by Clive James
That drove the ships of old, they crashed and burned
Or fed the fishes when they overturned.
The Portuguese, the Spaniards and the Dutch,
And all the times the English almost made
A landfall on our land-mass – it’s too much
Drowning to think about, a sad parade
That leaves you with a throat too dry to clutch,
Sensing the flesh dissolved, and bone decayed –
But really we should shift our starting date
To further in the past. It’s far too late
The way it is, and serves the fond idea
The cloudland of our gentle indigenes
Was wrecked when we decided to come here
To exercise our new-found ways and means:
Just name the day and Lo! We would appear
Out of the surf like Hollywood marines
Sprinting ashore in roughly half the time
It takes to find a rhyme or plan a crime.
But it took centuries for men to find
The means of even failing on the waves;
It took the murderous patterns in the mind
That made a mockery of Jesus Saves;
Above all it took industry, the kind
That limes the sea lanes with a million graves.
The quick did not usurp the slow, the quick
Had just grown slightly slower to get sick.
Visit the flight deck? Asked, I always do
Not just because the toy trains never die
As thrill-providers, but because it’s true
That how we sailed is still there when we fly,
In the controls. All that Magellan knew
Is in those panels, carried eight miles high
By turbo-fans whose climb to power began
With just the wind, and just the mind of man.
How unimaginable the past seems
When read about in detail! All that pain
With little gained or even less, the schemes
To get rich quick turned rotten by the rain –
Or ruined by the lack of it. All dreams:
Except the few that worked gave us this plane
We fly in now, our voyage just begun –
To catch the giant sling swung by the sun.
The Buzz
Grown old, you long still for what young love does.
It gives the world a liquid light injection,
A sun bath even in the night. The buzz
Blurs brain-cells by infecting everything
With lust. A girl bright as an egret’s wing
Will cleave unto an oaf and see perfection,
And as for him, don’t ask. He thinks her thighs
Open on heaven and his hands have eyes.
Time will sort all that out, but what a loss!
Sweet reason is our name for sour reflection,
The pause for thought that kills the fairy floss.
With luck, there will be two of you to trade
Tales of the star-burst that could never fade,
But did, and give a voice to introspection:
Which is love too, though not quite the young kind
We comfort ourselves now by calling blind.
But there is nothing young love fails to see
Except the future. Bodies and their connection
Are all creation, shorn of history.
These are the only humans who exist.
Whoever thought to kiss or to be kissed
Or hit the sack from every known direction
Except them? Visions radiantly true
Don’t change with age. Those that have had them do.
Dreams Before Sleeping
The idea is to set the mind adrift
And sleep comes. Mozart, exquisitely dressed,
Walks carefully to work between soft piles
Of fresh horse-dung. Nice work. Why was my gift –
It’s sixty years now and I’m still obsessed –
Hidden behind the tree? I cried for miles.
No one could find it. Find the tiger’s face.
It’s in the tree: i.e. the strangest place.
But gifts were presents then. In fact, for short,
We called them pressies, which was just as long,
But sounded better. Mallarmé thought “night”
A stronger word than nuit. Nice word. The fort
Defied the tide but faded like a song
When the wave’s edge embraced it at last light.
Which song? Time, time, it is the strangest thing.
The Waves. The Sea, the Sea. Awake and Sing.
Wrong emphasis, for music leads to sex.
Your young man must be stroking you awake
Somewhere about now, in another time.
Strange thing. Range Rover. Ducks de Luxe. Lex rex.
The cherry blossoms fall into the lake.
The carp cruise undisturbed. Lemon and lime
And bitters is a drink for drinkers. Just.
I who was iron burn in silence. Rust.
What would you do to please me, were you here?
The tarte Tatin is melting the ice cream.
One sip would murder sleep, but so does this.
Left to itself, the raft floats nowhere near
Oblivion, or even a real dream.
Strange word, nice question. Real? Real as a kiss,
Which never lasts, but proves we didn’t waste
The time we spent in longing for its taste.
Seek sleep and lose it. Fight it and it comes.
I knew that, but it’s too late now. The bird
Sings with its wings. The turtle storms ashore.
Pigs fly. Would that translate to talking drums?
Nice if they didn’t understand a word
Each other said, but drowned in metaphor –
As we do when we search within, and find
Mere traces of the peace we had in mind.
Forget about it. Just get up and write.
But when you try to catch that cavalcade,
Too much coherence muscles in. Nice thought.
