Clive James - The River in the Sky

CLIVE JAMES The River in the Sky PICADOR For Prue Contents The River in the Sky All is not lost, despite the quietness That comes like nightfall now as the last strength Ebbs from my limbs, and feebleness of breath Makes even focusing my eyes a task As when, before the merciful excision Of my mist-generating cataracts, The money-spiders dwindled in their webs Between one iron spandrel and the next On my flagstone verandah, each frail web The intermittent image of a disc That glittered like the Facel Vegas wheel Still spinning when Camus gave up his life, Out past the journeys edge. Just such a dish, Set off with dew-drops like pin-points of chrome, Monopolises my attention here In Cambridge as I sit wrapped in the quiet, Stock still and planning my last strategies For how I will employ these closing hours. But no complaints. Simply because enforced, This pause is valuable. Few people read Poetry any more but I still wish To write its seedlings down, if only for the lull Of gathering: no less a harvest season For being the last time. The same frail wheel Could decorate my fathers clean white headstone In the cemetery at Sai Wan Bay, Hong Kong: One of my gateways to the infinite First built when I was just a little child And flew a silver Spitfire through the flowers Clumps of nasturtiums sopping with their perfume As if they were low-lying, coloured clouds There in Jannali, in the summer heat.

Now, one last time, my fragile treasures link Together in review. In ancient days Men in my job prepared for endless travel Across the sea of stars, where Pharaoh sailed To immortality, but now we know This is no journey. A long, aching pause Is all the voyage there will ever be. Already it is not like life. I shant Caress the haeterae of Naukrates, Only their images: paint on a wall, Not vivid like a bowl of porphyry, But pale, chipped, always fading. Here forgive me When you come kindly visiting, as both Our daughters do, for you three built the start Of this tomb when you helped me weed my books And then arrange the ones left, walls of colour The sunlight will titrate from spring to autumn.

Rich shelves of them, these lustrous codices, Are the first walls I see now in the morning After the trek downstairs, though when I walk On further, painfully, I see much more Boats in the windows, treasures on the terrace, As if I werent just Pharaohs tomb designer But the living god in the departure lounge Surrounded by his glistering aftermath Yet everything began in these few thousand Pages of print and plates. Books are the anchors Left by the ships that rot away. The mud The anchors lie in is ones recollection Of what life was, and never, late or soon, Will be again. Plugged into YouTubes vast cosmopolis, We are in Sweden, and Bill Evans plays Round Midnight, Monks most elemental thing: Most beautiful and most bewildering Because it builds a framework out of freedom. At the Cambridge Union once, I watched Monk play That song in his sharp hat and limp goatee As if the fact that he himself composed it Back in the day Merely ensured he would forget it slowly, Instead of straight away, like where he was. His eyeballs like hot coals, he jabbed and growled, At one stage failing to locate the keyboard Completely.

But I walked to the Blue Boar Beside Tom Weiskel to pay awe-struck homage. Monk thought we were the cops. He disappeared. Only a few years later, Weiskel too Went missing. Back in the States, majestic In his tenure, he was skating with his daughter On a frozen lake. She went through the thin ice And he died diving for her.

So now I Am the only one of those three men alive. Lets call it four. George Russell loved that number. He heard the sparseness in the classic tones, Though his idea of swing was Hindemith. My future wife and I would bring him discs That he had never heard, and he for us Would spin the classic stuff we ought to hear. So much of receptivity is instinct, A lust for finding form in the unknown, The pathway around midnight, searched by touch When you are lost.

In Vienna once, the Princess Antoinette Hohenlohe, most commonly called Nettie, Showed me her familys fabulous collection Of Degas pastels. In a chest of drawers They were arranged in sheaves. The ballerinas I had first seen in my Skira book in Sydney Were all there, the colours sumptuous Past anything that I could have imagined. The state will get them all eventually. A good thing, but at least theyve been looked after, Like the Klimts and Schieles in the Belvedere. Bombarded by the photons pouring upwards, Eventually I had to plead exhaustion.

