by Clive James
Bambi was finished by the flame
You still could hear him scream
Snow White was rubbed out by the witch
Mary Poppins never made the scene
Mother Goose was just another bitch
Full of bullshit like the Fairy Queen
The gas grenades are telling him to run
He does and something stops him like a wall
It puts him back where he has always been
His nightmares laugh to see him fall
I told you they were gonna bust your ass
Says Tom Thumb inside an upturned glass
The Eye of the Universe
I have been where time runs into time
And so partaken of the vanished glamour
Have seen Atlantis and the perfect crime
Felt eloquence replace my mental stammer
Seen every evil brought beneath the hammer
In this mood all that Faust desired is mine
I am the eye with which the universe beholds itself
And knows itself divine
I have been to see my death prepare
Inside a Packard, somnolently cruising
The sure-fire way of giving me the air
And totting up exactly what I’m losing
Found such an end not too far from my choosing
I have settled up with Charon at the Styx
I am the eye with which the universe beholds itself
And knows itself a fix
I’ve crossed an atlas with the Golden Horde
Seen all the Seven Cities of Cibola
Olympus was a geriatric ward
The Promised Land is just the old payola
It’s all the same shellac, the same Victrola
Eternity should have more in the bag
I am the eye with which the universe beholds itself
And knows itself a drag
I have been where age runs into age
Have seen the children burned, the slaves in halters
The cutting edge is wearing off my rage
I leave them their strange gods, their reeking altars
And the way the reign of terror never falters
They were fighting for the right to count the slain
I am the eye with which the universe beholds itself
And knows itself insane
I have seen the gentle meet the savage day
In the sunlight on the spandrels of the towers
And in the moonlight very far away
The honeymoon canoe glide through the flowers
And the party left behind go on for hours
For a while things were as peaceful as they seemed
I am the eye with which the universe beholds itself
And knows itself redeemed
My Brother’s Keeper
My brother lives in fear
Of the hidden cries he seems to hear
Somewhere ahead the King of Hell
Somewhere below a kitten in a well
Am I my brother’s keeper?
Am I my brother’s keeper?
My brother lives a lie
When his laughter splits the summer sky
Somewhere inside he skips a breath
Somewhere in there he dies the little death
Am I my brother’s keeper?
Am I my brother’s keeper?
Every second morning now for years
My brother has put on my brawn and brain
To wander through the universe in pain
And my happiness of yesterday
Is walked and scorned away
Before he returns to me in tears
My brother lives a life
In the narrow shadow of the knife
Somewhere behind a hill of skulls
Somewhere below a beach of dying gulls
Am I my brother’s keeper?
Am I my brother’s keeper?
History and Geography
The history and geography of feeling less than wonderful
are known to me
The dates of broken bubbles and the whereabouts of every
lost belief
And from the point of tears I see how far away across the
of troubles
The pinnacles of happiness are halfway hidden in the clouds
sea of grief
My common sense can tell me all it likes to count myself
among the lucky
For pity’s sake to draw a breath and take a look around me
and compare
But all I seem to see and hear is something I’m unable to
remember
The flowing speech that stuttered out, the pretty song that
faded on the air
When the jet returns me half awake and half asleep to what
I call my homeland
I look down into the midnight city through the empty inkwell
of the sky
And in that kit of instruments laid out across a velvet-covered
table
I know that nothing lives which doesn’t hold its place more
worthily than I
Without a home, without a name, a girl of whom to say this is
my sister
For I am all the daughters of my father’s house and all the
brothers too
I comb the rubble of a shattered world to find the bright face
of an angel
And say again and say again that I have written this – this is
for you
The history and geography of feeling less than wonderful are
known to me
When sunsets are unlovely and the dawns are coldly calculated
light
And from the heights of arrogance across the steps that later
I regretted
I see those angel faces flame their last and flicker out into the
night
Femme Fatale
It isn’t fear I feel, or lack of nerve
Call it just a sensible reserve
When faced with the intoxicating verve
Of anyone who dazzles me like you
The children turning flint-wheels in the mines looked pretty too
And sparks were shaken out like golden rain
And oh so very lovely were the loneliness and pain
It’s not because I’m burning out or old
I hesitate to snuggle in the fold
Of body heat that really beats the cold
Though Icarus flew near the sun and fell
The chandeliers above the weeping fields looked warm as well
And flares would crumple down like fairy lights
And oh so very lovely were the long and fearful nights
It’s all because you are too much for me
Too good to last, too beautiful to be
That you are doomed to be a casualty
Of the night fight on my deeps of memory
A galleon with fire below falls glowing through the sea
And every mast shall tremble like a tree
And oh so very lovely shine the blast that breaks them free
A Hill of Little Shoes
I live in the shadow of a hill
A hill of little shoes
I love but I shiver with a chill
A chill I never lose
I live, I love, but where are they?
