Collected Poems (1958-2015)

by Clive James

In the Melbourne Botanical Gardens?

  In those days you would often see the couples –

  Well-dressed and softly spoken, arm in arm –

  Of new Australians who had made a life

  A long way from the wreckage of their homelands,

  But this pair were exceptionally spruce,

  Though easily the age that I am now.

  They were reserved, but I was curious.

  Two Poles, she from an Auschwitz labour camp,

  He crippled by the walk home from Siberia,

  They met in Krakow, married, and came here

  On a migrant ship that docked at Woolloomooloo –

  Which must have seemed a long way from Lwow,

  Though the old name was in the new name somewhere.

  Knowing my face from TV, the man told me

  My jokes against the local intellectuals

  Concerned about Australia’s vassal status

  In a Western world controlled by the US

  Were falling on deaf ears. “They’ve no idea,”

  He said. She nodded in agreement, graceful

  Like my mother, who would certainly have liked her.

  “We walk here every day,” she said. “So peaceful.”

  He nodded while he watched the currawongs.

  Her first fiancé perished at Katyn,

  The year my father sailed to Singapore.

  Oval Room, Wallace Collection

  Created purely for the court’s delight,

  Pictures by Boucher and by Fragonard

  Still work their charm no matter how we might

  Remind ourselves how frivolous they are.

  Surprised by Vulcan, Venus doesn’t care

  A fig, and Mars is merely given pause.

  The reason for the cuckold’s angry stare

  Might be that her sweet cleft is draped with gauze.

  Boucher does more of that when, held in thrall

  By naked ladies, Cupid doesn’t seem

  To grasp that he himself could have them all

  If he were older. This is just a dream,

  Even when Fragonard’s girl in the swing

  Splays her long legs, kicks off one velvet shoe,

  Knowing that boy down there sees everything.

  He can’t believe such miracles are true,

  And here they’re really not. In this whole room

  All images save one are sex made tame

  By prettiness, the pranks of youth in bloom,

  Winsomely keen to join a harmless game.

  But Boucher’s Pompadour is on her own.

  Her poise commands us to include her out:

  Such swinging scenes are a forbidden zone.

  The kind of woman men go mad about,

  Even in company her solitude

  Was strictly kept. She never spilled a thing,

  And what she might have looked like in the nude

  No man alive could know except the king.

  Always my visits here are made complete

  By her, the stately counterpoint to these

  Cavorting revellers. Aloof, discreet,

  She guards the greatest of the mysteries:

  How sensual pleasure feels. It can’t be seen,

  So all this other stuff was just a way

  To take the edge off how much love could mean

  To win and lose, back then. Just like today.

  Against Gregariousness

  Facing the wind, the hovering stormy petrels

  Tap-dance on the water.

  They pluck the tuna hatchlings

  As Pavlova, had she been in a tearing hurry,

  Might once have picked up pearls

  From a broken necklace.

  Yellowfin drive the turbine of sardines

  Up near the surface so the diving shearwaters

  Can fly down through the bubbles and get at them.

  Birds from above and big fish from below

  Rip at the pack until it comes apart

  Like Poland, with survivors in single figures.

  The krill, as singletons almost not there

  But en masse like a cloud of diamond dust

  Against the sunlit flood of their ballroom ceiling,

  Are scooped up by the basking shark’s dragline

  Or sucked in through the whale’s drapes of baleen –

  A galaxy absorbed into a boudoir.

  Make your bones in a shark family if you can.

  If not, be tricky to locate for sheer

  Translucence, a slick blip that will become –

  Beyond the daisycutter beaks and jaws –

  A lobster fortified with jutting eaves

  Of glazed tile, like the castle at Nagoya

  Hoisted around by jacks and cranes, an awkward

  Mouthful like a crushed car. That being done,

  Crawl backwards down a hole and don’t come out.

  Numismatics

  Merely a planchet waiting to be struck,

  The poem shapes up, but is not a coin

  Until, by craft, and then again by luck,

  He fashions clean devices fit to join

  A scrupulous design that he would like

  To look mint fresh and not like a soft strike –

  It must be hard. “It must be hard,” they say.

  But no, it isn’t, not when you know how.

  Except he doesn’t. He just knows the way

  To scratch and scrape until the coin says “Now”,

  Boasting its lustrous proof against the sleaze

  Of verdigris, that cankerous disease.

  The scholar rediscovers the doubloon

  Inside the encrustations we call Time.

  The critic says it might shine like the moon

  But pales in value next to a thin dime.

