CLIVE JAMES
Injury Time
PICADOR
To the nurses, doctors and staff of
Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, England:
with all my thanks for these unexpected recent years.
simplex munditiis
Plain in thy neatness.
– Horace
An author is not to write all he can, but only all he ought.
– Dryden
Foreword
When I locked up the final text for my previous volume of short poems, Sentenced to Life, I thought, rather grandly, that there would be no time left except perhaps for a long poem that might gain in poignancy by being left unfinished. I should have known better than to flirt with the metallic music of downed tools. Before my avowedly last collection was even in proof, new short poems had begun to arrive, and after a year or so it was already evident that they might add up to a book, once I solved the problem of how to write about, say, the death of Ayrton Senna. (Surely an appropriate obsequy would need a thousand-horsepower sound-track.) In my experience, it’s never a book before certain key themes have been touched on, but once they are, it always is, or anyway it’s going to be. It helps, of course, to have a publisher who thinks the same; and on that point Don Paterson at Picador was once again the ideal mentor.
For this collection, I have kept the rule of providing notes at the end of the volume, but only if they help to explain factual points that might be obscure. If the note explained the poem itself, the poem would be incomplete. In my later stages I have got increasingly keen on that precept. Explaining itself is what a poem does. Helping me to be certain that any new project really did have something intelligible to say for itself, David Free, Stephen Edgar, Tom Stoppard, my wife Prue Shaw and my elder daughter Claerwen James saw nearly all these poems in their early stages, and often I would also run them past Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. Though not all of these busy people thought everything I had written was marvellous, if any of them showed doubts it was always enough to make me think twice. But the day has not yet quite arrived when circulation by e-mail will count as tending an audience. Print still rules, and finally the editors of the periodicals will have to see and judge what the author fancies to be a finished product.
Once again I must especially thank Alan Jenkins of the TLS, Dan Johnson of Standpoint, Paul Muldoon of the New Yorker, Tom Gatti of the New Statesman, Sam Leith of the Spectator and Les Murray of Quadrant, while welcoming a new and generous grandee to my range of principal editorial mentors: Sandy McClatchy of the Yale Review. I should also thank the Kenyon Review, one of whose operatives has only just now written to discuss a printing schedule for a couple of poems that I can’t remember having sent. I go to sleep and dream of editorial ninjas breaking into my study and microfilming the MS of the unfinished epic in my bottom drawer. Remembering how wrong I turned out to be when I thought the poems in Sentenced to Life would be my last, I should say at this point that I had to think twice before giving this book a title suggesting that the game might soon be over. As it happens, I am writing this introductory note on the morning after an operation at Addenbrooke’s in which items of machinery – some of them, in my imagination, as big as the USS Nimitz – had been sent sailing up my interior in search of organic damage. I would have liked to be awake, in order to pick up the running commentary of my lavish range of nurses and surgeons. Alas, the relaxing agent they had given me relaxed me all the way to sleep, so the only interesting dialogue I heard was from the actors in Fantastic Voyage, which, by a trick of senescent memory, had been running in my waking brain for days beforehand, and was now running, even more vividly, in the depths of my slumber. From dreams of Raquel Welch navigating between the platelets I awoke to be told that I could once again safely have breakfast.
Or perhaps even safely begin writing something new. And indeed even now, a full six years into the trajectory of my dying fall, I do still have plans for other books, including a funeral oratorio which might celebrate at some length the very fact that my confidently forecast imminent demise turned out to be not as imminent as all that. There could also be a clinching volume of memoirs, its credibility endorsed by the bark of a Luger from my study late at night.
But I can be fairly sure that I am by now more or less done with the short lyrics. They take more concentration, and therefore more energy, than any other form of writing. I used always to keep the rule that if a poem started forming in my head then I should stick with it until it was finished. Here in my hideout in the Cambridge fens, in the middle of a dreary winter, with the prospect of further medical intervention retreating only to loom again, that rule begins to look too expensive. I can still imagine myself, however, feeling compelled to break it. Finally a poem can demand to be read only because it demanded to be written, and it is notable that the dying Hamlet is still balancing his phrases even when young Fortinbras has arrived outside in the lobby. At one stage I thought of calling this little volume The Rest Is Silence, but that would have been to give myself airs. It is quite pretentious enough to evoke the image of an exhausted footballer still plugging away with legs like lead.