Where are their lives, their loves? All blown away
And every little shoe is a foot that never grew
Another day
If you could find a pair and put them on the floor
Make a mark in the air like the marks beside your door
When you were growing
You’d see how tall they were
And the buckles and the laces they could do up on their own
Or almost could
With their tongue-tips barely showing
Tell you how small they were
And then you’d think of littl
e faces looking fearfully alone
And how they stood
In their bare feet being tall for the last time
Just to be good
And that was all they were
They were like you in the same year but you grew up
They were barely even here before they suddenly weren’t there
And while you got dressed for bed they did the same but they were led
Into another room instead
And they were all blown away into thin air
I live in the shadow of a hill
A hill of little shoes
I love but I shiver with a chill
A chill I never lose
And I caught that cold when I was chosen to grow old
In the shadow of a hill of little shoes
Dancing Master
As the world goes past me
I have enough to last me
As long as you come to call
And hang your coat and hat on the hook in the hall
This is the step we’ll learn tonight
Turn on a dime and stay upright
Come back slowly in your own time
I’ll wait for you
As the world goes past me
I have enough to last me
As long as we dance like this
And what a man’s never had he will never miss
This is the way the step looks best
Keep it neat as you come to rest
And if my heart seems to skip a beat
Just wait for me
Just wait for me the way I wait for you
For all the endless hours in a week
This is the silent language lovers speak
When they mean nothing except what’s true
Just wait for me the way I wait for you
To change your shoes before we say goodbye
This is the world where I will never die
Or lie awake for what I’m going through
As the world goes past me
I have enough to last me
As long as we dance like that
There’s a hook in the hall and it’s waiting for your coat and hat
I Have to Learn to Live Alone Again
I have to learn
To live alone again
I used to burn
To live alone again
But this is now
And that was then
And now I have to live alone again
Did you paint your bedroom gold the way you planned?
Is the same love song open on the music stand?
Not knowing things like that is part of missing you
As much as never touching you or kissing you
I cross the silver bridge and see your balcony
The vines have filled the trellis with a filigree
I had such plans to see the way your garden grew
But missing out on that is part of missing you
As much as never touching you or kissing you
I have to learn
To live alone again
I used to burn
To live alone again
But now I do
I wonder when
I’ll ever learn
To live alone
Again
Winter Spring
This is the way that winter says goodbye to spring
By whispering we will not meet this year
This year I will not see you flower or hear you sing
The time is over now you could look back to me
And see the way the crocus cupped the snow
Part of the picture in your show of pageantry
The grass would not have been as green without the frost
The night prepares the splendour of the day
My hands were cold and now they’re cold as cold can be
I fold them to my chest and turn away
This is the way that winter says goodbye to spring
By whispering we will not meet this year
This year I will not see you flower or hear you sing
Or taste the brilliance that you bring
To everything.
Notes
Four Poems About Porpoises
I wrote most of this suite of miniature poems in the Sunda Strait, on the ship to England. But the mention of ‘Fylingdales’ indicates that at least one of the poems was written after I got there. Situated in the North York Moors, Fylingdales, an American-designed Ballistic Missile Early Warning Station (BMEWS), came online in 1953, and was a key element of the NATO defence system throughout the Cold War.
The Banishment
The epigraph is from Dante, Inferno, Canto X, the episode featuring Dante’s great political enemy Farinata degli Uberti. Standing in his grave in the burning cemetery of heretics, Farinata reminds Dante that when there was talk of destroying Florence, he, Farinata, was alone in defending her with his visor open, so that his face could be seen.