  The poet only knows that he can’t cheat

  At any point, or else it’s counterfeit.

  He must be definite yet open to

  The second thought. He mustn’t make a mark

  That falls short of the palpably brand new

  Whose play of light pays tribute to the dark –

  One solid, spinning, singing little disc

  Perhaps not worth much, but still worth the risk.

  Nefertiti in the Flak Tower

  If there was one thing Egyptian Queens were used to

  It was getting walled up inside a million tons

  Of solid rock. Nefertiti had a taste of that

  Before the painted head by which we know her –

  That neck, that pretty hat, those film-star features,

  The Louise Brooks of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms –

  Emerged to start a tour of the museums

  That finished in Berlin, almost for keeps.

  It could have been the end, but for the flak tower:

  With all the other treasures, she was brought there

  And sat the war out barely shivering,

  Deep in an armoured store-room built by slaves –

  That old scenario again. During a raid

  The guns sent up eight thousand shells a minute,

  Some of them big enough to turn a whole

  B-17 into a falling junk-yard,

  But the mass concussion, spread through so much concrete,

  Was just a rumbling tremble. In each tower

  At least ten thousand quaking people sheltered,

  Their papers having proved them Aryan.

  When the war stopped, the towers fought one more day

  Because the Russians couldn’t shoot a hole

  To get in. Finally they sent an envoy.

  The great Queen was brought out and rode in state

  Back to her little plinth and clean glass case.

  In Berlin in the spring, I cross the bridge

  To the Museumsinsel just to see her

  And dote on her while she gives me that look,

  The look that says: “You’ve seen one tomb, you’ve seen

  Them al
l.” For five long years the flak towers stood

  Fighting the enemy armies in the sky

  Whose flying chariots were as the locusts:

  An age, but less than no time to Nefertiti,

  Who looks as if she never heard a thing.

  Spectre of the Rose

  Goethe and Ulrike von Levetzow in Marienbad

  You see this rose? This rose is not just you,

  Crisp in the softness it makes visible,

  With all its petals nourished by the dew

  That wet its leaves last night and pumped it full

  Of crimson lake before the rising sun

  Reached down and opened it to be as one

  Slow-motion cyclone of sheer loveliness,

  Lush yet precise, contained in its excess,

  A sumptuous promise to be always new,

  Superbly poised as you when you undress:

  This rose is also me, condemned to die.

  The laws by which its nest of shells will fade

  From the circumference inwards, it lives by

  And follows to the end. So deep a grade

  Of red is bought with borrowed time. The power

  Of photosynthesis in plant or flower

  That wrecks what has been built works even here,

  Captured in such a jewel that it comes near

  To matching you. You put it in the shade

  I feel advancing with each precious hour.

  Below it on the stem, regard the thorns

  Meant to protect its frailty while it grew.

  Doomed from the moment when the thoughtless dawn’s

  Fatal initiative brought it to view,

  It came here to this vase, and here it glows

  For us, and it is yours and mine, this rose,

  But it is also you and I. Two lives

  United only for a time, it thrives –

  Spreading its perfumed beauty as you do –

  For just a while, and while it stays it goes:

  Perfect too late for me, too soon for you.

  The Same River Twice

  Surely you see now that you gave your name

  To the easy option. Nobody disagrees

  About the infinitely shifting texture

  Of the world. A malefactor loves the haze

  Of boiling chance that blurs the total picture,

  The fog you stand in up to your stiff knees,

  Looking so wise, as if you’d solved the structure

  Of all causality, when you, in fact,

  Left out the thing we needed most to know –

  That our character will leave us free to act

  In contradiction to its steady flow

  Only through our regretting that the river,

  Though never still, is still the same as ever.

  No man steps out of it, not even once.

  On A Thin Gold Chain

  Opals have storms in them, the legend goes:

  They brim with water held in place by force

  To stir the dawn, to liquefy the rose,

  To make the sky flow. They are cursed, of course:

  Great beauty often is. But they are blessed

  As well, so long as she herself gives light

  Who wears them. Shoulders bare, you were the guest

  At the garden table on a summer night

  Whose face lent splendour to the candle flame

  While that slight trinket echoing your eyes

  Swam in its colours. What a long, long game

  We’ve played. Quick now, before somebody dies:

  Have you still got that pendant? Can I see?

  And have you kept it dark to punish me?

