by Clive James
CLIVE JAMES
Angels Over Elsinore
COLLECTED VERSE 2003–2008
PICADOR
Contents
Windows Is Shutting Down
Angels Over Elsinore
Exit Don Giovanni
My Father Before Me
A Gyre from Brother Jack
Woman Resting
Sunday Morning Walk
Natural Selection
Under the Jacarandas
The Victor Hugo Clematis
Mystery of the Silver Chair
The Genesis Wafers
Museum of the Unmoving Image
Statement from the Secretary of Defense
The Australian Suicide Bomber’s Heavenly Reward
Diamond Pens of the Bus Vandals
The Zero Pilot
Iron Horse
Grace Cossington Smith’s Harbour Bridge
Belated Homage to Derek Walcott
When We Were Kids
Only Divine
Lock Me Away
Bigger than a Man
Publisher’s Party
Literary Lunch
At School with Reg Gasnier
At Ian Hamilton’s Funeral
Press Release from Plato
Young Lady Going to Dakar
Ramifications of Pure Beauty
The Serpent Beguiled Me
State Funeral
This Is No Drill
Tramps and Bowlers
Fires Burning, Fires Burning
Yusra
Private Prayer at Yasukuni Shrine
Naomi from Namibia
William Dobell’s Cypriot
Ghost Train to Australia
Les Saw It First
Signed by the Artist
Return of the Lost City
Anniversary Serenade
Double or Quits
Overview
The Nymph Calypso
Meteor IV at Cowes, 1913
The Magic Wheel
Portrait of Man Writing
Status Quo Vadis
Dreams Before Sleeping
The Carnival
We Being Ghosts
Windows Is Shutting Down
Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.
Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.
The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.
Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.
Angels Over Elsinore
How many angels knew who Hamlet was
When they were summoned by Horatio?
They probably showed up only because
The roster said it was their turn to go.
Another day, another Dane. Too bad,
But while they sang their well-rehearsed lament
They noticed his good looks. Too soon, too sad,
This welcome home for what seemed heaven sent.
Imagine having been with him down there!
But here I dream, for angels do not yearn.
They take up their positions in the air
Free from the passions of the earth they spurn.
Even their singing is done less from joy
Than duty. But was this the usual thing?
Surely they gazed on that recumbent boy,
Clearly cut out one day to be a king,
And sang him to his early rest above
With soaring pride that they should form the choir
Whose voices echoed all the cries of love,
Which, even when divine, implies desire?
But soft: an ideal world does not exist.
Hamlet went nowhere after he was dead.
No angel sighed where lovers never kissed,
And there was nothing in what his friend said.
Hamlet himself knew just what to expect:
Steady reduction of his body mass
Until the day, his very coffin wrecked,
Some clown picked up his skull and said, ‘Alas.’
No, there would be no music from on high.
No feather from a wing would fall, not one.
Forget it all, even the empty sky –
What’s gone is gone, sweet prince. What’s done is done.
Exit Don Giovanni
Somewhere below his pride, the Don’s bad dreams
Fashioned the statue that would take him down.
Deep underground, the tears were there in streams.
The man who had the only game in town,
In Spain, in Europe, when it came to love,
Sensed that there had to be a reckoning.
The boundaries he claimed to soar above
Meant nothing to him except everything.
Why the defiant stance, if not from shame?
And why deny that truth, if not from fear?
The bodice-ripper made his famous name
By staying buttoned up. His whole career
Came back to haunt him in a stony glance.
Transfixed, he followed where the statue led.
Below, tips of hot tongues began to dance.
Further below, it was a sea of red.
There was a jetty. Next to it, a raft
Held every name on Leporello’s list,
Even from just last week.
The statue laughed And left.
The women, modelled out of mist,
Were images, as they had always been
To him, but strong enough to ply the sweeps.
They would not meet his eye, having foreseen
What waited for him on the burning deeps.
A long way out, they paused, and one by one
They disappeared, each hinting with a smile,
But not to him, their work had been well done.
He was alone. To cry was not his style,
But then he reached down through the surface fire
Into the water. Almost with relief
He learned at last the flames of his desire
Had floated on the ocean of his grief.
