Sentenced to Life Read online

  Into the singularity we fly

  After a stretch of time in which we leave

  Our lives behind yet know that we will die

  At any moment now. A pause to grieve,

  Burned by the starlight of our lives laid bare,

  And then no sound, no sight, no thought. Nowhere.

  What is it worth, then, this insane last phase

  When everything about you goes downhill?

  This much: you get to see the cosmos blaze

  And feel its grandeur, even against your will,

  As it reminds you, just by being there,

  That it is here we live or else nowhere.

  Nature Programme

  The female panda is on heat

  For about five minutes a year

  And the male, no sprinter at the best of times,

  Hardly ever gets there

  Before she cools off again.

  In the South Island of New Zealand

  There is a rain forest

  With penguins in it.

  They trot along the dangerous trails

  Towards the booming ocean

  Where albatross chicks in training

  For their very first take-off

  Are snatched by tiger sharks

  Cruising in water

  No deeper than your thighs.

  Doomed to the atrophy of lust,

  Lurching with their flippers out,

  Dragged under as they strain for flight,

  They could be you:

  Wonder of nature that you were.

  Managing Anger

  On screen, the actor smashes down the phone.

  He wrecks the thing because he can’t get through.

  He plays it stagey even when alone.

  If you were there, he might be wrecking you.

  Actors believe they have to show, not tell,

  Any annoyance that the script dictates,

  Therefore it’s not enough for them to yell:

  They must pull down a cupboard full of plates.

  An actor wrecks a room. The actress who

  Is playing wife to him does not protest.

  Perhaps she doesn’t have enough to do

  All day, and thinks his outburst for the best.

  For God forbid that actors bottle up

  Their subterranean feelings so that we

  Can’t see them. We must watch the coffee cup

  Reduced to smithereens, the shelf swept free

  Of all its crockery. Another take

  Requires the whole set to be dressed again

  With all the gubbins that he got to break

  The first time. Aren’t they weary, now and then,

  The poor crew, setting up the stuff once more

  That some big baby trashes in a rage,

  And all that fury faked? False to the core,

  The screen experience gives us a gauge

  For our real lives, where we go on for years

  Not even mentioning some simple fact

  That brings us to the aching point of tears –

  Lest people think that it might be an act.

  Echo Point

  I am the echo of the man you knew.

  Launched from the look-out to the other side

  Of this blue valley, my voice calls to you

  All on its own, and more direct for that.

  My line of sweet talk you could not abide

  Came from the real man. It will all be gone –

  Like glitter back to the magician’s hat –

  Soon now, and only sad scraps will remain.

  His body that betrayed you has gone on

  To do the same for him. Like veils of rain,

  He is the cloud that his tears travel through.

  When the cloud lifts, he will be gone indeed.

  Hearing his cry, you’ll see the ghost gums break

  Into clear air, as all the past is freed

  From false hopes. No, I nowhere lie awake

  To feel this happen, but I know it will.

  At the last breath, my throat was full of song;

  The proof, for a short while, is with you still.

  Though snapped at sharply by the whip-bird’s call,

  It has not stopped. It lingers for your sake:

  Almost as if I were not gone for long –

  And what you hear will not fade as I fall.

  Too Much Light

  My cataracts invest the bright spring day

  With extra glory, with a glow that stings.

  The shimmering shields above the college gates –

  Heraldic remnants of the queens and kings –

  Flaunt liquid paint here at the end of things

  When my vitality at last abates,

  And all these forms bleed, spread and make a blur

  Of what, to second sight, they are and were.

  And now I slowly pace, a stricken beast,

  Across a lawn which must be half immersed

  In crocuses and daffodils, but I

  Can only see for sure the colours burst

  And coalesce as if they were the first

  Flowers I ever saw. Thus, should I die,

  I’ll go back through the gate I entered when

  My eyes were stunned, as now they are again.

