Angels Over Elsinore

by Clive James

  And no use asking if I would have died

  Had this one nailed me. When a man is bald

  And soon to face an aria from Tosca,

  It’s not as if he needs a pile of crap

  Dumped on his head from fifty thousand feet

  By some Stealth fowl. And spare me the assurance

  That it wipes off. I didn’t sign on for this.

  Tramps and Bowlers

  In the park in front of my place, every night

  A bunch of tramps sleep on the wooden porch

  Of the bowling green club-house. They shed no light.

  No policeman ever wakes them with a torch,

  Because no one reports their nightly stay.

  People like me who take an early walk

  Just after dawn will see them start the day

  By packing up. They barely even talk,

  Loading their duffel bags. They leave no trace,

  Thus proving some who sleep rough aren’t so dumb.

  Tramps blow their secret if they trash the place:

  This lot make sure that, when the bowlers come,

  There’s not a beer-can to pollute the scene.

  And so, by day, neat paragons of thrift

  And duty bow down to the very green

  Which forms, by night, for scruffs who merely drift,

  Their front lawn. If the bowlers only knew,

  For sure they’d put in for a higher fence.

  They’d have a point, but it would spoil the view

  More than the tramps will, if they have the sense

  To keep on cleaning up before they go,

  Protecting indolence with industry:

  A touch of what the bowlers value so.

  Which way of life is better? Don’t ask me –

  I chose both, so I’d be the last to know.

  Fires Burning, Fires Burning

  Over Hamburg

  The Lancaster crews could feel the heat

  Through the sides of the aircraft.

  The fire was six thousand feet high.

  At Birkenau

  When burning a lot of bodies, the SS found

  The thing to do was to put down a layer

  Of women first.

  They had more fat in them.

  In Tokyo

  Some people who survived in a canal

  Saw a horse on fire running through the streets.

  But few who saw it were left to remember anything:

  Even the water burned.

  In New York

  Some couples, given the choice

  Between the flames and a long fall,

  Outflanked the heat and went down holding hands.

  Come with me, you imagine the men saying,

  I know a quicker way.

  In Sydney

  Next to my mother’s coffin

  I gave thanks that she would shortly meet

  A different kind of fire,

  Having died first, and in due time.

  Yusra

  The Public Morals Unit of Hamas

  Saw Yusra al-Azzuri, bold as brass,

  In Gaza City, walk with her betrothed,

  Her sister also present. Half unclothed,

  All three behaved as if beyond the reach

  Of justice. Laughing, dancing on the beach,

  They almost touched. They thought to drive away.

  The Unit followed them without delay.

  Her young man drove. Beside him as they fled,

  Yusra died quickly in a hail of lead.

  The other two were hauled out of the car

  And beaten senseless. With an iron bar,

  The riddled corpse of Yusra, as the worst

  Offender, was assaulted till it burst.

  She would have prayed for death. It can be said,

  Therefore, it was a blessing she was dead

  Already. Thus we look for just one touch

  Of grace in this catastrophe. Too much

  To bear, the thought that those young men were glad

  To be there. Won’t the memory drive them mad?

  Could they not see the laughter in her face

  Was heaven on earth, the only holy place?

  Perhaps they guessed, and acted from the fear

  That Paradise is nowhere if not here.

  Yusra, your name too lovely to forget

  Shines like a sunrise joined to a sunset.

  The day between went with you. Where you are,

  That light around you is your life, Yusra.

  Private Prayer at Yasukuni Shrine

  An Oka kamikaze rocket bomb

  Sits in the vestibule, its rising sun

  Ablaze with pride.

  Names of the fallen are on CD-ROM.

  The war might have been lost. The peace was won:

  A resurrection after suicide.

  For once I feel the urge to send my thoughts

  Your way, as I suppose these people do.

  I see the tide

  Come in on Papua. Their troop transports,

  The beach, our hospital. Over to you:

  Why was one little miracle denied?

  After they made our nurses wade waist deep

  They picked their targets and they shot them all.

  The waves ran red.

  Somehow this is a memory I keep.

  I hear the lost cries of the last to fall

  As if I, too, had been among the dead.

  Those same troops fought south to the Golden Stairs,

  Where they were stopped. They starved, and finally

  The last few fed

  On corpses. And the victory would be theirs

  If I were glad? That’s what you’re telling me?

  It would have been in vain that your son bled?

  But wasn’t it? What were you thinking when

  Our daughters died? You couldn’t interfere,

  I hear you say.

  That must mean that you never can. Well, then,

  At least I know now that no prayers from here

  Have ever made much difference either way,

  And therefore we weren’t fighting you as well.

