by Clive James
Of illustrating her full bloom of youth.
Why isn’t she immortal, then? you ask.
Look at her bedside table for the truth.
Carafe, decanter, bottle, beaker, all
Are brushed in with the same besotted touch:
Not just as clutter which, were it to fall,
Would break and be swept up. He cares too much
About the world around her. While she dreams,
The room dreams too, as if it too were spent
From pleasure. In the end, nothing redeems
This failure to make her the main event.
Manet’s Olympia is no great shakes
For beauty beside this one, but transcends
Her setting with exactly what it takes:
The fire that starts where general interest ends.
Out for the count, Miss Italy sleeps on,
So lovely that we check the artist’s name,
Vow to remember it, and then are gone,
Forgetting one who never found his fame
Because his unrestricted sympathy
Homogenised existence. Art must choose
What truly merits perpetuity
From everything that we are bound to lose.
Even a master’s landscape, though devoid
Of people, has a human soul in view:
His own. A focused vision is employed
To say: behold what I alone can do.
Picking the mortal to immortalise,
The great paint objects only to abet
Their concentration on what lives and dies.
Faced with a woman that they can’t forget
They make sure we can’t either. Should she rest,
Her daylight hours still dominate the room.
We see her waking up and getting dressed.
Her silence hits us like the crack of doom.
But this girl, drowned in decor, disappears
From memory, which doesn’t care to keep
A pretty picture long, so save your tears.
I shouldn’t try to wake her. Let her sleep,
And let Mancini, suave but second rate,
Sleep with her, as in fact he might have done –
Some recompense for his eventual fate
Of scarcely mattering to anyone.
Sunday Morning Walk
Frost on the green.
The ducks cold-footing it across the grass
Beside the college moat
Meet a clutch of matrons
In freeze-dried Barbours
Walking their collies
Freshly brushed by Gainsborough.
Buoyed by the world’s supply
Of rosemary sprigs
Packed under glass,
The moorcock emerging from the reeds
Does a hesitation step
As though dancing to Piazzolla.
Cool shoes, if I may say so.
In front of the boat-houses
The rowers rigging fulcrums to the shells
Bite off their gloves
To push in pins,
And the metal shines
Just short of a glitter
Because the light, though Croesus-rich,
Is kiss-soft.
Under the bridge, the iron ribs
Form a pigeon loft,
A pit-lane of sports saloons
Testing their engines.
The final year
Of the finishing school for swans
Passes in review,
Watched by the cob, his nibs,
Who at Bayreuth once
Had a glide-on role
In Lohengrin,
But this is better.
Winter regatta,
Unspoiled by even
Yesterday’s litter
Spilling from the bins,
Is it any wonder
That I never left you?
Remember this day,
It’s already melting.
Natural Selection
The gradual but inexorable magic
That turned the dinosaurs into the birds
Had no overt, only a hidden, logic.
To start the squadrons climbing from the herds
No wand was ever waved, but afterwards
Those who believed there must have been a wizard
Said the whole show looked too well-planned for hazard.
And so it does, in retrospect. Such clever
Transitions, intricate beyond belief!
The little lobsters, in their mating fever,
Assaulted from the sea, stormed up the cliff,
And swept inland as scorpions. But if
Some weapons freak equipped their tails for murder
He must have thought sheer anguish all in order.
Source of all good and hence of evil, pleasure
And hence of pain, he is, or else they are,
Without a moral sense that we can measure,
And thus without a mind. Better by far
To stand in awe of blind chance than to fear
A conscious mechanism of mutation
Bringing its fine intentions to fruition
Without a qualm about collateral horror.
The peacock and the tapeworm both make sense.
Nobody calls the ugly one an error.
But when a child is born to pain intense
Enough to drive its family all at once
To weep blood, an intelligent designer
Looks like a torture garden’s beaming owner.
No, give it up. The world demands our wonder
Solely because no feeling brain conceived
The thumb that holds the bamboo for the panda.
Creation, if the thing’s to be believed –
And only through belief can life be loved –
Must do without that helping hand from Heaven.
Forget it, lest it never be forgiven.
Under the Jacarandas
Under the jacarandas
The pigeons and the gulls
Pick at the fallen purple
That inundates the grass
For two weeks in October.
