretful bees

  Fitfully busy as last time I came.

  Here you have lain since 1945,

  When you, at half the age that I am now,

  Were taken from the world of the alive,

  Were taken out of time. You should see how

  This hillside, since I visited it first,

  Has stayed the same. Nothing has happened here.

  They trim the sloping lawn and slake its thirst.

  Regular wreaths may fade and reappear,

  But these are details. High on either side

  Waves of apartment blocks roll in so far

  And no further, forbidden to collide

  By laws that keep the green field where you are,

  Along with all these others, sacrosanct.

  For once the future is denied fresh ground.

  For that much if no more, let God be thanked.

  You can’t see me or even hear the sound

  Of my voice, though it comes out like the cry

  You heard from me before you sailed away.

  Your wife, my mother, took her turn to die

  Not long ago. I don’t know what to say –

  Except those many years she longed for you

  Are over now at last, and now she wears

  The same robes of forgetfulness you do.

  When the dreams cease, so do the nightmares.

  I know you would be angry if I said

  I, too, crave peace. Besides, it’s not quite so.

  Despair will ebb when I leave you for dead

  Once more. Once more, as I get up to go,

  I look up to the sky, down to the sea,

  And hope to see them, while I still draw breath,

  The way you saw your photograph of me

  The very day you flew to meet your death.

  Back at the gate, I turn to face the hill,

  Your headstone lost again among the rest.

  I have no time to waste, much less to kill.

  My life is yours; my curse, to be so blessed.

  A Gyre from Brother Jack

  The canvas, called A Morning Long Ago,

  Hangs now in Dublin’s National Gallery

  Of Ireland, and for capturing the flow

  Of life, its radiant circularity,

  Yeats painter leaves Yeats poet beaten flat.

  I hear you saying, ‘How
can he say that?’

  But look. Here is the foyer of a grand

  Theatre. It is always interval.

  On the upper level, brilliant people stand.

  What they have seen inside invests them all

  With liquid light, and some of them descend

  The sweet, slow, curving, anti-clockwise bend

  Of staircase and go out into that park

  Where yet another spectacle has formed:

  A lake made bright by the oncoming dark.

  And at the left of that, white wings have stormed

  Upward towards where this rondeau begins.

  Birds? Angels? Avatars? Forgiven sins?

  He doesn’t say: the aspect I like best.

  William had theories. Jack has just the thrill.

  We see a little but we miss the rest,

  And what we keep to ponder, time will kill.

  The lives we might have led had we but known

  Check out at dawn and take off on their own

  Even as we arrive. Sad, it might seem,

  When talked about: but shown, it shines like day.

  The only realistic general scheme

  Of the divine is in this rich display –

  Proof that the evanescent present tense

  Is made eternal by our transience.

  Woman Resting

  Sometimes the merely gifted give us proof

  Born artists have a democratic eye

  That genius gets above, to stand aloof,

  Scorning to seize on all that happens by

  And give it the full treatment. Look at her,

  Mancini’s woman, as she rests her head

  In white impasto linen. Cats would purr

  To think of lying curled up on that bed

  Warmed by her Monica Bellucci skin.

  Her mouth, like Vitti’s in La Notte, breathes

  A sulky need for more of the same sin

  That knocked her sideways. Silently, she seethes.

  She’s perfect, and he’s well up to the task