  Old people here saw the Missouri loom

  Out in the bay

  And thought the end had come. They couldn’t tell

  That the alternative to certain doom

  Would be pachinko and the cash to play

  A game of chance, all day and every day.

  In that bright shrine you really do preside.

  What you have said

  Comes true. The DOW is down on the Nikkei.

  The royal baby takes a buggy ride.

  The last war criminal will die in bed.

  Naomi from Namibia

  In the Brisbane Botanical Gardens,

  Walking the avenue of weeping figs,

  You can see exuded latex stain the bark

  Like adolescent sperm. A metamorphosis:

  The trunks must be full of randy boys.

  At home, the Java willows

  When planted alongside a watercourse

  Were said to stem the breeding of mosquitoes.

  Here, they have nothing else to do

  Except to stand there looking elegant

  In Elle McPherson lingerie.

  From the walkway through the mangrove mud-flats

  Spread south from overwhelming Asia,

  You can see the breathing tubes of Viet Cong crabs

  And imagine Arnie hiding from the Predator

  Like a mud-skipper playing possum,

  Although he did that, of course, in South America.

  Below the tangled branches, bubbles tick.

  For a century and a half, the giant banyan

  Has grown like a cathedral heading downwards,

  As a dumb Chartres might slowly dive for cover

  Through shallows clear as air. In India

  At least a dozen families would be dying

  By inches in its colonnades.

 
; At the kiosk, Naomi from Namibia

  Serves me a skimmed milk strawberry milkshake.

  She has come here to lead her ideal life,

  Like almost all these trees.

  They get to stay, but she has to go back.

  William Dobell’s Cypriot

  The Cypriot brought his wine-dark eyes with him

  Along with his skin and hair. He also brought

  That shirt. Swathes of fine fabric clothe a slim

  Frame with a grace bespeaking taste and thought.

  Australia, 1940. There were few

  Men native-born who had that kind of style.

  Hence the attention Dobell gave the blue

  Collar and cuffs, to make us pause awhile

  And see a presence that did not belong.

  This sitter, sitting here, caught by this hand?

  Caught beautifully. No, there is nothing wrong

  About this transportation to Queensland

  Of ancient subtleties. It’s merely odd.

  A man whom he had loved and seen asleep

  The painter painted naked, a Greek god.

  But then he had the sudden wit to keep

  The clothes, and thus the heritage, in the next

  Picture. A window from a men’s-wear store,

  It doubles as the greatest early text

  Of the immigration. What we were before

  Looks back through this to what we would become.

  We see a sense of nuance head our way

  To make the raw rich, complicate the sum

  Of qualities, prepare us for today.

  Now that the day is ours, the time arrives

  To remember destiny began as chance,

  And history is as frail as human lives.

  A young and foreign smile, love at first glance:

  Painter and painted possibly first met

  Just because one admired the other’s tie.

  A year old then, I live now in their debt.

  This is the way they live. I too will die.

  Ghost Train to Australia

  (Container Train in Landscape, 1983–84, by Jeffrey Smart)

  I won’t this time. Silent at last and shunted

  Into its siding in the Victorian Arts Centre,

  The container train started its journey in Yugoslavia

  Two years before it arrived in Gippsland

  Among trees that echo Albert Namatjira.

  The containers echo First World War dazzle paint

  Whose solid planes of colour fooled submarines.

  Everything in the picture echoes something,

  Yet it all belongs to the painter’s unifying vision.

  How does he do that? Perhaps as a consolation

  For not being Piero della Francesca

  And lacking Christ’s birth to celebrate in Arezzo,

  He can alter the order of modern history’s pages

  Though we might need our memories to catch him in the act:

  All trains in Europe, for example, even today,

  When they are drawn by electric locos and made of metal,

  Remind us of boxcars full of unbelieving people

  And the scenes on the platform when the train pulled in.

  No amount of lusciously applied colour

  Can cover all that stark grey squalor up

  Or take away the shadow on a train’s fate.

  Simply because it is a European train,

  Even if it goes all the way to Australia

  And terminates among the eucalypts

  In a lake of perfect sunlight the whole sky deep

  And everybody gets off and there are no searchlights

  Or whips or wolf-hounds or cold-eyed efficient doctors

  And the fathers go to work on the Snowy River

  And the mothers learn the lemon meringue pie

  And the children, after they have had their tonsils out,

  Get Shelley’s lemonade and vanilla ice-cream

  And all grow up to be captain of the school,

  And the local intellectuals fly in like fruit-bats

  To lecture the new arrivals about genocide,

  The train, the train, the wonderful train

  That found visas for all aboard and now finally sits

  Shining in the bush like five bob’s worth of sweets –

  Jaffas, Cherry Ripes, Hoadley’s Violet Crumble Bars

  Glittering in the original purple and gold wrappers –

  Is still the ghost train. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.