Although the splash of colour
Should seem absurdly lush,
Soon you get used to it.
You think life is like that,
But a clock is ticking.
The pigeons and the gulls
Don’t even know how good
They look, set off like this.
They get it while it’s there.
Keep watching and you’ll learn.
The Victor Hugo Clematis
In our garden, the Victor Hugo clematis
Grows among masses of small pink roses
Prettier than it is, but not as stately.
There’s a royal lustre to its purple petals:
Long splinters of amethyst
Arranged like the ribs of a Catherine wheel
In a disc that is almost all space,
And the edge of every petal
Is curved like the volutes in any of the four
Propellers of the Normandie,
Those museum-forecourt-filling pieces of sculpture
(37 tons each of cast manganese bronze)
That transmitted the electric
Power to the water,
Giving the ship her all-conquering speed,
Not to mention her teeth-rattling vibration
Even in First Class –
The cost of elegance, as the Victor Hugo clematis
Costs me my equilibrium,
Until I wonder: don’t I mean the narrow-bladed
More-wood-than-metal airscrew
Of a WWI Armée de l’Air bomber?
Say a Breguet 14, faster than a Fokker D. VII?
Perhaps that would be better:
I grow uncertain, I have to look things up,
And stuff that I thought I knew for sure
Turns out to be wrong.
Inelegantly recli
ning in my liner chair
As the evening sunlight finally fades,
I watch the flowers, that were never really my thing,
Glowing their last and blacking out closer
And closer to me
(When the dancing finished in the Grand Salon
At one o’clock in the morning
They brought back and unrolled the half-ton weight
Of the world’s biggest ocean-going carpet
To cover the parquetry floor
Copied from the throne-room in Versailles)
While the great poet’s record-breaker of a funeral
Still stretches halfway across Paris –
Well, it does in my mind –
And the rockets and flares go up to look for Gothas –
I can see the colours burst and fall, going dry
Like the baby dribble of cherubim
On a black velvet bib –
And the pinwheel flower, even in silhouette,
Drills a sibilant echo of Cocteau’s voice through my brain’s ruins:
The Victor Hugo clematis is a madman that thinks
It is Victor Hugo.
Mystery of the Silver Chair
As if God’s glory, with just one sun-ray,
Could not burn craters in a chromosome,
We call it kindly when it works our way,
And, some of us with tact, some with display,
Arrange the house to make it feel at home.
With votive tokens we propitiate
Almighty God. Just to be neat and clean –
Running the water hot to rinse the plate,
Chipping the rust-flakes from the garden gate –
These things are silent prayers, meant to be seen.
Strange, though, when parents with a stricken child
Still cleanse the temple, purify themselves.
They were betrayed, but how do they run wild?
With J-cloth and a blob of Fairy Mild
They wipe the white gloss of the kitchen shelves.
They, least of all, are likely to let go
Completely, like the slovens down the street:
The ones who could conceal a buffalo
In their front lawn and you would never know,
Yet somehow they keep their Creator sweet.
Unjust, unjust: but only if He’s there.
The girl with palsy looks you in the eye,
Seeming to say there is no God to care.
Her gleaming wheel-chair says He’s everywhere,
Or why would the unwell try not to die?
And why would those who love them give the best
Years of their lives to doing the right thing?
Why go on passing a perpetual test
With no real hope and with so little rest?
Why make from suffering an offering?
Why dust the carpet, wash the car, dress well?
If God were mocked by those who might do that
With ample cause, having been given Hell
To live with, we could very quickly tell –
Somebody would forget to feed the cat.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes the spirit kneels.
But when those with the least take pride the most,
We need to bend our thoughts to how it feels.
Shamed by those scintillating silver wheels,
We see the lightning of the Holy Ghost.
The Genesis Wafers
Genesis carried wafers in her hold
To catch the particles sent from the sun.
Diamond, sapphire, gold
Were those fine webs, as if by spiders spun
Beside whom specks of dust would weigh a ton.
A million miles from Earth, in the deep cold,
The particles collected in the skeins.
Diamond, sapphire, gold,
They flowered like tiny salt pans in the rains –
Fresh tablecloths distressed with coffee stains.
Back in the lab, the altered wafers told
A story of how poetry is born:
Diamond, sapphire, gold
Serenities invaded by stuff torn
From the incandescent storm that powers the dawn.
