by Clive James
A name like his. No substance. Too much skill.
Return of the Lost City
How far was Plato free of that ‘inflamed
Community’ he said we should avoid?
Sofas, incense and hookers: these he named
Among the habits not to be enjoyed,
And if you did, you ought to be ashamed.
But can’t we tell, by how he sounds annoyed,
That his Republic, planned on our behalf,
Was where his own desires had the last laugh,
If only as the motor for his sense
Of discipline? Even the dreams were policed,
By the Nocturnal Council. Such immense
Powers of repression! What would be released
Without them? The Republic was intense:
The fear of relaxation never ceased.
Hence the embargo on all works of art,
However strict in form, that touched the heart.
No poetry. No poets! No, not one –
Not even Homer, if he were to be
Reborn – could be admitted, lest the sun
Set on the hard-won social harmony,
And that obscene night-life which had begun
In man’s first effort at society,
Atlantis, should come flooding back, the way
The sea did, or so story-tellers say.
But Plato knew that they’d say anything:
For money or applause or just a share
Of an hetaera, they would dance and sing
And turn the whole deal into a nightmare.
The very prospect left him quivering
With anger. There is something like despair
Haunting the author of the ideal state,
A taunting voice he heard while working late:
Atlantis made you. It is what you know,
Deep down. Atlantis and its pleasures drive
Your thoughts. Atlantis never lets you go.
Atlantis is where you are most alive –
Yes, even you, you that despise it so,
When all mankind would love it to arrive
Again, the living dream you try to kill
By making perfect. But you never will.
Anniversary Serenade
You are my alcohol and nicotine,
My silver flask and cigarette machine.
You watch and scratch my back, you scrub me clean.
I mumble but you still know what I mean.
Know what I mean?
You read my thoughts, you see what I have seen.
You are my egg-flip and my ego trip,
My passion-fruit soufflé and strawberry whip.
When the dawn comes to catch you on the hip
I taste the sweet light on my fingertip.
My fingertip?
I lift it to my quivering lips and sip.
Homecoming Queen and mother of our two
Smart daughters who, thank God, take after you,
This house depends on what you say and do –
And all you do is wise and say is true.
And say is true?
True as a plumb-line or a billiard cue.
On from Byzantium to Cooch Behar
Our Messerschmitt two-seater bubble car,
Laden with foie gras and with caviare,
Follows the shining road to Shangri-La.
To Shangri-La?
With Blossom Dearie singing in the bar.
When the sun fades, the Earth will fly away.
Tell me it isn’t happening today.
I have a debt of happiness to pay.
I die if you should leave, live if you stay.
Live if you stay?
Live like a king, proud as a bird of prey.
My share of Heaven and my sheer delight,
My soda fountain and my water-sprite,
My curving ribbon of a climbing kite,
You are my Starlight Roof, my summer night.
My summer night?
The flying foxes glide, the possums fight.
You are my honeydew and panther sweat,
The music library on my private jet.
Top of the bill, we fly without a net.
You are the stroke of luck I can’t forget.
I can’t forget?
I’m still not ready for you even yet.
You are my nicotine and alcohol,
My Stéphane Audran in a Claude Chabrol,
My sunlight through a paper parasol,
My live-in living doll and gangster’s moll –
And gangster’s moll?
Mine the fedora, yours the folderol.
The ring is closed. The rolling dice we cast
So long ago still roll but not so fast.
The colours fade that we nailed to the mast
We lose the future but we own the past.
We own the past?
From our first kiss, a lifetime to the last.
Double or Quits
Sydney, 2006
Only when we are under different skies
The truth strikes home of what love has become:
A compact it takes time to realise
Is better far, being less burdensome,
Than that first tempest by which we were torn.
Tonight you’re there, where both of us now live,
And I am here, where both of us were born,
But there is no division we need give
A thought to, beyond localised regret:
For we will be together again soon,
And both see the one sunrise and sunset
And the face saved and the face lost by the moon –
The clouds permitting, which they seldom do
In England, but at least I’ll be with you.
I’ll be with you from now on to the end
If you say so. Should you choose otherwise
Then I will be a jealous loving friend
To wish you well yet prove it never dies,
Desire. Your beauty still bewilders me
Though half a century has passed. I still
Stand breathless at the grace of what I see:
More so than ever, now the dead leaves fill
The garden. A long distance will soon come.