  Les Saw It First

  I swam across the creek at Inverell.

  The guard of jacarandas bled their blue

  Into the water. I recall it well,

  But partly I do that because of you.

  I was a city boy. A country trip

  Was rare, and so the memories were sparse.

  I helped to plait a cracker for a whip,

  But when I swung the thing it was a farce.

  At Tingha, where they used to mine the tin,

  I searched for sapphires all day and found none.

  I briefly rode a horse and barked my shin

  When I got off, and couldn’t stand the sun

  That bleached the fence-rails to a dry, pale grey

  A hundred years before and there they were,

  Just looking wooden and what can you say?

  Sit on a stump and blink into the blur.

  I had been long away when I looked back

  Through your books and at last saw what I’d seen:

  The blue-tongue in the gum beside the track,

  The headless black snake limp as Plasticine.

  The snake was in a trench they called a race.

  Somebody threw it there when it was dead.

  Now I remember how fear froze my face

  When, further on, I found its yawning head.

  The country built the city: now I know.

  Like it or not, it got to even me,

  And not just through the Royal Easter Show,

  But the hard yakka of its poetry.

  Now I can hear the shouts of the young men

  Out after rabbits with a .22.

  I wasn’t there long, but I’m there again,

  Collecting trinkets as the magpies do.

  It’s part of me, and partly because of you.

  Signed by the Artist

  The way the bamboo leans out of the frame,

  Some of its leaves cut short by the frame’s edge,

  Makes room for swathes of air which you would think,

  If it were sold in bolts, would drape like silk.

  Below, where one pond spills from the stone ledge

  Into the next, three carp as white as milk

  Glow through the water near the painter’s name,

  A stack of characters brushed in black ink.

  The open spaces and the spare detail

  Are both compressed into that signature:

  He made his name part of the work of art.

  Slice of crisp leaf, smooth flourish of fish fin

  Are there to show you he is very sure

  Of how the balance of things kept apart

  Can shape a distance. On a larger scale

  He still leaves out far more than he puts in.

  We’re lucky that he does. What he includes,

  Almost too beautiful to contemplate,

  Already hurts our hearts. Were he to fill

  The gaps, the mind would have no place to rest,

  No peace in the collected solitudes

  Of those three fish, in how each leaf is blessed

  With life. Easy to underestimate

  A name like his. No substance. Too much skill.

  Return of the Lost City

  How far was Plato free of that ‘inflamed

  Community’ he said we should avoid?

  Sofas, incense and hookers: these he named

  Among the habits not to be enjoyed,

  And if you did,
you ought to be ashamed.

  But can’t we tell, by how he sounds annoyed,

  That his Republic, planned on our behalf,

  Was where his own desires had the last laugh,

  If only as the motor for his sense

  Of discipline? Even the dreams were policed,

  By the Nocturnal Council. Such immense

  Powers of repression! What would be released

  Without them? The Republic was intense:

  The fear of relaxation never ceased.

  Hence the embargo on all works of art,

  However strict in form, that touched the heart.

  No poetry. No poets! No, not one –

  Not even Homer, if he were to be

  Reborn – could be admitted, lest the sun

  Set on the hard-won social harmony,

  And that obscene night-life which had begun

  In man’s first effort at society,

  Atlantis, should come flooding back, the way

  The sea did, or so story-tellers say.

  But Plato knew that they’d say anything:

  For money or applause or just a share

  Of an hetaera, they would dance and sing

  And turn the whole deal into a nightmare.

  The very prospect left him quivering

  With anger. There is something like despair

  Haunting the author of the ideal state,

  A taunting voice he heard while working late:

  Atlantis made you. It is what you know,

  Deep down. Atlantis and its pleasures drive

  Your thoughts. Atlantis never lets you go.

  Atlantis is where you are most alive –

  Yes, even you, you that despise it so,

  When all mankind would love it to arrive

  Again, the living dream you try to kill

  By making perfect. But you never will.

  Anniversary Serenade

  You are my alcohol and nicotine,

  My silver flask and cigarette machine.

  You watch and scratch my back, you scrub me clean.

  I mumble but you still know what I mean.

  Know what I mean?

  You read my thoughts, you see what I have seen.

  You are my egg-flip and my ego trip,

  My passion-fruit soufflé and strawberry whip.

  When the dawn comes to catch you on the hip

  I taste the sweet light on my fingertip.

  My fingertip?

  I lift it to my quivering lips and sip.

  Homecoming Queen and mother of our two

  Smart daughters who, thank God, take after you,

  This house depends on what you say and do –