Museum of the Unmoving Image
The objects on display might seem to lack
Significance, unless you know the words.
The final straw that broke the camel’s back,
The solitary stone that killed two birds.
Does this stuff really merit a glass case?
A tatty mattress and a shrivelled pea,
A shadow that somebody tried to chase,
A rusty pin that somehow earned a fee?
That gilded lily might have looked quite good
Without the dust that you won’t see me for.
But where’s the thrill in one piece of touched wood?
I think we’ve seen that uncut ice before.
A strained-at gnat, how interesting is that?
The bat from hell looks pitifully tame,
As do the pickled tongue got by the cat,
The ashes of the moth drawn to the flame.
Spilled milk, rough diamond, gift horse, gathered moss,
Dead duck, gone goose, bad apple, busted flush –
They’re all lined up as if we gave a toss.
Try not to kill each other in the crush.
They’ve got an annexe for the big events:
Burned boats and bridges, castles in the air,
Clouds for your head to be in, rows of tents
For being camp as. Do we have to care?
What does this junk add up to? Look and learn,
The headphones say. They say our language grew
Out of this bric-a-brac. Here we return
To when the world around us shone brand new,
Lending its lustre to what people said;
Their speech was vivid with specific things.
It cries out to be brought back from the dead.
See what it was, and hear what it still sings.
Statement from the Secretary of Defense
This one we didn’t know we didn’t know:
At least, I didn’t. You, you might have known
You didn’t know. Let’s say that might be so.
You knew, with wisdom granted you alone,
You didn’t know. You say, but don’t say how,
You knew we didn’t know about abuse,
By us, in gaols of theirs that we run now.
Well, now we all know. I make no excuse:
In fact it’s far worse than you think. You thought
You knew how bad it was? If you could see
The photos in this classified report
You’d know you knew, as usual, less than me.
You want to see a stress position? Look
At how I crouch to meet the President
And tell him this has not gone by the book.
How do I know he won’t know what I meant?
I just know what he’ll say, with hanging head:
‘They don’t know what pain is, these foreign folks.
Pain is to know you don’t know what gets said
Behind your back, except you know the jokes.’
I feel for that man in his time of trial.
He simply didn’t know, but now he knows
He didn’t, and it hurts. Yet he can smile.
Remember how that Arab saying goes –
The blow that doesn’t break you makes you strong?
They’ll thank us when they get up off the mat.
They didn’t know we knew what they knew. Wrong.
Even our women can do stuff like that.
Fair-weather friends who called our cause so good
Not even we could screw it, but now say
We’ve managed the impossible – I’ve stood
All I can stand of petty spite today,
So leave no room for doubt: now that we know
We might have known we didn’t know, let’s keep
Our heads. Give history time, and time will show
How flags wash clean, and eagles cease to weep.
The Australian Suicide Bomber’s Heavenly Reward
Here I am, complaining as usual to Nicole Kidman
(‘Sometimes I think that to you I’m just a sex object’)
While I watch Elle MacPherson model her new range
Of minimalist lingerie.
Elle does it the way I told her,
Dancing slowly to theme music from The Sirens
As she puts the stuff on instead of taking it off.
Meanwhile, Naomi Watts is fluffing up the spare bed
For her re-run of that scene in Mulholland Drive
Where she gets it on with the brunette with the weird name.
In keeping with the requirements of ethnic origin
Naomi’s partner here will be Portia de Rossi,
Who seems admirably hot for the whole idea.
On every level surface there are perfumed candles
And wind chimes tinkle on the moonlit terrace:
Kylie and Dannii are doing a great job.
(They fight a lot, but when I warn them they might miss
Their turn, they come to heel.)
Do you know, I was scared I might never make it?
All suited up in my dynamite new waistcoat,
I was listening to our spiritual leader –
Radiant his beard, elegant his uplifted finger –
As he enthrallingly outlined, not for the first time,
The blessings that awaited us upon the successful completion
Of our mission to obliterate the infidel.
He should never have said he was sorry
He wasn’t going with us.
Somehow I found myself pushing the button early.
I remember his look of surprise
In the flash of light before everything went sideways,
And I thought I might have incurred Allah’s displeasure.
But Allah, the Greatest, truly as great as they say –