Let’s hear it, heartbreak. Happiness writes white.
Be grateful for the bed of nails you made
And now must lie in, trading, as you ought,
Sleep for the pictures that will leave you keen
To draft a memo about what they mean.
You will grow weary doing so. Your eyes
Are fighting to stay open. When they fail
You barely make it back to where you lay.
What do you see? Little to memorise.
A lawn shines green again through melting hail.
Deep in its tree, a tiger turns away.
Nice try, but it was doomed, that strange request
To gaze into the furnace and find rest.
Incident in the Gandhi Bookshop Café,
Avenida Corrientes
They were all dying for her,
But they died bravely, they died well.
It was well done.
I was proud to join them.
We all went over the waterfall together.
We fell together.
The world fell together.
For a sacred moment it was all one,
And then she was gone.
Briefly she had sat there
Making notes to mark her progress
Through the labyrinths of Borges –
Something in her manner
Discouraged offers of help –
And then she looked at her watch.
Did she have a lover somewhere
Or perhaps a tango class?
Imagine being the maestro
Against whom she leans
In a tensile puente.
Deep breasted, long legged,
Silk skinned,
She was the kind of beauty
Who makes every poet
Wish he were a painter,
So as to say:
“Take off your clothes:
I need the essence of you.”
Old poets who try that
Get themselves arrested,
Whereas painters never fail,
Until the day they drop,
To score with the girl of fine family
And the perfect behind.
Having paid her bill,
She stood up and was swept away
On a wave of sighs
As we all shared the light in our eyes,
Our hearts bleeding,
Before going back to the books
We were writing and reading –
Back to the usual macho shit
Which is all there is
When you get down to it,
Out of the cloud
Into which the angel
Disappears,
Having blessed us once
With the holy presence
Of her good looks:
Eternity compressed
Into one sweet minute.
She was out of this world
And we are in it.
Now we must begin again.
Poor us. Poor men.
The waterfall:
It was our tears.
The Falcon Growing Old
The falcon wears its erudition lightly
As it angles down towards its master’s glove.
Student of thermals written by the desert,
It scarcely moves a muscle as it rides
A silent avalanche back to the wrist
Where it will stand in wait like a hooded hostage.
A lifetime’s learning renders youthful effort
Less necessary, which is fortunate.
The chase and first-strike kill it once could wing
Have grown beyond it, so some morning soon
This bird will have its neck wrung without warning
And one of its progeny will take its place.
Thinking these things, the ageing writer makes
Sketches for poems, notes for paragraphs.
Bound for the darkness, does he see himself
Balanced and forceful like the poised assassin
Whose mere trajectory attracts all eyes
Except the victim’s? Habit can die hard,
But still the chance remains he simply likes it,
Catching the shifting air the way a falcon
Spreads on a secret wave, the outpaced earth
Left looking powerless. This sentence here,
Weighed down by literal meaning as it is,
Might only need that loose clause to take off,
Air-launched from a position in the sky
For a long glide with just its wing-tip feathers
Correcting for the wobble in the lisp
Of sliding nothingness, the whispering road
That leads you to a dead-heat with your shadow
At the orange-blossom trellis in the oasis.
Vertical Envelopment
Taking the piss out of my catheter,
The near-full plastic bag bulks on my calf
As I drag my I.V. tower through Addenbrooke’s
Like an Airborne soldier heading for D-Day
Down the longest corridor in England.
Each man his own mule. Look at all this stuff.
Pipes, tubes, air bottles. Some of us have wheels.
Humping our gear, we’re bare-arsed warriors
Dressed to strike fear into the enemy,
But someone fires a flare. Mission aborted.
On the airfield, the chattering Dakotas
Have fallen silent. Jump postponed again.
Stay as you are. Keep your equipment on.
When cloud and wind are OK in the drop zone
We hit the sky and leap into the dark.
Meanwhile just hunker down and get some sleep.
Look on the bright side. Everyone’s still here.
The longest corridor is full of us,
Men of the Airborne going back to bed
For just one more drawn-out Walpurgisnacht.
Our urinary tracts hung up to drain
Throw amber highlights on the bare white wall
Until another dawn. The sky looks clear.
Dakotas cough when they start up, repeat
Themselves like women gossiping. But wait,
Where are the women? What do they go through?
They fly there by Lysander and get caught
Like Violette Szabo. Out there on their own.
