by Clive James
Bound to record the damage of the years,
You aim to tell the truth, and not to please.
And so this other man slowly appears
Who is not me as I would wish to be,
But is the me that I try not to see.
Suppose while you paint me I wrote of you
With the same fidelity: people would say
That not a line could possibly be true.
Nobody’s lips in real life glow that way.
Silk eyelashes! Is this what he’s come to?
Your portrait, put in words, sounds like a lie,
Minus the facts a glance would verify.
But do we credit beauty even when
It’s there in front of us? It stops the heart.
The mortal clockwork has to start again,
Ticking towards the day we fall apart,
Before we see now all we won’t have then.
Let’s break for lunch. What progress have we made?
Ah yes. That’s me exactly, I’m afraid.
Status Quo Vadis
As any good poem is always ending,
The fence looks best when it first needs mending.
Weathered, it hints it will fall to pieces –
One day, not yet, but the chance increases
With each nail rusting and grey plank bending.
It’s not a wonder if it never ceases.
In beauty’s bloom you can see time burning:
A lesson learned while your guts are churning.
Her soft, sweet cheek shows the clear blood flowing
Towards the day when her looks are going
Solely to prove there is no returning
The way they came. There’s a trade wind blowing.
We know all this yet we love forever.
Build her a fence and she’ll think you’re clever.
Write her a poem that’s just beginning
From start to finish. You’ll wind up winning
Her heart, perhaps, but be sure you’ll never
Hold on to the rainbow the top sets spinning.
What top? The tin one that starts to shiver
Already, and soon will clatter. The river
Of colour dries up and your mother’s calling
Your name while the ball hasn’t finished falling,
And you miss the catch and you don’t forgive her.
You went out smiling but you go home bawling.
Weep all you like. Earn your bread from weeping.
Write reams explaining there is no keeping
The toys on loan, and proclaim their seeming
Eternal glory is just the dreaming
We do pretending that we aren’t sleeping –
Your tears are stinging? They’re diamonds gleaming.
Think of it that way and reap the splendour
That flares reflected in the chromium fender
Of the Chrysler parked in the concrete crescent.
The surge is endless, the sigh incessant.
A revelation can only tender
Sincere regrets from the evanescent.
Remember this when it floods your senses
With streams of light and the glare condenses
Into a star. It’s a star that chills you.
Don’t fool yourself that the blaze fulfils you
And builds your bridges and mends your fences
Merely because of the way it thrills you –
The breath of life is what finally kills you.
Meteor IV at Cowes, 1913
Sydney in spring. Tonight you dine alone.
Walk up the Argyle Cut to Argyle Place
And turn left at the end. In there you’ll find
Fish at the Rocks: not just a fish-and-chip joint
But a serious restaurant, with tablecloths
And proper glassware. On the walls, a row
Of photographs, all bought as a job lot
By a decorator with a thoughtful eye:
Big portraits of the racing yachts at Cowes
In the last years before the First World War.
Luxurious in black and white as deep as sepia,
The photographs are framed in the house style
Of Beken, the smart firm that held the franchise
And must have had a fast boat of its own
To catch those vivid poses out at sea:
Swell heaving in the foreground, sky for backdrop,
Crew lying back on tilting teak or hauling
On white sheets like the stage-hands of a classic
Rope-house theatre shifting brilliant scenery –
Fresh snowfields, arctic cliffs, wash-day of titans.
What stuns you now is the aesthetic yield:
A mere game made completely beautiful
By time, the winnower, whose memory
Has taken out all but the lasting outline,
The telling detail, the essential shadow.
But nothing beats the lovely, schooner-rigged
Meteor IV, so perfectly proportioned
She doesn’t show her size until you count
The human hieroglyphs carved on her deck
As she heels over. Twenty-six young men
Are present and correct below her towers
Of canvas. At the topmost point, the apex
Of what was once a noble way of life
Unquestioned as the antlers in the hunting lodge,
The Habsburg eagle flies. They let her run,
Led by the foresail tight as a balloon,
Full clip across the wind, under the silver sun,
Believing they can feel this thrill for ever –
And death, though it must come, will not come soon.
The Carnival
You can’t persuade the carnival to stay.
Wish all you like, it has to go away.