My eyes were weary from the burning colours, Especially the blue I never found Again until the year I filmed in Cairo And saw it as an inlay in pure gold The sky-lit death mask of Tutankhamun. This is the way my memories connect Now that they have no pattern. All I can do is make the pictures click As I go sailing on the stream of thought Feeding the lake across which the sun strikes To fill my sail, and every river bank Or beach between the dunes and the sand bar Leads to another place which I once knew, And now, at night, can see again In sharper outline, shadows in the shadows: Veils, sheets and tents of coruscation Peeling and coalescing as I travel As if, instead of walking by the river I were whispering across the Nullarbor In the cockpit of the car whose silver shell Was made of photo cells. The Sun Racer? The Sun Voyager. Gliding is what I do, Here at the finish, in the final hour. It will be this way between the star clusters, In the gulf between the galaxies.

In sunken cities of the memory Mud-brick, dissolved in time, Leaves nothing but the carved, cut stones And scraps of the ceramics. Time, it is thereby proven, is the sea Whose artefacts are joined by separateness. Oasis of Siwa, I call you back Through the gilded wood of Osiris With his inlaid eyes. Time passes and turns black But only in between the gold, the jewels: Where nothing of its decoration lingers The wood is a dark night Sky gods appear as falcons: Horus, the divine, is one of them. After Rembrandt lost his wealth He could still paint the frothed and combed Delicacy of light on gold, The texture of gathering darkness Made manifest by the gleam That it contains and somehow seems to flaunt While dialling down. An understated festival, His energy came back to him through memory As mine does here and now, as if lent power By the force of its own fading.

The slick smooth sandstone of the water stair Lifted through space from Clifton Gardens In Sydney where I picnicked with my mother With all the other widows and war orphans To the delta of the Nile Echoes a frescos surface, petrified. That figure with its finger in its mouth Is meant to be a child Even when dancing in the caves Of the Kimberleys All painted adults seem serene The Dreamtime Dancers. Only the children suck their fingers As they look towards you Waiting for their turn At life, the long plunge into doubt On TV at night, direct from Rio, Olympic divers are hydraulic drills When they go in and flatten out To lie above the bottom of the pool On palettes of specific bubbles At Rio, Ren Qian, plaiting her silk thread Of falling and revolving light Through thirty feet of air Goes in without a ripple. Seen from inside the pool, her impact Is a shout rewritten as a whisper, A bomb exploding inwards At Ramsgate Baths on Botany Bay I waited half an hour For the girl in the blue Speedo To do her simple dive From a mere three metres The dive was one step up From a peanut roll But Ren Qian now Spearing through my screen Like a goddess reaching Earth Is only a touch more beautiful Than what I can remember Of a human girl whose face I have spent my life forgetting. If you want to see a better joke Than young desire Just look at an old man First gambling without chips And then without a single steady picture Of the silver ball Roulette wheels in Las Vegas, The B24s propellers Churning sunlight on Okinawa For the flight meant to bring My father home Are like collars of the priests Heads threaded through the suns disc Or that tambourine the moon At the destruction horizon The last wall of the temple Crashes into the water And, pulled apart, a fresco turns to dust: A cup of coffee gone back to the bag Of beans by the long route, An aeon reassigned To form the towpath now Of the river of my memory This is a river song, Linking the vivid foci Where once my mind was formed That now must fall apart: A global network blasted To ruins by the pressure Of its lust to grow, which proves now At long last, after all this time, To be its urge to die. Regard the crown of Hallas: Cow horns, sun disc, feathers, The centuries subtract its properties Until you reach a Borgia Pope The Prince of the carnival in Rio Ive come to help you carry The Sun, Orpheus The floats of Melbournes Moomba festival, Precursor of the Sydney Mardi Gras When my first queer friends came out To teach me music And thus it was, because I so adored A female singer in