Best not to think of it, stick with the guys
And shoot the bull about your CLL
Leukaemia that might hold off for years,
The hacking rattle of COPD
Which sounds as if it might star Dennis Franz
As Andy Sipowicz, but it turns out
To be the bug they once called emphysema.
The way I smoked, thank Christ it wasn’t cancer:
I caught one break at least. It’s dawn again.
The sky looks clear. The kit bag full of piss
Is heavy on your leg. Your name-tags itch,
The cannula inside your elbow dangles,
The patches for electrodes decorate
Your chest like Nicorettes. When you go down
Into the dark you’ll see it sliced with flak
Just as the bumping CAT Scan bangs and crackles,
As the MRI inscribes the night with fire.
My outfit one by one in the green light,
Out of the door and down into the dark
They go, and not much later in the year
I’m watching Peter jump. The flak comes up
And pulls him in. But no green light for me.
I’m home in the Dakota and the same
Long corridor leads back to bed. More stuff
To hump: omeprazole and doxycycline
Pills for my lungs. The medics give me leave
To be there for my daughter’s New York show.
I step ashore and wake up in Mount Sinai,
Felled by the blood clot I brought off the boat.
For ten full days and nights I lie and watch
The Gulf spill oil on CNN, which is
An oil-spill anyway, and back in England
I add syringes to my weaponry.
Bruises from Clexane like Kandinsky abstracts
Blotch me with blue and yellow and bright pink,
A waistline from the Lenbach Haus in Munich.
The women of my family watch the clock
To make sure I shoot up at the right time:
All in the timing and a simple plan.
Normandy showed, and Arnhem showed again,
The Airborne tactic was a death-trap. Crete
Fell to the German sky troops but their losses
Were too great and they never jumped again.
At Cassino and in the Hürtgen Forest
The Fallschirmjäger were brought in by truck.
Up in the air like white blooms on a pond
We’re asking for it. Borneo was waiting
For the Aussies to jump into if the Yanks
Held back the bomb. The jump postponed,
You see them now in the long corridor,
My countrymen, their incipient melanomas
Cut out and sewn up, scars like bullet holes.
You want to see mine? In the final hours
At Dien Bien Phu fresh paratroops went in
Through tracer veils as if about to land
Slap in the middle of SS Das Reich.
They’re here again. They must have been patched up:
Not one less handsome than Alain Delon
In Purple Noon, but barely half his age.
The Hitch is with them and I hear him speak
Exactly as he looked the day we met:
The automatic flak came bubbling up
Like champers, dear boy. Overrated stuff.
I watch him standing there in the
green light.
It switches off. Has he come home with us?
I can’t see. I just see the corridor
And my white room. Another night alive
To lie awake and rue the blasphemy
By which I take their deaths as mine, the young
Soldiers of long ago, in the first years
Of my full span, who went down through the dark
With no lives to look back on. Their poor mothers.
Where are the women? Nurse, my bag is broken.
Sorry, it’s everywhere. She mops, I cough,
She brings the nebulizer and I sit
Exhaling fog. Dakotas starting up
Make whirlpools in the ground mist. Too much luck,
Just to have lived so long when I unfold
And shuffle forward to go out and down
The steep, dark, helter-skelter laundry chute
Into that swamp of blinking crocodiles
Men call Shit Creek. Come, let us kiss and part.
Book Review
Dante Alighieri: Monarchia
Edited by Prue Shaw for the Società Dantesca Italiana, 2009
More valuable than all of mine, your book
Is neatly kept like everything you do:
So clearly worth the twenty years it took,
It sparkles. Fonts well chosen, margins true,
Its every creamy page exhales the sense
Of learned judgment, tact and permanence.
If Dante waited seven centuries
To see his Latin tract receive such care
He can’t complain, though being hard to please
No doubt he did while he was lying there
Still exiled in Ravenna, still annoyed
That so much effort has to be employed
In re-establishing what he first wrote.
But what could he expect? He worked by hand,
And other hands, on skins of sheep and goat,
Made copies, and those went to every land
In Europe, and were copied once again,
And soon for every error there were ten.
Tracing the manuscripts back to the first
Few spin-offs is as good as you can get.
Often you don’t get that, and at the worst
A copy’s copy’s copy’s the best bet,
And so the scholar must compare, contrast,
And from the past deduce a deeper past.
It takes far more than sweat. It takes a mind
That can connect with the great poet’s heart,
