It is. A sketchy dirt track through the trees
Leads to a pool just forty feet across
Connected to the sea at such a depth
That though as clear as air and always calm
It shades down into darkness. Sufferers
From vertigo can’t swim there. Parrotfish
Like clockwork paperweights on crystal shelves,
Their colour schemes preposterous, exchange
Positions endlessly. Shadows below
Look no more dense than purity compressed
Or light packed tight. Things were clear-cut
At that great moment of assault repulsed,
The victors proud yet chivalrous to a fault.
White flags, no matter how unsavoury
The hands that held them, were respected. Two
Of Batista’s most notorious torturers,
Still wearing their original dark glasses
(Through which they’d both looked forward to a prompt
Resumption of a glittering career),
Were singled out and shot, but otherwise
Nobody missed a change of socks. They all
Got shipped back undamaged to Miami –
A better deal than they’d have handed out.
That day the Cuban revolution showed
A cleanliness which in the memory
Dazzles the more for how it has been spoiled:
What had to happen sullied by what might
Have been avoided, had those flagrant beards
Belonged to wiser heads – or so we think,
We who were young and thrilled and now are neither.
Credit where credit’s due, though. Let’s be fair.
Children cut cane here still, but go to school,
And don’t get sick; or, if they do, don’t die.
La cienega is a charnel house no longer,
And in this pool, which they call El Cenote,
Young workers float at lunchtime like tree frogs
Poised on an air column. Things have improved
In some ways, so when they get worse in others
It’s easier to blame Reagan than accept
The plain fact that the concentrated power
Which makes sick babies well must break grown men –
The logic so obvious it’s blinding.
From armchairs far away we watch the brilliant
Picture grow dim with pain. On the Isle of Pines
The men who wear dark glasses late at night
Are back in business. Anyone smart enough
To build a raft from inner tubes and rope
Would rather run the gauntlet of the sharks
On the off-chance of encountering Florida
Than take the risk of listening to one more
Speech by Fidel – who, in his unrelenting
Urge to find friends among the non-aligned
Countries, now heaps praise on the regime
Of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Russian oil
Pollutes Havana. How opaque, we feel,
Those erstwhile glories have become, how sad –
Preferring, on the whole, to leave it there
Than enter beyond one long, ravished glance
That cistern filled with nothing but the truth,
Which we partake of but may not possess
Unless we go too deep and become lost,
By pressure of transparency confounded –
Trusting our eyes instead of turning back,
Drawn down by clarity into the dark,
Crushed by the prospect of enlightenment,
Our lungs bursting like a revelation.
The Artificial Horizon
Deus gubernat navem
The artificial horizon is no false dawn
But a tool to locate you in the sky.
A line has been drawn.
If it tilts, it is you that are awry.
Trust it and not your eye.
Or trust your eye, but no further than it goes
To the artificial horizon.
Only if that froze
Would you look out for something on the level
And pray you didn’t spot it too late.
To stay straight
You can’t just follow your nose –
Except when the true horizon’s there.
But how often is that?
The sea at sunset shades into the air.
A white cloud, a night black as your hat –
What ground you glimpse might be at an angle,
While looking flat.
So the artificial horizon is a court
And last resort:
A token world whose import is immense.
Though it seem unreal,
If it moves it can’t be broken.
Believe that it makes sense
Or else be brought up short.
The artificial horizon
Is your Dr Johnson:
It’s got its own slant.
It says clear your mind of cant.
What Happened to Auden
His stunning first lines burst out of the page
Like a man thrown through a windscreen. His flat drawl
Was acrid with the spirit of the age –
The spy’s last cigarette, the hungry sprawl
Of Hornby clockwork train sets in ‘O’ gauge,
Huge whitewashed slogans on a factory wall –
It was as if a spotlight when he spoke
Brilliantly pierced the histrionic smoke.
Unsentimental as the secret police,
Contemporary as a Dinky Toy,
On holiday in Iceland with MacNeice,
A flop-haired Cecil Beaton golden boy,
Auden pronounced like Pericles to Greece
The short time Europe had left to enjoy,
Yet made it sound as if impending doom
Could only ventilate the drawing room.
Splendidly poised above the ashtray’s rim,
The silver record-breaking aeroplane
For streamlined utterance could not match him.
