by Clive James
It left me with pursed lips and shaking head,
Surprised they even bothered
And full of pity for the royal children
Deceived by their bonanza every Christmas –
A wampum headband set with amethysts,
A solid silver tomahawk –
Into equating workmanship with wealth.
Full of boutiques that try to do the same,
The Strand Arcade is still there,
Commendably preserved if over-polished,
But the train is gone for good –
Except where, in my mind,
Forever turning back and yet forever
Continuing its tour d’horizon
Of a world threatened by a race of giants,
It snickers behind the glass
I stained with the acid of my fingertips.
Grace Cossington Smith’s Harbour Bridge
Grace Cossington Smith, Grace Cossington Smith,
Your name is yet one to be conjuring with.
You painted the Bridge well before it was finished
And still the excitement remains undiminished,
Your patchwork of pigments enhancing its myth.
Grace Cossington Smith, Grace Cossington Smith,
Your skill was the essence, the fulcrum and pith
Of all that we love about classical art
Embracing the modern and making it part
Of the total adventure that starts in the heart.
Crace Cossington Smith, Grace Cossington Smith,
Your moniker honours your kin and your kith.
The studies you made of the Bridge uncompleted
Add up to a triumph that can’t be repeated:
The lattice-work elements reach for each other
Like Damon and Pythias, brother to brother,
Imprinting the sky with the future before it
Was certain, and you were the one who foresaw it.
The polychrome grains of our grey megalith –
You put them together, Grace Cossington Smith.
Belated Homage to Derek Walcott
You made me think last night. Your lines about
How people on those islands you evoke
As easily as blowing smoke
Could not look down from high ground to the sea,
Or even see a cargo ship, without
Fear of the worst, reminded me –
Reminded me I still need the reminder –
That my own ships and oceans linked a kinder
Imperium. Though free for generations
The crime’s descendants are not free of that –
The open water is for drowning in.
Embarked now for the erstwhile ruling nations,
The migrant’s back still hears the spitting cat.
He looks up through the grille at the least grin
Of condescension. Railway station porters
With one impatient word rape teenage daughters –
Terror invades perception when it gives
That tinge of death to where your verse most lives,
In the lost luxuriance
Of how you, growing up, were made to feel
By history that your childhood was unreal
Because the actual so usurped romance
That even the sweet white of breaking waves –
Their stately bridal veils of spray –
Looked startling as the bones of broken slaves:
Unsleeping infrastructure of the trance
The tourist brochures lovingly display,
Taking your time out of their time away.
You made me think last night, but not today.
Today I found out that a girl I know
Was bailed up by two little boys in hoods
Who claimed their hidden knives were not for show.
She made a weapon of her front-door key.
They took off. No doubt short of worldly goods
Through no fault of their own, they make me long
To see them kicked and whipped. Don’t get me wrong:
Where she lives, there are whites the same age worse.
But let’s not kid ourselves. Race is a curse,
And at a time like this it curses me.
To put it bluntly, I don’t think at all.
Terror invades perception:
Reaction, ruled by what we first recall,
Enrols an ethnic type without exception
Among the threats to life, as it must do
Even for you. Tell me that isn’t so.
Hand on your heart and say it isn’t true.
You made me think last night. How can I know
Your deepest wish is not for me to go
To Hell? Should I pretend I understand
What it feels like, before the burning sand
And scalding water teach me how to die
Day in, day out, under that pretty sky?
Before I, too, can hear in the surf’s roar
The landlady’s slammed door,
Can see the lynch mob strutting with the gulls
Gathered among the hulls
Of yachts whose owners don’t just patronise
A raw colonial, but spurn my hand
And still would if it held the Nobel Prize –
Proof of my right to land
Having sailed so far, and, stranger yet, survived
A setting out from which so few arrived,
And fewer still thrived, on the further shore?
I know: I should have thought of this before.
When We Were Kids
When we were kids we fought in the mock battle
With Ned Kelly cap guns and we opened the cold bottle
Of Shelley’s lemonade with a Scout belt buckle.
We cracked the passion fruit and sipped the honeysuckle.
When we were kids we lit the Thundercracker
Under the fruit tin and we sucked the all day sucker.
We opened the shoe box to watch the silk-worms spinning
Cocoons of cirrus with oriental cunning.
When we were kids we were sun-burned to a frazzle.
The beach was a griddle, you could hear us spit and sizzle.
We slept face down when our backs came out in blisters.
Teachers were famous for throwing blackboard dusters.
When we were kids we dive-bombed from the tower.