Cambridge, 2017
Contents
Return of the Kogarah Kid
Anchorage International
Hiatus
Visitation of the Dove
The Gardener in White
This Coming Winter
Finch Conference
The Rest is Silence
Edith Piaf on YouTube
A Heritage of Trumpets
Panis Angelicus
Sweet Disaster
Declaration of Intent
Initial Outlay
Night-Walker’s Song
Final Reminder
Carpentry of the Quatrain
Head Wound
Candy Windows
Elephant in the Room
Quiet Passenger
In Your Own Time
The Back of My Hand
Ibrutinib
Side Effects of Medication
Not Forgetting George Russell
Imminent Catastrophe
Splinters from Shakespeare
Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub
Sunt lacrimae rerum
Choral Service from Westminster Abbey
Ayrton Senna Killed at Imola
Verse Letter
Aldeburgh Dawn
Too Many Poets
Apotheosis at the Signing Table
Recollected in Tranquillity
The Dark Roses
Summer Surprised Us
Tactics of the Air Battle
The Gods Make Mischief
The Smocking Brick
Intergalactic Junket
Front Flip Half Twist
Use of Space
Photo File
Injury Time
This Being Done
Notes on the Text
Letter to a Young Poet
Return of the Kogarah Kid
Here I began and here I reach the end.
From here my ashes go back to the sea
And take my memories of every friend
And love, and anything still dear to me,
Down to the darkness out of which the sun
Will rise again, this splendour never less:
Fated to be, when all is said, and done,
For others to recall and curse or bless
The way that time runs out but still comes in,
The new tide always ready to begin.
Do the gulls cry in triumph, or distress?
In neither, for they cry because they must,
Not knowing this is glory, unaware
Their time will come to leave it. It
is just
That we, who learned to breathe the brilliant air
And first were told that we were made of dust
Here in this city, yet went out across
The globe to find fame, should return one day
To trade our gains against a certain loss –
And sink from sight where once we sailed away.
Anchorage International
In those days Russia was still closed. My flight
Would cross the Pole and land at Anchorage
To refuel. Many times, by day or night,
I watched them shine or blink, that pilgrimage
Of planes descending from the stratosphere
Down some steep trail. As if I’d come to stay,
I lived in that lounge, neither there nor here:
The still point of transition. I would pay
For drinks with cash, it was so long ago –
But now, again, it is a place I know.
I’ve changed a lot, but these seats look the same,
Except there are so few of us who wait.
It’s like a party but nobody came.
There is no voice that calls us to the gate,
For no procession interrupts the sky.
It seems that this time I will not move on.
I have arrived. With nowhere left to fly,
I need not leave: I have already gone.
There’s almost nothing left to think about
Except the swirl of snow as I look out.
Here in this neutral zone at last we learn
That all our travelling must come to rest
In stillness: no way forward, no return.
We once thought to keep moving might be best
Until we reached the end, but it was there
From the beginning. Darkness gave the dawn
Its inward depth. The lights in the night air
That came down slowly were us, being born
Alive. The silver points in the pale blue
Of daylight were us dying. Both were true.
I bought your small white boxes marked Chanel
At Anchorage. I must have used a card.
Did I? I can’t remember very well.
In these last, feeble days I find it hard
To fix a detail of the way things were
And set it in its time. Soon there will be
Only one final thing left to occur,
One little thing. You need not fear for me:
It can’t hurt. Of that much I can be sure.
I know this place. I have been here before.
Hiatus
In February, winter was undone.
Day after day a honeysuckle sun
Glowed in the windows. Though the nights were long,
And from one bird song to the next bird song
Took half the morning, still it worked like spring.
I breathed the yielding air and felt it bring
My lost life back to me, at least in part:
The one intact component that I’ve got –
From breaking at the thought that I might not
Summon the strength to see the season through
And all the sweet world properly made new.
We old and ill must measure time that way.
When young, we scarcely saw the interplay
Of life and the surrounding atmosphere:
We just lived in it. Now the truth is here:
Existence wants us gone. The oxygen
We once wolfed down now fuels a fire, and when
The air is cold the flames reach deep within,
Reminding us that we can never win
This battle. Only let the air turn mild,
However, and the power of hope runs wild:
It makes a fool of me, as if I could
Begin again, and be both strong and good.