Oblique but no more often than the rain,
Impenetrable only to the dim,
Neurotic merely not to be insane,
He seemed to make so much sense all at once
Anyone puzzled called himself a dunce.
Cricket pavilion lust looked a touch twee
Even to devotees, but on the whole,
Apart from harsh reviews in Scrutiny,
All hailed his triumph in Cassandra’s role,
Liking the chic he gave her, as if she
Wore ankle-strap high heels and a mink stole –
His ambiguity just further proof
Here was a man too proud to stand aloof.
By now, of course, we know he was in fact
As queer as a square grape, a roaring queen
Himself believing the forbidden act
Of love he made a meal of was obscene.
He could be crass and generally lacked tact.
He had no truck with personal hygiene.
The roughest trade would seldom stay to sleep.
In soiled sheets he was left alone to weep.
From the Kurfürstendamm to far Shanghai
He cruised in every sense with Isherwood.
Sadly he gave the talent the glad eye
And got out while the going was still good.
New York is where his genius went to die
Say those who disapproved, but though they could
Be right that he lost much of his allure,
Whether this meant decline is not so sure.
Compatriots who stuck it out have said
Guilt for his getaway left him unmanned,
Whereat his taproot shrivelled and went dead,
Having lost contact with its native land.
Some say it was the sharing of his bed
With the one ma
n nobody else could stand
That did him in, since poets can’t afford
The deadly risk of conjugal concord.
But Chester made bliss hard enough to take,
And Wystan, far from pining for his roots,
Gaily tucked into the unrationed steak.
An international figure put out shoots.
Stravinsky helped the progress of the rake:
Two cultural nabobs were in cahoots.
No, Auden ageing was as much at home
On the world stage as Virgil was in Rome,
If less than salonfähig still. Regret
By all accounts he sparingly displayed
When kind acquaintances appeared upset,
Their guest rooms wrecked as if by an air raid.
He would forgive himself and soon forget.
Pig-like he revelled in the mess he made,
Indecorous the more his work lost force,
Devoid of shame. Devoured, though, by remorse,
For had he not gazed into the abyss
And found, as Nietzsche warned, that it gazed back?
His wizardry was puerile next to this.
No spark of glamour touched the railway track
That took whole populations to the hiss
Of cyanide and stoked the chimney stack
Scattering ash above a vast expanse
Of industry bereft of all romance.
The pit cooled down but still he stood aghast
At how far he had failed to state the case
With all those tricks that now seemed so half-arsed.
The inconceivable had taken place.
Waking to find his wildest dreams outclassed
He felt his tongue must share in the disgrace,
And henceforth be confined, in recompense,
To no fine phrase devoid of plain prose sense.
The bard unstrung his lyre to change his tune,
Constrained his inspiration to repent.
Dry as the wind abrading a sand dune,
A tightly drafted letter of intent,
Each rubric grew incisive like a rune,
Merest suggestions became fully meant.
The ring of truth was in the level tone
He forged to fit hard facts and praise limestone.
His later manner leaves your neck-hair flat,
Not standing up as Housman said it should
When poetry has been achieved. For that,
In old age Auden simply grew too good.
A mortal fear of talking through his hat,
A moral mission to be understood
Precisely, made him extirpate the thrill
Which, being in his gift, was his to kill.
He wound up as a poor old fag at bay,
Beleaguered in the end as at the start
By dons appalled that he could talk all day
And not draw breath although pissed as a fart,
But deep down he had grown great, in a way
Seen seldom in the history of his art –
Whose earthly limits Auden helped define
By realizing he was not divine.
Last Night the Sea Dreamed It Was Greta Scacchi
Last night the sea dreamed it was Greta Scacchi.
It wakes unruffled, lustrous, feeling sweet –
Not one breath of scandal has ever touched it.
At a higher level, the rain has too much power.
Grim clouds conspire to bring about its downfall.
The squeeze is on, there is bound to be a shake-out.
The smug sea and the sky that will soon go bust
Look like antagonists, but don’t be fooled:
They understand each other very well.
We are caught between the hammer and the anvil.
Our bodies, being umpteen per cent water,
Are in this thing up to the neck at least.
If you want to feel detached from a panorama,
Try the Sahara. Forget about Ayers Rock –
The sea was once all over it like a rash.
The water in the opal makes it lovely,
Also unlucky. If not born in October
You might be wearing a cloudburst for a pendant.