We floated in the inner tube, we bowled the rubber tyre.
From torn balloons we blew the cherry bubble.
Blowing up Frenchies could get you into trouble.
When we were kids we played at cock-a-lorum.
Gutter to gutter the boys ran harum-scarum.
The girls ran slower and their arms and legs looked funny.
You weren’t supposed to drink your school milk in the dunny.
When we were kids the licorice came in cables.
We traded Hubba-Bubba bubblegum for marbles.
A new connie-agate was a flower trapped in crystal
Worth just one go with a genuine air pistol.
When we were kids we threw the cigarette cards
Against the wall and we lined the Grenadier Guards
Up on the carpet and you couldn’t touch the trifle
Your Aunt Marge made to go in the church raffle.
When we were kids we hunted the cicada.
The pet cockatoo bit like a barracuda.
We were secret agents and fluent in pig Latin.
Gutsing on mulberries made our lips shine like black satin.
When we were kids we caught the Christmas beetle.
Its brittle wings were gold-green like the wattle.
Our mothers made bouquets from frangipani.
Hard to pronounce, a pink musk-stick cost a penny.
When we were kids we climbed peppercorns and willows.
We startled the stingrays when we waded in the shallows.
We mined the sand dunes in search
of buried treasure,
And all this news pleased our parents beyond measure.
When we were kids the pus would wet the needle
When you dug out splinters and a piss was called a piddle.
The scabs on your knees would itch when they were ready
To be picked off your self-renewing body.
When we were kids a year would last forever.
Then we grew up and were told it was all over.
Now we are old and the memories returning
Are like the last stars that fade before the morning.
Only Divine
Always the Gods learned more from humankind
Than vice versa. So it was bound to be:
It takes a troubled heart to make a mind.
Stuck with their beautiful stupidity,
The Gods were peeved to find themselves outclassed
Even in pleasure, which was their best thing.
Sky-walking Zeus, the Bright One, was aghast
To find that men could laugh and weep and sing
For love, instead of merely chasing tail
The way he did when he came down to earth:
Driving his lightning bolt in like a nail,
Shouting the place down with unsubtle mirth.
Sometimes he stole earth-men’s identities.
His acrobatics in a borrowed face
Drew some applause for their raw power to please
But none at all for foreplay, tact or grace.
By Jove! By Jupiter! He heard the names
Men gave him change. The world grew less impressed
Than he was with his simple fun and games,
The gold medallions on his hairy chest.
Back in the clouds, he brooded for as long
As Gods can. If he couldn’t have the tears
Of mortals, he could copy a love song.
To learn one took him several hundred years,
But time, like sorrow, doesn’t count up there.
He got quite good at it, and now he sings
Sinatra standards that sound pretty fair
Against a backing track complete with strings.
Virgin Minerva, born out of his brain
To stave off Vulcan with a single slap,
Borrowed more fetching versions of disdain
Better designed to milk the thunderclap
Of lust. Her heavenly suitors pay for shoes
She might wear only once, or not at all.
Pretending they know how it feels to lose,
Prospective lovers, outside in the hall,
Compare TAG Heuer watches while they scuff
Their Gucci loafers on the marble floor.
In love, real men have taught them, things get rough:
A show of grief might get you through her door.
Inside, she lies back on her Zsa-Zsa pink
Chaise-longue while Aphrodite dishes dirt.
Feigning to taste the whisky sours they drink,
They smile as if a memory could hurt.
Does Atlas need those Terminator shades?
Poseidon’s wet-suit, what good does it do?
Is gold-crowned Phoebe on her roller blades
Really as cute as when the world was new?
And here comes Hera in her Britney kit,
And there goes Hermes on his superbike.
The stuff they have! You wouldn’t credit it,
And all top of the range. What are they like?
Like us, without the creativity
Stirred by the guilt that hangs around our necks.
Their only care the void of their carefree
Millennia of unprotected sex,
Uncomprehendingly they quote our books.
Their gull-wing sports cars and their Gulfstream jets,
The bling-bling wasted on their perfect looks –
It’s all ours. Gleaming as their long sun sets,
The Gods are gaudy tatters of a plan
Hatched by our ancestors to render fate
More bearable. They end as they began,
Belittled in our thoughts that made them great.
Lock Me Away
In the NHS psychiatric test
For classifying the mentally ill
You have to spell ‘world’ backwards.
Since I heard this, I can’t stop doing it.
The first time I tried pronouncing the results
I got a sudden flaring picture
Of Danny La Rue in short pants
With his mouth full of marshmallows.