Today, no. Nor tomorrow. But it must
Open the door into Elysium
For one of us, and me the first, I trust.
May we stay joined, as these two sonnets are –
That meet, and are apart, but just so far.
Overview
An object lesson in the speed of silence,
The condensation trail across the sky
High over London scores the Wedgwood blue
With one long streak of chalk so true and pure
It seems an angel has begun to crop-dust
The lower fields of Heaven.
Nothing is where you think it is for long.
Our granddaughter, here for a Sunday visit,
Goes through the house like a burst of friendly fire
Or a cosmic particle making its instant transit
Of a bubble chamber. A close search of my corpse
Would find the trajectory of her smile.
Convinced all lasting memories are digital,
The clump of Japanese tourists at Tower Bridge
Hold up their telephones like open notebooks.
As part of their plan, surely now near completion,
For copying the Earth,
They snap the coke-line in the stratosphere.
Our granddaughter would not sit still for that.
My wife gets pictures only of where she was.
Our elder daughter says the thing observed
Changes the observer: it works both ways.
Our younger daughter is reading Mansfield Park,
But the cat yawns the soft first syllable
Of Schrödinger’s name. Everything happens now.
None of it hangs together except in thought
,
And that, too, will pass. One ought to take
Solace from the resplendent, but it goes hard
To know the world view that you had in mind
Is fading like powdered water,
Your mark lost in the thin air it was made from.
The Nymph Calypso
Planning to leave Calypso in the lurch,
Odysseus snuck off to build a ship.
He found the right-shaped boughs of larch or birch
Or spruce, for all I know, from which to strip
The bark, and … but the details we can skip.
I won’t pretend that I’ve done much research.
He had to build a ship and he knew how.
Just how he did it hardly matters now:
Enough to say he juggled rib and spar.
Calypso came to him and said, ‘I see
That duty calls. Will you be going far?
You wouldn’t have your mind on leaving me,
By any chance? Forget the trickery
For once, and if you’re following your star
Just say so. Circe lured you with a song.
At least I wasn’t stringing you along.’
‘It’s time,’ he said. ‘I’m an adventurer.
I sail in search of things. It’s what I do.
I’d heard about how beautiful you were,
So lovely that I came in search of you.
But now I know you and need something new
To challenge me.’ He wryly smiled at her
To show he knew he sounded like a ham.
‘You wanted me. Well, this is what I am.’
‘All very well,’ Calypso said, ‘but I
Have an investment here. You had to quit
Sometime, and I gave you a reason why.
Old studs like you need youth to love. I’m it.
I’m always eager, and you’re still quite fit:
A last adventure to light up the sky.
I’ll tell my tale forever, don’t forget:
The greatest lover that I ever met.’
Odysseus could see the point, but still
He stood his ground, a man of destiny
Proclaiming his ungovernable will
To follow the unknown out to the sea
Beyond the sea, and solve the mystery
Of where the world went next, and not until
He had would he find rest. Calypso said,
‘No wonder that you turned up here half dead.’
That night the two of them made love again.
She slapped herself against him when she came
The way she always did, but even then
She let him know she knew things weren’t the same.
She cried out his polysyllabic name –
Something she’d never done for other men –
As if, this time, he was no longer there.
But though she flattered him with her despair,
Already he had made the break. His mind
Was elsewhere, on a course she could not guess.
She thought her hero had new worlds to find
Out on the edge of the blue wilderness,
But he had lied, to cause her less distress.
We needn’t think of him as being kind:
He simply knew the truth would drive her mad
And make her fight with everything she had.
After he left, she let the world believe
She’d given him the boat: a likely tale
That Homer swallowed whole. Keen to deceive
Even herself, for no nymph likes to fail –
The Miss World of the Early Age of Sail
Had never yet known such a cause to grieve –
She spread the story that he’d only gone
Because she told him legends must go on.
But he was going home. There, in the end,
Lay the departure point for his last quest.
Age was a wound that time indeed would mend
But only one way, with a long, long rest.
For that, familiar territory is best.
As for Penelope, he could depend
On her care for the time he had to live.
Calypso wanted more than he could give,
And it was time to take, time to accept
The quiet bounty of domestic peace.