The Young Australian Rider, P. G. Burman
Largely due to the influence of my doomed friend, I knew an awful lot about competition motorcycles when I was young, and even in my old age I follow the Isle of Man TT races on television. Luckily I was able to keep most of my mugged-up technical knowledge out of the poem, but the reader might need to be told that for the post-war amateur bike-builders there was a crucial, snobbish difference between an overhead valve engine and a side-valve engine. The OHV delivered more power for the same capacity. ‘One-lung three-fifty’: a single cylinder engine of 350 cc swept volume. Further up the scale of desirability and power, an OHV engine with valves actuated by push-rods was outranked by an OHV engine with camshafts. The racing bikes of the factory teams had camshafts; and the British AJS company revolutionized the sport by making its 7R camshaft racing model available on the commercial market. Suffice it to say that the technical information in the poem would be enough to tell an aficionado that my friend was trying to do the whole thing on a shoe-string.
A Line and a Theme from Noam Chomsky
Though I eventually came to view Noam Chomsky’s political opinions as adding up to a toxic attack on the liberal outlook he professed to support, I was immensely impressed by his first theoretical work in linguistics. As an undergraduate in Cambridge I caught a train to Oxford just to hear him expound his concept of deep grammar, and I was never more thrilled by a lecture in my life: it was better than listening to Isaiah Berlin. But I did notice a flaw in Chomsky’s contention that a string of words – ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ was the example he concocted – could be completely meaningless. Not, I thought, if you could sufficiently widen the context.
Reflections on a Cardboard Box
Hostathion and Triazophos were two different pesticides that I somehow encountered in the form of empty cardboard boxes marked with their names. The boxes came in handy for transporting books during a move in Cambridge from one address to another, just around the corner. At one point the work got too tiring and I sat down to write this poem. God knows how I got the idea that insane barbarism was a thing of the past.
Will Those Responsible Come Forward?
The line ‘Lest the Druze and the Jews or the Juze and the Drews’ can’t be made to work when recited. After I found this out the hard way, I took care to make every line of verse I wrote pass the test of being read aloud.
Funnelweb
Apart from a few would-be Hart Crane efforts perpetrated in my student days in Sydney, I have only ever once set out to be obscure, and this poem was the result. Obscurity, in my view, is rarely a tolerable aim in the arts, although it may sometimes have to be put up with as an incidental result; and even for mere difficulty the only justification is a striving for simplicity; so a poem like this should normally be consigned to the oblivion with which it flirted. But there are things in it that I could not have said more clearly, so I have kept it, even though there are also things that demand explanation. Most of them can be tracked down on the Web, but some might pro
ve elusive even then. The Banzai Pipeline is a surf reef break in Hawaii, off the north coast of Oahu: a gathering place for tube-riders, it also offers an excellent chance to get killed. A running W, back in the bad old days when Hollywood stunt arrangers were allowed to hurt animals, was a ruthless device to make a horse crash at the gallop. At the time I wrote the poem, Natalia Makarova, the only runaway Soviet female dancer to make the same impact as Nureyev and Baryshnikov, was the darling of Covent Garden. The dear friend with cancer was Penny Faber, much loved by our family. In the Ni-Jo Castle in Kyoto the nightingale floors were designed to make it impossible for any assassin to approach the Shogun’s sleeping quarters unheard. ‘Saito’ was Lt General Yoshitsugu Saito, the officer in command on the island of Saipan in June 1944. At this point in the poem the narration is taken over by a US Marine who was not only in the frightful last battle against the Japanese garrison, but also witnessed the even more horrible events the next morning, when the Japanese civilians on the island committed suicide. Analysts of the casualty figures concluded, surely correctly, that the cost of invading the Japanese home islands would be ruinously high. The next two stops on the bitter trail through Japan’s inner defences were Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Both battles were so expensive in American lives that they made the use of the atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki inevitable, but really those cities had been already doomed before the fighting stopped on Saipan. Late in the poem, the atomic bombs mentioned are the ones held at the American airfields in East Anglia: as graduate students in Cambridge we were very aware of their nearby presence at that stage of the Cold War. One of the survivors of the Tokyo fire raid on the night of 10 March 1945 later described how he had been a member of a party that had dedicated itself to saving the Emperor’s portrait from the flames. In a chapel built within the confines of KZ Dachau the nuns set themselves the task of keeping perpetual vigil: on a visit in 1983 I saw them praying. The stanza that begins ‘High over Saipan’ records a flight south I made in the 1970s from Tokyo to Sydney, during which I saw another airliner going in the opposite direction, unspooling a condensation trail that evoked, in my mind, the B-29s on their way from Tinian in the Marianas to their target cities in Japan; although, because of the jet stream over the home islands, most of the fire raids were carried out at low level. On the raids that delivered the atomic bombs, however, the planes flew high up.
