Collected Poems (1958-2015)

by Clive James

  Into the holes from which they had attacked.

  It might have been a scene from Starship Troopers:

  But no, I had returned to the real world.

  They sent me home to sleep in a dry bed

  Where I felt better than I had for months.

  No need to make a drama of my rescue:

  Having been saved was like a lease of life,

  The thing itself, undimmed by images –

  A thrill a minute simply for being so.

  The Emperor’s Last Words

  An army that never leaves its defences

  Is bound to be defeated, said Napoleon,

  Who left them, and was defeated.

  And thus I gather my remaining senses

  For the walk, or limp, to town

  Where I have a haircut and visit

  The Oxfam bookshop near the bridge.

  Only a day out of Addenbrooke’s

  Where another bout of pneumonia

  Damned near nailed me,

  I walk slowly now, sitting on low brick walls.

  But the haircut is successful,

  Completing my resemblance to Buzz Aldrin

  On the surface of Jupiter,

  And in the bookshop I get, for my niece,

  The Penguin Book of English Verse

  (John Hayward’s excellent anthology)

  And the old, neat, thin-paper OUP edition

  Of the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation

  Of War and Peace, so handy for the pocket.

  Still in her teens, already reading everything,

  She wants to be a writer, and when she visits me

  She gets a useful lesson

  On how a writer can end up.

  But things could have been worse:

  I could have been married to Laura Riding,

  Whose collected poems I purchase for myself.

  Have fifteen years of death improved her verses?

  No, still stridently incomprehensible, befitting

  The way she won an argument with Robert Graves

  By throwing herself backwards from a window:

  A token, no doubt, of an artistic commitment

  The purity of whose achievements was proved

  By being intelligible to nobody at all

  Except her fellow fruit-cakes.

  Well, she sure left her defences.

  Almost everyone wants to be a writer.

  My niece, however, has got the knack:

  That feeling for a sentence, you can’t mistake it.

  The only question is how far you will go,

  Even walking ever so slowly,

  Away from your fortress. All the way to Russia?

  But Tolstoy, himself an awful husband,

  Waits to make a midget of your memory.

  You escaped from Elba

  But not from St Helena.

  Had you stayed in Corsica

  None of this would have happened.

  But you left, and now every nut ward in the world

  Has one of you at least.

  The Maudes were married more than fifty years.

  In two days’ time, the Tour de France

  Will go past here

  Where I now sit to gather strength

  For my retreat from this hot sun.

  It’s time to go. High time to go. High time.

  France, army, head of the army, Josephine.

  Bugsy Siegel’s Flying Eye

  In Havana, at the Hotel Nacional,

  Lucky Luciano, or so the story goes,

  Persuaded a reluctant Meyer Lansky

  That Bugsy Siegel, who had squandered the mob’s money

  On taking years to finish the Flamingo

  And might even have skimmed from the invested capital,

  Would need to have his venture in Las Vegas

  Brought to a sudden end.

  But the execution happened in LA

  With Bugsy unwisely sitting near a window.

  The first bullet took out his right eye

  And flung it far away across the carpet

  Into the tiled dining area.

  He should have known that something bad would happen

  Because when he got home he had smelled flowers

  And when there are no flowers in the house

  But you still smell them, it means death.

  After the window shattered, the smell of jasmine

  Seeped through the house, but that was no premonition,

  Because Bugsy was already dead.

  Scholars still ask the question why

  He never guessed that he would soon get hit,

  Even after closing down his dream-land

  For yet another re-design. He was

  An artist among gangsters. The others weren’t.

  When I got to Vegas, the original Flamingo

  Had been torn down, with a garden on the site,

  But in Havana, at the Nacional,

  I met the waiter who had built a long career

  Out of once having slept with Ava Gardner,

  And I sat to drink mojitos where Meyer Lansky

  And Lucky Luciano might once have done the same

  While they pondered what to do about Bugsy.

  Maybe they did. It was mob business

  So nothing got written down. Nobody can be sure

  Of anything except that flying eye.

  Only the Immortal Need Apply

  ‘I am as the demon of the tumult’

  Gabriele d’Annunzio, quoted by Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Pike

  In Paris, at Diaghilev’s Cleopatra –

  Decor by Bakst, choreography by Fokine,

  Ida Rubinstein in the title role –

  D’Annunzio and his powerful halitosis

  Sat beside Robert de Montesquiou,

  The model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus.

  Rubinstein, who could not dance a step,

  Merely stood there looking beautiful

  Or adopted the occasional Egyptian pose,

  While d’Annunzio laid his plans.