Don’t let the way it moves on get you down.
If it stayed put, how could it come to town?
How could there be the oompah and the thump
Of drums, the trick dogs barking as they jump?
The girl in pink tights and gold headache-band
Still smiling upside down in a hand stand?
These wonders get familiar by the last
Night of the run. A miracle fades fast.
You spot the pulled thread on a leotard.
Those double somersaults don’t look so hard.
Can’t you maintain your childish hunger? No.
They know that in advance. They have to go,
Not to return until they’re something new
For anybody less blasé than you.
The carnival, the carnival. You grieve,
Knowing the day must come when it will leave.
But that was why her silver slippers shone –
Because the carnival would soon be gone.
We Being Ghosts
Too many of my friends are dead, and others wrecked
By various diseases of the intellect
Or failing body. How am I still upright?
And even I sleep half the day, cough half the night.
How did it come to this? How else but through
The course of years, and what its workings do
To wood, stone, glass and almost all the metals,
Smouldering already in the fresh rose petals.
Our energy deceived us. Blessed with the knack
To get things done, we thought to get it back
Each time we lost it, just by taking breath –
And some of us are racing yet as we face death.
Well, good to see you. Sorry I have to fly.
I’m struggling with a deadline, God knows why,
And ghosts keep interrupting. Think of me
The way I do of you. Quite often. Constantly.
from Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
Signing Ceremony
Hotel Timeo, Taormina
The lilac peak of Etna dribbles pink,
&nb
sp; Visibly seething in the politest way.
The shallow vodka cocktails that we sink
Here on the terrace at the close of day
Are spreading numb delight as they go down.
Their syrup mirrors the way lava flows:
It’s just a show, it might take over town,
Sometimes the Cyclops, from his foxhole, throws
Rocks at Ulysses. But regard the lake
Of moonlight on the water, stretching east
Almost to Italy. The love we make
Tonight might be our last, but this, at least,
Is one romantic setting, am I right?
Cypresses draped in bougainvillea,
The massed petunias, the soft, warm night,
That streak of candy floss. And you, my star,
Still walking the stone alleys with the grace
Of forty years ago. Don’t laugh at me
For saying dumb things. Just look at this place.
Time was more friend to us than enemy,
And soon enough this backdrop will go dark
Again. The spill of neon cream will cool,
The crater waiting years for the next spark
Of inspiration, since the only rule
Governing history is that it goes on:
There is no rhythm of events, they just
Succeed each other. Soon, we will be gone,
And that volcano, if and when it must,
Will flood the slope with lip-gloss brought to boil
For other lovers who come here to spend
One last, late, slap-up week in sun-tan oil,
Their years together winding to an end.
With any luck, they’ll see what we have seen:
Not just the picture postcard, but the splash
Of fire, and know this flowering soil has been
Made rich by an inheritance of ash.
Only because it’s violent to the core
The world grows gardens. Out of earth we came,
To earth we shall return. But first, one more
Of these, delicious echoes of the flame
That drives the long life all should have, yet few
Are granted as we were. It wasn’t fair?
Of course it wasn’t. But which of us knew,
To start with, that the other would be there,
One step away, for all the time it took
To come this far and see a mountain cry
Hot tears, as if our names, signed in the book
Of marriage, were still burning in the sky?
Monja Blanca
The wild White Nun, rarest and loveliest
Of all her kind, takes form in the green shade
Deep in the forest. Streams of filtered light
Are tapped, distilled, and lavishly expressed
As petals. Her sweet hunger is displayed
By the labellum, set for bees in flight
To land on. In her well, the viscin gleams:
Mesmeric nectar, sticky stuff of dreams.
This orchid’s sexual commerce is confined
To flowers of her own class, and nothing less.
And yet for humans she sends so sublime
A sensual signal that it melts the mind.
The hunters brave a poisoned wilderness
To capture just a few blooms at a time,
And even they, least sensitive of men,
Will stand to look, and sigh, and look again,
Dying of love for what does not love them.
Transported to the world, her wiles inspire
The same frustration in rich connoisseurs
Who pay the price for nourishing the stem
To keep the bloom fresh, as if their desire
To live forever lived again through hers:
But in a day she fades, though every fold
Be duplicated in fine shades of gold.