After he killed the suitors who had kept
His wife glued to the loom, she spread the fleece
Of their first blanket and they found release
Together as they once had. Though she wept
For their lost years, she gave him her embrace,
And he looked down into her ageing face
And saw Calypso. What the nymph would be,
Given the gift of time, was there made plain,
Yet still more beautiful. Penelope,
Because she knew that we grow old in pain
And learn to laugh or else we go insane,
Had life unknown to immortality,
Which never gets the point. ‘Well, quite the boy,’
She murmured. ‘And now tell me about Troy.’
Later the poets said he met his fate
In the Atlantic, or perhaps he went
Around the Horn and reached the Golden Gate.
Space vehicles named after him were sent
Into infinity. His testament,
However, and what truly made him great,
Was in the untold story of the day
He died, and, more or less, had this to say:
‘Penelope, in case you ever hear
The nymph Calypso loved me, it was so:
And she tried everything to keep me near
But finally she had to let me go
Because she knew I loved you. Now you know,
And I can move on, having made that clear.’
And so he did, while she knelt by his side,
Not knowing, as he sailed on the last tide,
That just this once he almost hadn’t lied.
The Magic Wheel
An ode in the manner of Theocritus
O magic wheel, draw hither to my house the man I love.
I dreamed of you as dreaming that, and now
The boxed-in balcony of my hotel room high above
Grand Harbour is a sauna. See the prow
Of that small boat cut silk. Out in the sea
No waves, and there below not even ripples turning light
To glitter: just a glow spread evenly
On flawless water spills into the skyline that last night
Was a jewelled silhouette from right to left and left to right.
Behold, the sea is silent, and silent are the winds.
The not yet risen sun edges the sky
With petal-juice of the Homeric rose as day begins.
I am alone, but with you till I die,
Now we have met again after six years.
Last night we danced on limestone in the open-air café.
I saw one woman sitting there near tears,
Aware that she would never look like you or dance that way –
A blessing, like the blessings that have brought you home to stay.
O magic wheel, draw hither to my house the man I love.
I dreamed of you as dreaming that, until
I saw you wave in welcome from your window high above,
And up the slick hard steps designed to kill,
Like all Valletta staircases bar none,
I went, as if I still had strength, to find your open door
And you, and your tremendous little son,
And your husband, the great dancer, whom I had not met before,
And I met his kindly eyes and knew you dreamed of me no more.
Behold, the sea is silent, and silent are the winds.
Stirred by the ceiling fan, the heat of noon
Refuses to grow cooler as it very slowly spins,
But I take its rearrangement as a boon,
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As if it were the gradual work of time,
Which leaves things as they are but changes us and picks the hour
To make us see resentment is a crime.
A loving memory forgets and true regret yields power:
Trust in the long slow aqueduct and not the water tower.
O magic wheel, draw hither to my house the man I love.
I dreamed of you as dreaming that. Tonight
My dream was gone, but flowering in the darkness high above
The festa, rockets set the rain alight,
The soft, sweet rain. With you and your young men,
I walked the shining streets and all was right and nothing wrong
As the joy of our first moment lived again.
In the ruins of the opera house a lizard one inch long
Is the small but vibrant echo of an interrupted song.
Bethink thee of my love and whence it comes, O holy Moon.
I dreamed of you as dreaming that, and now
I know you never did. Another day: the afternoon
Burns white as only here the sun knows how,
But a fever is broken when I sweat –
For my delight in your contentment proves that in the past
My love must have been true, as it is yet:
The magic wheel has turned to show what fades and what holds fast.
Dream this when I am gone: that he was glad for me at last.
Portrait of Man Writing
While you paint me, I marvel at your skin.
The miracle of being twenty-four
Is there like a first blush as you touch in
The blemishes that make my face a war
I’m losing against time. So you begin,
By lending inwardness to an outline,
Your life in art as I am ending mine.
Try not to miss the story my mouth tells,
Even unmoving, of how once I had
The knack for capering in cap and bells,
And had to make an effort to seem sad.
These eyes that look as crusty as dry wells
Despite the glue they seep, once keenly shone.
Give them at least a glimmer of what’s gone.
I know these silent prayers fall on deaf ears:
You’ve got integrity like a disease.