He was giving his initial and surname
To a new schoolteacher.
Now every time I read the Guardian
I find its columns populated
By a thousand mumbling drag queens.
Why, though, do I never think
Of a French film composer
(Georges Delerue, pupil of
Darius Milhaud, composed the waltz
In Hiroshima, Mon Amour)
Identifying himself to a policeman
After being beaten up?
But can I truly say I never think of it
After I’ve just thought of it?
Maybe I’m going stun:
Dam, dab and dangerous to wonk.
You realise this ward you’ve led me into
Spelled backwards is the cloudy draw
Of the ghost-riders in the sky?
Listen to this palindrome
And tell me that it’s not my ticket out.
Able was I ere I saw Elba.
Do you know who I am, Dr Larue?
Bigger than a Man
Bigger than a man, the wedding tackle
Of the male blue whale is a reminder
There can be potent spouses who stay true.
As he nuzzles up behind her
He gives hard evidence that he is always keen,
And when they have lain face to face awhile
Like two blimps that have seen The Blue Lagoon,
He brings the Sunday papers up to bed.
With a whole globe of ocean for a boudoir
Their pillow talk has not been much recorded,
But there have been some transcripts:
‘Baweeng bok eeng,’ he sings, and she:
‘Baweeng chock. Eeng bawok eeng chunk.’
Some experts think that ‘eeng’ must mean ‘again’:
She asks for more of what he always gives.
Well, that would fit, as his impressive member
Lodges in her blancmange-lined sleeping bag.
There are no blue whale marriage guidance counsellors
Except perhaps one, seen alone near Cape Town.
She sang ‘eeng’, always with a plangent cadence.
She sang ‘eeng’ only. ‘Eeng eeng. Eeng eeng eeng.’
Publisher’s Party
(for Posy Simmonds)
Young ladies beautiful as novelists
Were handing out the nibbles and the drinks.
Butch writers with bald heads and hairy wrists
Exchanged raised eyebrows, nudges, knowing winks,
Hints broader than their beams.
The tall dark knockout who prowled like a lynx
With the chicken satay cooled the optimists –
Her polite smile said as if and in your dreams.
One writer never sought her violet eyes.
He concentrated on the parquet floor.
Ungainly yet of no impressive size,
Lacking in social skills, licensed to bore,
He was the kind of bloke
A girl like her would normally ignore,
Unless, of course, he’d won the Booker Prize.
Alas, he had. I can’t think of a joke –
Only of how she lingered there until
He woke up to the full force of her looks;
Of how we rippled with a jealous thrill,
All those of us who’d also written books
Out of an inn
er need;
And now a panel-game of hacks and crooks
Had staked him out for her to stalk and kill –
As if the man could write, and she could read.
They live in Docklands now: a top-floor flat
They can see France from. Yes, they live there, too:
A house in the Dordogne. Stuff like that
I honestly don’t care about, do you?
But then I see her face
Beside his in the papers. Strange, but true –
Blind chance that picked his fame out of a hat
Had perfect vision when it gave him grace.
My new book’s hopeless and I’m getting fat.
Literary Lunch
Reciting poetry by those you prize –
Auden, MacNeice, Yeats, Stevens, Charlotte Mew –
I trust my memory and watch your eyes
To see if you know I am wooing you
With all these stolen goods. Of course you do.
Across the table, you know every line
Does service for a kiss or a caress.
Words taken out of other mouths, in mine
Are a laying on of hands in formal dress,
And your awareness measures my success
While marking out its limits. You may smile
For pleasure, confident my love is pure:
What would have been an exercise in guile
When I was young and strong, is now for sure
Raised safely to the plane of literature,
Where you may take it as a compliment
Unmixed with any claims to more delight
Than your attention. Such was my intent
This morning, as I planned what to recite
Just so you might remember me tonight,
When you are with the man who has no need
Of any words but his, or even those:
The only poem that he cares to read
Is open there before him. How it flows
He feels, and how it starts and ends he knows.
At School with Reg Gasnier
Gasnier had soft hands that the ball stuck to
And a body swerve off either foot
That just happened, you couldn’t see him think.
He wasn’t really knock-kneed
But he looked that way when he ran,
With his studded ankles flailing sideways
Like the hubcaps of a war chariot.
At tackling practice we went at him in despair
And either missed or fell stunned,
Our foreheads dotted with bleeding sprig-marks.
So glorious were his deeds
That the testimonials at school assembly
On the day after the match
Went on like passages from Homer.