Another month, and still the freeze is slow
To come back to the lawns and wreck their show
Of ground-based blooms. But I have seen before
How March can throw a quick switch, and restore
The temperature to what it ought to be
In any keyhole not blocked with a key,
And how the caught-out flowers pay the cost
Of misplaced confidence. Felled by the frost,
Here without leave and gone without a fight,
Where do they go? They vanish overnight.
This time, perhaps not. Maybe death will take
A whole new attitude, just for my sake.
Visitation of the Dove
Night is at hand already: it is well
That we yield to the night. So Homer sings,
As if there were no Heaven and no Hell,
But only peace.
The grey dove comes down in a storm of wings
Into my garden where seeds never cease
To be supplied as if life fits a plan
Where needs are catered to. One need is not:
I do not wish to leave yet. If I can
I will stay on
And see another autumn, having got
This far with all my strength not yet quite gone.
When Phèdre, dying, says that she can see
Already not much more than through a cloud,
She adds that death has taken clarity
Out of her eyes
To give it to the world. Behold my shroud!
This brilliance in the garden. The dove flies.
The Gardener in White
The Reaper sobers you. You will be stirred
By just how serious you tend to get
When he draws near and has his quiet word.
His murmur is the closest you’ve heard yet
To someone heavy calling in a debt.
No gun, no flick-knife: none of that gangster thing.
Just you, him, and the fear that you might die,
As the fluff-ball tern chick under its mother’s wing
Senses the black-back gull in the clear sky,
And shivers from the knowledge in its blood.
The end of life is like a flower’s bud
Formed from the code of its unfolding bloom,
Which carries, in its turn, the burst of light
That lies ahead, the blinding crack of doom
When petals in the rain are shaken dry
By the whisper of the Gardener in White.
This Coming Winter
This coming winter I will say goodbye –
In case I do not live to see the spring –
To all my loved ones one by one. That way,
Taking my time each time, I need not be
Besieged at the last hour, with the fine thing
Eluding me that I wished to convey
To each face, always granted I could tell
Which one was which as they, around my bed,
Vied not to notice that my mouth no more
Could shape the easy phrase. Nothing said well
To suit the occasion: mutterings instead,
And then not even those. No, long before
That night I’ll call them separately aside
And speak my heart so as to save my pride
From injury when I search for a word
And finally words fail me. All will hear
My fond farewells ahead of time, save one:
Only my granddaughter will not have heard
How sad I am to bow out. Not from fear
Of hurting her will I leave this undone:
My aim is otherwise. I’d like to keep
Her thinking that I’m in some way still there
When she laughs, as we did together when
Basil in all his tallness took a steep
Dive as he rushed behind the counter. Where
Was Manuel? She knew. Basil forgot again!
Miraculous, the way she understood
That how the scene was built
made it so good.
Let me be part, then, of her memory
Each time the comedy of life strikes her
As wonderful. In that way to live on
Is my wish, though I’ll not be there to see
A single giggle. That my last days were
Lit by her friendship until I was gone
Is not for me to tell her, at her age.
Let any last words that she hears from me
Be about Johnny English and the scene
In which he wrecks the sushi bar. A page
Of my book will turn soon, and it might be
The last, but I would want my death to mean
No more to her than our shared sense of doom
When Basil takes charge of the dining room.
Until that day, and never before then,
Let there be no big talk of what is lost
When one friend stays, the other goes away,
And all their sprightly chat comes to an end.
Think rather of the continuity
Prepared for her if she, in times to come,
At any moment when her heart is light,
Should cast her mind back to these laughing hours
And think me part of them. A tiny part
Will do. She’ll have her own concerns.
There must be independence for the heart:
It is by cutting loose that the mind learns,
And therefore, wishing to transfer my powers –
To give her, for her life, the memory
Of how I laughed when she made fun of me –
I shall renounce them at the fall of night
As I move on to find Elysium.
Finch Conference
Known as a charm, the bunch of goldfinches,
Polished so prettily from head to heels,
Do girl-group step routines like the Ronettes.
You would not be astonished if Phil Spector
Showed up by limo to collect the money.
The chaffinch arrives solo like Karsavina
On the first night of The Firebird in Paris,
When no one credited her speed on stage.
If she would just stay still, that russet bodice
Would look like satin dyed and draped by Bakst.
After her triumph, in the dressing room,
The new star, sitting down to darn her tights,
Was told that from now on she didn’t have to.