Only where she was born, and only for
One creature, will she give up everything
Simply because she is adored; and he
Must sacrifice himself. The Minotaur,
Ugly, exhausted, has no gifts to bring
Except his grief. She opens utterly
To show how she can match his tears of pain.
He drinks her in, and she him, like the rain.
He sees her, then, at her most beautiful,
And he would say so, could she give him speech:
But he must end his life there, near his prize,
Having been chosen, half man and half bull,
To find the heaven that we never reach
Though seeking it forever. Nothing buys
Or keeps a revelation that was meant
For eyes not ours and once seen is soon spent:
For all our sakes she should be left alone,
Guarded by legends of how men went mad
Merely from tasting her, of monsters who
Died from her kiss. May this forbidden zone
Be drawn for all time. If she ever had
A hope to live, it lies in what we do
To curb the longing she arouses. Let
Her be. We are not ready for her yet,
Because we have a mind to make her ours,
And she belongs to nobody’s idea
Of the divine but hers. But that we know,
Or would, if it were not among her powers
Always across the miles to bring us near
To where she thrives on shadows. By her glow
We measure darkness; by her splendour, all
That is to come, or gone beyond recall.
Stage Door Rocket Science
In the early evening, before I go on in Taunton,
I’m outside the stage door for a last gasp.
Two spires, one Norman, share the summer sky
With a pale frayed tissue wisp of cirrostratus
And the moon, chipped like the milky-white glass marble
I kept separate for a whole week and then ruined
By using as a taw.
I have never been here before,
So where does this strong visual echo come from?
Concentrate. Smoke harder. And then I get it:
Cape Kennedy, the rocket park in the boondocks.
A Redstone and a Jupiter stuck up
Through clear blue air with a cloud scrap just like this one,
And the moon in the same phase.
The rockets, posing for the tourist’s gaze,
Were the small-time ancestors of Saturn V,
But so were these spires. It’s a longer story
Than the thirty years I just felt shrink to nothing.
Time to go in, get rigged with the lapel mike –
Its furry bobble like a soft black marble –
And feel the lectern shaking while I set
Course for the Sea of Shadows.
A Perfect Market
ou plutost les chanter
Recite your lines aloud, Ronsard advised,
Or, even better, sing them. Common speech
Held all the rhythmic measures that he prized
In poetry. He had much more to teach,
But first he taught that. Several poets paid
Him heed. The odd one even made the grade,
Building a pretty castle on the beach.
But on the whole it’s useless to point out
That making the thing musical is part
Of pinning down what you are on about.
The voice leads to the craft, the craft to art:
All this is patent to the gifted few
Who know, before they can, what they must do
To make the mind a spokesman for the heart.
As for the million others, they are blessed:
This is their age. Their slap-dash in demand
From all who would take fright were thought expressed
In ways that showed a hint of being planned,
They may say anything, in any way.
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Why not? Why shouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they?
Nothing to study, nothing to understand.
And yet it could be that their flight from rhyme
And reason is a technically precise
Response to the confusion of a time
When nothing, said once, merits hearing twice.
It isn’t that their deafness fails to match
The chaos. It’s the only thing they catch.
No form, no pattern. Just the rolling dice
Of idle talk. Always a blight before,
It finds a place today, fulfils a need:
As those who cannot write increase the store
Of verses fit for those who cannot read,
For those who can do both the field is clear
To meet and trade their wares, the only fear
That mutual benefit might look like greed.
It isn’t, though. It’s just the interchange
Of showpiece and attention that has been
There since the cave men took pains to arrange
Pictures of deer and bison to be seen
To best advantage in the flickering light.
Our luck is to sell tickets on the night
Only to those who might know what we mean,
And they are drawn to us by love of sound.
In the first instance, it is how we sing
That brings them in. No mystery more profound
Than how a melody soars from a string
Of syllables, and yet this much we know:
Ronsard was right to emphasise it so,
Even in his day. Now, it’s everything:
The language falls apart before our eyes,
But what it once was echoes in our ears
As poetry, whose gathered force defies
Even the drift of our declining years.
A single lilting line, a single turn
Of phrase: these always proved, at last we learn,
Life cries for joy though it must end in tears.
Australia Felix
Was it twenty years ago I met that couple