  Backstage in her crowded dressing-room

  The Nile-nymph recovered from her exertions

  By lying back in her couch.

  D’Annunzio was six inches shorter than she was

  But her posture put him within range.

  He fell to his knees and kissed her lovely legs

  Upward from toes to crotch.

  As he plunged his face into the tarte tatin,

  Barrès and Rostand bowed their heads in awe

  And Montesquiou adjusted his moustache.

  Later on a man in the street was arrested

  And charged with not being famous.

  He remains nameless to this day.

  Plot Points

  On the rafting ice

  The afterbirth of seals

  Leaves stains like pink blancmange.

  Glyco proteins in the fish

  Keep them from freezing.

  M13 in Hercules

  Is a globular star cluster –

  A glitterball that my mother

  Could have danced the Charleston under.

  She had lovely hands.

  Renoir, choosing models, always looked

  At their hands first.

  After the war, at Lodz,

  On a tour of the concentration camp,

  Rubinstein said ‘I was born here.’

  In Melanesia, the House of Memories

  Contains the treasures of the tribe.

  The Somme chalk was good for tunnels.

  When the barrage broke them,

  The parapet bags spat white.

  At Kokoda, the treetop phosphorescence

  Turned the night to Christmas.

  The Aussies in Tobruk

  Brushed dust from bully beef.

  In the dry valleys of Antarctica

  Dust is raised by the katabatic wind.

  With the Wehrmacht stalled in front of Moscow,

 
Even the grease froze. The 88s

  Were jammed by their own shells.

  Rasputitsa was the mud

  Of spring thaw and autumn rain.

  On a hard day in the Alhambra

  The Sultan sent an apple

  To the virgin of his choice.

  The logo on your MacBook

  Is an echo of the manner

  In which Alan Turing killed himself.

  In the battle for Berlin

  The last panzers were overrun

  Before they reached the start-line.

  A dead hippo in the Tiergarten

  Had an unexploded mortar bomb

  Sticking out of its side.

  While you were reading this

  Millions of stars moved closer

  Towards their own extinction

  So many years ago –

  But let’s believe our eyes:

  They say it’s all here now.

  Asma Unpacks Her Pretty Clothes

  Wherever her main residence is now,

  Asma unpacks her pretty clothes.

  It takes forever: so much silk and cashmere

  To be unpeeled from clinging leaves of tissue

  By her ladies. With her perfect hands, she helps.

  Out there in Syria, the torturers

  Arrive by bus at every change of shift

  While victims dangle from their cracking wrists.

  Beaten with iron bars, young people pray

  To die soon. This is the Middle Ages

  Brought back to living death. Her husband’s doing,

  The screams will never reach her where she is.

  Asma’s uncovered hair had promised progress

  For all her nation’s women. They believed her.

  We who looked on believed the promise too,

  But now, as she unpacks her pretty clothes,

  The dream at home dissolves in agony.

  Bashar, her husband, does as he sees fit

  To cripple every enemy with pain.

  We sort of knew, but he had seemed so modern

  With Asma alongside him. His big talk

  About destroying Israel: standard stuff.

  A culture-changing wife offset all that.

  She did, she did. I doted as Vogue did

  On her sheer style. Dear God, it fooled me too,

  So now my blood is curdled by the shrieks

  Of people mad with grief. My own wrists hurt

  As Asma, with her lustrous fingertips –

  She must have thought such things could never happen –

  Unpacks her pretty clothes.

  Nina Kogan’s Geometrical Heaven

  Two of her little pictures grace my walls:

  Suprematism in a special sense,

  With all the usual bits and pieces flying

  Through space, but carrying a pastel-tinged

  Delicacy to lighten the strict forms

  Of that hard school and blow them all sky-high,

  Splinters and stoppers from the bombing of

  An angel’s boudoir. When Malevich told

  His pupils that their personalities

  Should be suppressed, the maestro little knew

  The state would soon require exactly that.

  But Nina, trying as she might, could not

  Rein in her individuality,

  And so she made these things that I own now

  And gaze at, wondering at her sad fate.

  She could have got away, but wished instead

  Her gift devoted to Utopia.

  She painted trams, designed official posters:

  Alive until the siege of Leningrad

  And then gone. Given any luck, she starved:

  But the purges were still rolling, and I fear

  The NKVD had her on a list,

  And what she faced, there at the very end,

  Was the white cold. Were there an afterlife,

  We might meet up, and I could tell her then

  Her sumptuous fragments still went flying on

  In my last hours, when I, in a warm house,

  Lay on my couch to watch them coming close,

  Her proofs that any vision of eternity

  Is with us in the world, and beautiful

  Because a mind has found the way things fit

  Purely by touch. That being said, however,

  I should record that out of any five

  Pictures by Kogan, at least six are fakes.