  And Then They Dream of Love

  “Were you not more than just a pretty face

  And perfect figure,” he thought, kissing one

  While clamped against the other, “this embrace

  Would not be so intense.” But she was done

  For now with doubts and fears. Her state of grace

  Had come upon her like the rising sun.

  He bathed in daybreak, loving its suddenness,

  The way she shook, her look of sheer distress

  That meant the opposite, and everything.

  Back in the world, her limbs still trembling,

  She said it all again, and this time he

  Expressed himself in words as best he could –

  “You must know you mean more than this to me” –

  Merely to find himself misunderstood.

  “You mean you don’t get lost in ecstasy

  The way I do?” she said. “I want to be

  All that you need of this.” He said, “You said

  I only cared what you were like in bed.”

  And so their bickering began again

  About what you mean now and I meant then.

  Only so long could they go on that way

  Before they parted, worn out by their knack

  For petty quarrels even when they lay

  Replete. The things they said before came back

  To plague them. If it matters what you say

  It can’t last. Best to take another tack,

  And meet for just this, very late at night.

  Would she do that? No. He would. She was right.

  Beachmaster

  Scanning the face of a crestfallen wave

  He sees his life collapsing to a close,

  A foaming comber racing to its grave.

  But after that one, there are all of those:

  The ranks of the unbroken, the young men

  Completely green, queuing to take their turn

  To die so that the sea might live again.

  That much it took him all his life to learn.

  Propped on her elbow in the burning sand,

  The latest Miss Australia views it all

  As one vast courtship. With a loving hand

  She strokes her thigh as one by one they fall,

  Those high walls in the water. Look at her,

  But shade your sad glance carefully, old man –

  For she will never see you as you were,

  A long way out, before the end began.

  Continental Silentia

  Neat name for the machine

  On which the lists were done:

  Quietly ordered violence.

  Feathers by the ton.

  The whisper of a tempest,

  The ghost of a parade:

  Pan-European silence,

  A pop-gun fusillade,

  A muted rat-tat-tat,

  The excuse already ripe:

  We knew nothing of all that.

  All we did was type,

  And corrections in those days

  Had to be done with x’s.

  You couldn’t just erase

  And start again: wrong sexes,

  Wrong spellings … it took ages.

  Just to get it right

  Meant black spots in the pages:

  Blurs of a foggy night.

  Unspoken and unsung,

  Those names that didn’t matter.

  Sonderbehandlung.

  Just written, pitter-patter.

  Continental Silentia

  For all those in absentia

  Respectable dementia

  Sub rosa eloquentia

  List, oh list

  The rest is silence

  Put to silence

  Zum schweigen gebracht

  Typewriter

  Firelighter

  Tap tap

  Language Lessons

  She knew the last words of Eurydice

  In every syllable, both short and long.

  Correcting his misuse of quantity,

  She proved the plangent lilt of Virgil’s song

  Depended on precision, while his hand,

  Light as a mayfly coming in to land,

  Caressed her cheek to taste the melody

  Of such sweet skin, smooth as a silk sarong.

 
Give her the palm for speaking well, he thought,

  But has she ever melted as she should

  With no holds barred, or wept the way she ought?

  His scraps of Greek, it seemed, were not much good.

  He said the words for rosy-fingered dawn

  And when she set him straight with laughing scorn

  He spoke a tongue she barely understood,

  Contesting her with kisses long and short.

  In such a way they traded expertise

  Until the day came it took half the night.

  She gradually improved his memories

  And he set loose her longing for delight.

  The passion underneath the verse technique

  She saw in its full force, and learned to speak –

  Strictly, as always, but in ecstasies.

  So finally, for both, the sound was right,

  A compound language fashioned out of sighs

  And poetry recited line by line.

  Few lovers and few scholars realise

  The force with which those separate things combine

  When classic metres are at last revealed

  As reservoirs where rhythms lie concealed

  That sprang from heartbeats just like yours and mine,

  Pent breath, and what we cry with flashing eyes.

  In that regard they made a pretty pair:

  He with his otherwise unhurried touch,

  She with her prim and finely balanced air,

  When they lay down together, came to such

  An ending they were like a poem caught

  In the last singing phrase of what it sought

  To start with: to contain what means too much

  Left lying loose. In something like despair,

  Though it was joy, they would forget they knew

  What anybody else had ever said

  Of love, and simply murmur the poor few

  Abstract endearments suitable for bed

  Until they slept, and dreamed they’d never met

  And none of this sheer bliss had happened yet.

  One woke the other – which was which? – in dread:

  Ah, Orpheus, what has lost us, me and you?