Had he known sooner, what would that have meant?
Less to regret, and little to admit?
The raft burned: final stage of his descent.
Hell was on Earth. Now he was out of it.
My Father Before Me
Sai Wan War Cemetery, Hong Kong
At noon, no shadow. I am on my knees
Once more before your number and your name.
The usual heat, the usual fretful bees
Fitfully busy as last time I came.
Here you have lain since 1945,
When you, at half the age that I am now,
Were taken from the world of the alive,
Were taken out of time. You should see how
This hillside, since I visited it first,
Has stayed the same. Nothing has happened here.
They trim the sloping lawn and slake its thirst.
Regular wreaths may fade and reappear,
But these are details. High on either side
Waves of apartment blocks roll in so far
And no further, forbidden to collide
By laws that keep
the green field where you are,
Along with all these others, sacrosanct.
For once the future is denied fresh ground.
For that much if no more, let God be thanked.
You can’t see me or even hear the sound
Of my voice, though it comes out like the cry
You heard from me before you sailed away.
Your wife, my mother, took her turn to die
Not long ago. I don’t know what to say –
Except those many years she longed for you
Are over now at last, and now she wears
The same robes of forgetfulness you do.
When the dreams cease, so do the nightmares.
I know you would be angry if I said
I, too, crave peace. Besides, it’s not quite so.
Despair will ebb when I leave you for dead
Once more. Once more, as I get up to go,
I look up to the sky, down to the sea,
And hope to see them, while I still draw breath,
The way you saw your photograph of me
The very day you flew to meet your death.
Back at the gate, I turn to face the hill,
Your headstone lost again among the rest.
I have no time to waste, much less to kill.
My life is yours; my curse, to be so blessed.
A Gyre from Brother Jack
The canvas, called A Morning Long Ago,
Hangs now in Dublin’s National Gallery
Of Ireland, and for capturing the flow
Of life, its radiant circularity, Yeats painter leaves
Yeats poet beaten flat.
I hear you saying, ‘How can he say that?’
But look. Here is the foyer of a grand
Theatre. It is always interval.
On the upper level, brilliant people stand.
What they have seen inside invests them all
With liquid light, and some of them descend
The sweet, slow, curving, anti-clockwise bend
Of staircase and go out into that park
Where yet another spectacle has formed:
A lake made bright by the oncoming dark.
And at the left of that, white wings have stormed
Upward towards where this rondeau begins.
Birds? Angels? Avatars? Forgiven sins?
He doesn’t say: the aspect I like best.
William had theories. Jack has just the thrill.
We see a little but we miss the rest,
And what we keep to ponder, time will kill.
The lives we might have led had we but known
Check out at dawn and take off on their own
Even as we arrive. Sad, it might seem,
When talked about: but shown, it shines like day.
The only realistic general scheme
Of the divine is in this rich display –
Proof that the evanescent present tense
Is made eternal by our transience.
Woman Resting
Sometimes the merely gifted give us proof
Born artists have a democratic eye
That genius gets above, to stand aloof,
Scorning to seize on all that happens by
And give it the full treatment. Look at her,
Mancini’s woman, as she rests her head
In white impasto linen. Cats would purr
To think of lying curled up on that bed
Warmed by her Monica Bellucci skin.
Her mouth, like Vitti’s in La Notte, breathes
A sulky need for more of the same sin
That knocked her sideways. Silently, she seethes.
She’s perfect, and he’s well up to the task
Of illustrating her full bloom of youth.
Why isn’t she immortal, then? you ask.
Look at her bedside table for the truth.
Carafe, decanter, bottle, beaker, all
Are brushed in with the same besotted touch:
Not just as clutter which, were it to fall,
Would break and be swept up. He cares too much
About the world around her. While she dreams,
The room dreams too, as if it too were spent
From pleasure. In the end, nothing redeems
This failure to make her the main event.
Manet’s Olympia is no great shakes
For beauty beside this one, but transcends
Her setting with exactly what it takes:
The fire that starts where general interest ends.