  Star System

  The stars in their magnificent array

  Look down upon the Earth, their cynosure,

  Or so it seems. They are too far away,

  In fact, to see a thing; hence they look pure

  To us. They lack the textures of our globe,

  So only we, from cameras carried high,

  Enjoy the beauty of the swirling robe

  That wraps us up, the interplay of sky

  And cloud, as if a Wedgwood plate of blue

  And white should melt, and then, its surface stirred

  With spoons, a treasure too good to be true,

  Be placed, and hover like a hummingbird,

  Drawing all eyes, though ours alone, to feast

  On splendour as it turns west from the East.

  There was a time when some of our young men

  Walked plumply on the moon and saw Earth rise,

  As stunning as the sun. The years since then

  Have aged them. Now and then somebody dies.

  It’s like a clock, for those of us who saw

  The Saturn rockets going up as if

  Mankind had energy to burn. The law

  Is different for one man. Time is a cliff

  You come to in the dark. Though you might fall

  As easily as on a feather bed,

  It is a sad farewell. You loved it all.

  You dream that you might keep it in your head.

  But memories, where can you take them to?

  Take one last look at them. They end with you.

  And still the Earth revolves, and still the blaze

  Of stars maintains a show of vigilance.

  It should, for long ago, in olden days,

  We came from there. By luck, by fate, by chance,

  All of the elements that form the world

  Were sent by cataclysms deep in space,

  And from their combination life unfurled

  And stood up straight, and wore a human face.

  I still can’t pass a mirror. Like a boy,

  I check my looks, and now I see the shell

  Of what I was. So why, then, this strange joy?

  Perhaps an old man dying would do well

  To smile as he rejoins the cosmic dust

  Life comes from, for resign himself he must.

  Change of Domicile

  Installed in my last house, I face the thought

  That fairly soon there will be one house more,

  Lacking the pictures and the books that here

  Surround me with abundant evidence

  I spent a lifetime pampering my mind.

  The new place will be of a different sort,

  Dark and austere, and I will have to find

  My way along its unforthcoming walls.

  Help is at hand here should I fall, but there

  There will be no one to turn on the lights

  For me, and I will know I am not blind

  Only by glimpses when the empty halls

  Lead me to empty rooms, in which the nights

  Succeed each other with no day between.

  I may not see my tattered Chinese screen

  Again, but I shall have time to reflect

  That what I miss was just the bric-a-brac

  I kept with me to blunt my solitude,

  Part of my brave face when my life was wrecked

  By my gift for deceit. Truth clears away

  So many souvenirs. The shelves come clean.

  In the last, the truly last house ther
e will be

  No treasured smithereens to take me back

  To when things hung together. I’ll conclude

  The way that I began so long ago:

  With nothingness, but know it fit for me

  This time around, now I am brought so low,

  Yet ready to move soon. When, I can’t say.

  Rounded with a Sleep

  The sun seems in control, the tide is out:

  Out to the sandbar shimmers the lagoon.

  The little children sprint, squat, squeal and shout.

  These shallows will be here until the moon

  Contrives to reassert its influence,

  And anyway, by then it will be dark.

  Old now and sick, I ponder the immense

  Ocean upon which I will soon embark:

  As if held in abeyance by dry land

  It waits for me beyond that strip of sand.

  It won’t wait long. Just for the moment, though,

  There’s time to question if my present state

  Of bathing in this flawless afterglow

  Is something I deserve. I left it late

  To come back to my family. Here they are,

  Camped on their towels and putting down their books

  To watch my granddaughter, a natural star,

  Cartwheel and belly-flop. The whole scene looks

  As if I thought it up to soothe my soul.

  But in Arcadia, Death plays a role:

  A leading role, and suddenly I wake

  To realise that I’ve been sound asleep

  Here at my desk. I just wish the mistake

  Were rare, and not so frequent I could weep.

  The setting alters, but the show’s the same:

  One long finale, soaked through with regret,

  Somehow designed to expiate self-blame.

  But still there is no end, at least not yet:

  No cure, that is, for these last years of grief

  As I repent and yet find no relief.

  My legs are sore, and it has gone midnight.

  I’ve had my last of lounging on the beach

  To see the sweet oncoming sunset light

  Touching the water with a blush of peach,

  Smoothing the surface like a ballroom floor

  As all my loved ones pack up from their day