The ban on flash photography is lifted.
The reception area expectantly lights up.
No contest. It’s just life. Don’t try to fight it –
You’ll only get wet through, and we are that
Already. Every dimple in the swell
Is a drop in the ocean, but then who isn’t?
No, nothing about women is more sensual
Than their sea smell. Look at her lying there,
Taking what comes and spreading it on her skin –
The cat, she’s using her cream as moisturizer.
Milt Jackson’s mallets bounce on silver leaves.
Strafed by cool riffs she melts in silent music:
Once we walked out on her, but we’ll be back.
Drama in the Soviet Union
When Kaganovich, brother-in-law of Stalin,
Left the performance barely halfway through,
Meyerhold must have known that he was doomed,
Yet ran behind the car until he fell.
In Pravda he’d been several times condemned
For Stubborn Formalism. The ill will
Of the All Highest himself was common knowledge,
Proved by a mud slide of denunciations
And rubbed in by the fact that the Great Teacher
Had never personally entered the theatre
Which this enemy of the people had polluted
With attitudes hostile to the State.
Thus Meyerhold was a dead man of long standing:
Behind the big black car it was a corpse
That ran, a skull that gasped for air,
Bare bone that flailed and then collapsed.
His dear friend Shostakovich later said
How glad he was that he had never seen
Poor Meyerhold like that. Which was perhaps
Precisely why this giant of his art
Did such a thing: to dramatize the fear
Which had already eaten him alive
And make it live.
Stalin, meanwhile,
Who didn’t need to see how it was done
To know that the director’s trick of staging
A scene so it could never be forgotten
Had to be stamped on, was the acknowledged master
Of the one theatrical effect that mattered –
He knew how to make people disappear.
So Meyerhold, having limped home, plummeted
Straight through the trapdoor to oblivion.
Nobody even registered surprise.
Specific memories were not permitted.
People looked vague, as if they didn’t have them.
In due course his widow, too, was murdered –
Stabbed in the eyes, allegedly by thieves.
Budge up
Flowering cherry pales to brush-stroke pink at blossom fall
Like watermelon bitten almost to the rind.
It is in his mind because the skin is just that colour
Hot on her tight behind
As she lies in the bath, a Bonnard flipped like a flapjack.
His big black towel turns a naiad to a dryad,
No pun intended. Then,
An unwrapped praline,
She anoints herself with liberal Oil of Ulay.
It looks like fun.
Her curved fingers leave a few streaks not rubbed in.
He says: here, let me help.
The night is young but not as young as she is
And he is older than the hills.
Sweet sin
Swallows him at a gulp.
While cherry blossom suds dry on the lawn
Like raspberry soda
He attends the opening of the blue tulip
Mobbed at the stage
door by forget-me-nots.
For a short season
He basks in her reflected glory.
Pathetic fallacy,
Dispelled by the clattering plastic rake.
Bring Me the Sweat of Gabriela Sabatini
Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini
For I know it tastes as pure as Malvern water,
Though laced with bright bubbles like the acqua minerale
That melted the kidney stones of Michelangelo
As sunlight the snow in spring.
Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini
In a green Lycurgus cup with a sprig of mint,
But add no sugar –
The bitterness is what I want.
If I craved sweetness I would be asking you to bring me
The tears of Annabel Croft.
I never asked for the wristbands of Maria Bueno,
Though their periodic transit of her glowing forehead
Was like watching a bear’s tongue lap nectar.
I never asked for the blouse of Françoise Durr,
Who refused point-blank to improve her soufflé serve
For fear of overdeveloping her upper arm –
Which indeed remained delicate as a fawn’s femur,
As a fern’s frond under which cool shadows gather
So that the dew lingers.
Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini
And give me credit for having never before now
Cried out with longing.
Though for all the years since TV acquired colour
To watch Wimbledon for even a single day
Has left me shaking with grief like an ex-smoker
Locked overnight in a cigar factory,
Not once have I let loose as now I do
The parched howl of deprivation,
The croak of need.
Did I ever demand, as I might well have done,
The socks of Tracy Austin?
Did you ever hear me call for the cast-off Pumas
Of Hana Mandlikova?
Think what might have been distilled from these things,
And what a small request it would have seemed –
It would not, after all, have been like asking
For something so intimate as to arouse suspicion