Out for the count, Miss Italy sleeps on,
So lovely that we check the artist’s name,
Vow to remember it, and then are gone,
Forgetting one who never found his fame
Because his unrestricted sympathy
Homogenised existence. Art must choose
What truly merits perpetuity
From everything that we are bound to lose.
Even a master’s landscape, though devoid
Of people, has a human soul in view:
His own. A focused vision is employed
To say: behold what I alone can do.
Picking the mortal to immortalise,
The great paint objects only to abet
Their concentration on what lives and dies.
Faced with a woman that they can’t forget
They make sure we can’t either. Should she rest,
Her daylight hours still dominate the room.
We see her waking up and getting dressed.
Her silence hits us like the crack of doom.
But this girl, drowned in décor, disappears
From memory, which doesn’t care to keep
A pretty picture long, so save your tears.
I shouldn’t try to wake her. Let her sleep,
And let Mancini, suave but second rate,
Sleep with her, as in fact he might have done –
Some recompense for his eventual fate
Of scarcely mattering to anyone.
Sunday Morning Walk
Frost on the green.
The ducks cold-footing it across the grass
Beside the college moat
Meet a clutch of matrons
In freeze-dried Barbours
Walking their collies
Freshly brushed by Gainsborough.
Buoyed by the world’s supply
Of rosemary sprigs
Packed under glass,
The moorcock emerging from the reeds
Does a hesitation step
As though dancing to Piazzolla.
Cool shoes, if I may say so.
In front of the boat-houses
The rowers rigging fulcrums to the shells
Bite off their gloves
To push in pins,
And the metal shines
Just short of a glitter
Because the light, though Croesus-rich,
Is kiss-soft.
Under the bridge, the iron ribs
Form a pigeon loft,
A pit-lane of sports saloons
Testing their engines.
The final year
Of the finishing school for swans
Passes in review,
Watched by the cob, his nibs,
Who at Bayreuth once
Had a glide-on role
In Lohengrin,
But this is better.
Winter regatta,
Unspoiled by even
Yesterday’s litter
Spilling from the bins,
Is it any wonder
That I never left you?
Remember this day,
It’s already melting.
Natural Selection
The gradual but inexorable magic
That turned the dinosaurs into the birds
Had no overt, only a hidden, logic.
To start the squadrons climbing from the herds
No wand was ever waved, but afterwards
/>
Those who believed there must have been a wizard
Said the whole show looked too well-planned for hazard.
And so it does, in retrospect. Such clever
Transitions, intricate beyond belief!
The little lobsters, in their mating fever,
Assaulted from the sea, stormed up the cliff,
And swept inland as scorpions. But if
Some weapons freak equipped their tails for murder
He must have thought sheer anguish all in order.
Source of all good and hence of evil, pleasure
And hence of pain, he is, or else they are,
Without a moral sense that we can measure,
And thus without a mind. Better by far
To stand in awe of blind chance than to fear
A conscious mechanism of mutation
Bringing its fine intentions to fruition
Without a qualm about collateral horror.
The peacock and the tapeworm both make sense.
Nobody calls the ugly one an error.
But when a child is born to pain intense
Enough to drive its family all at once
To weep blood, an intelligent designer
Looks like a torture garden’s beaming owner.
No, give it up. The world demands our wonder
Solely because no feeling brain conceived
The thumb that holds the bamboo for the panda.
Creation, if the thing’s to be believed –
And only through belief can life be loved –
Must do without that helping hand from Heaven.
Forget it, lest it never be forgiven.
Under the Jacarandas
Under the jacarandas
The pigeons and the gulls
Pick at the fallen purple
That inundates the grass
For two weeks in October.
Although the splash of colour
Should seem absurdly lush,
Soon you get used to it.
You think life is like that,
But a clock is ticking.
The pigeons and the gulls
Don’t even know how good
They look, set off like this.
They get it while it’s there.
Keep watching and you’ll learn.
The Victor Hugo Clematis
In our garden, the Victor Hugo clematis
Grows among masses of small pink roses
Prettier than it is, but not as stately.
There’s a royal lustre to its purple petals:
Long splinters of amethyst
Arranged like the ribs of a Catherine wheel
In a disc that is almost all space,
And the edge of every petal
Is curved like the volutes in any of the four