  My Latest Fever

  My latest fever clad me in cold sweat

  And there I was, in hospital again,

  Drenched, and expecting an attack of bugs

  As devastating as the first few hours

  Of Barbarossa, with the Russian air force

  Caught on the ground and soldiers by the thousand

  Herded away to starve, while Stalin still

  Believed it couldn’t happen. But instead

  The assault turned out to be as deadly dull

  As a bunch of ancient members of the Garrick

  Emerging from their hutch below the stairs

  To bore me from all angles as I prayed

  For sleep, which only came in fits and starts.

  Night after night was like that. Every day

  Was like the night before, a hit parade

  Of jazzed-up sequences from action movies.

  While liquid drugs were pumped into my wrist,

  My temperature stayed sky high. On the screen

  Deep in my head, heroes repaired themselves.

  In Rambo First Blood, Sly Stallone sewed up

  His own arm. Then Mark Wahlberg, star of Shooter,

  Assisted by Kate Mara, operated

  To dig the bullets from his body. Teeth

  Were gritted in both cases. No-one grits

  Like Sly: it looks like a piano sneering.

  Better, however, to be proof against

  All damage, as in Salt, where Angelina

  Jumps from a bridge onto a speeding truck

  And then from that truck to another truck.

  In North Korea, tortured for years on end,

  She comes out with a split lip. All this mayhem

  Raged in my brain with not a cliché scamped.

  I saw the heroes march in line towards me

  In slow-mo, with a wall of flame behind them,

  And thought, as I have often thought, ‘This is

  The pits. How can I make it stop?’ It stopped.

  On the eleventh day, my temperature

  Dived off the bridge like Catherine Zeta-Jones

  From the Petronas towers in Kuala Lumpur.

  I had no vision of the final battle.

  The drugs, in pill form now, drove back the bugs

  Into the holes from which they had attacked.

  It might have been a scene from Starship Troopers:

  But no, I had returned to the real world.

  They sent me home to sleep in a dry bed

  Where I felt better than I had for months.

  No need to make a drama of my rescue:

  Having been saved was like a lease of life,

  The thing itse
lf, undimmed by images –

  A thrill a minute simply for being so.

  The Emperor’s Last Words

  An army that never leaves its defences

  Is bound to be defeated, said Napoleon,

  Who left them, and was defeated.

  And thus I gather my remaining senses

  For the walk, or limp, to town

  Where I have a haircut and visit

  The Oxfam bookshop near the bridge.

  Only a day out of Addenbrooke’s

  Where another bout of pneumonia

  Damned near nailed me,

  I walk slowly now, sitting on low brick walls.

  But the haircut is successful,

  Completing my resemblance to Buzz Aldrin

  On the surface of Jupiter,

  And in the bookshop I get, for my niece,

  The Penguin Book of English Verse

  (John Hayward’s excellent anthology)

  And the old, neat, thin-paper OUP edition

  Of the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation

  Of War and Peace, so handy for the pocket.

  Still in her teens, already reading everything,

  She wants to be a writer, and when she visits me

  She gets a useful lesson

  On how a writer can end up.

  But things could have been worse:

  I could have been married to Laura Riding,

  Whose collected poems I purchase for myself.

  Have fifteen years of death improved her verses?

  No, still stridently incomprehensible, befitting

  The way she won an argument with Robert Graves

  By throwing herself backwards from a window:

  A token, no doubt, of an artistic commitment

  The purity of whose achievements was proved

  By being intelligible to nobody at all

  Except her fellow fruit-cakes.

  Well, she sure left her defences.

  Almost everyone wants to be a writer.

  My niece, however, has got the knack:

  That feeling for a sentence, you can’t mistake it.

  The only question is how far you will go,

  Even walking ever so slowly,

  Away from your fortress. All the way to Russia?

  But Tolstoy, himself an awful husband,

  Waits to make a midget of your memory.

  You escaped from Elba

  But not from St Helena.

  Had you stayed in Corsica

  None of this would have happened.

  But you left, and now every nut ward in the world

  Has one of you at least.

  The Maudes were married more than fifty years.

  In two days’ time, the Tour de France

  Will go past here

  Where I now sit to gather strength

  For my retreat from this hot sun.

  It’s time to go. High time to go. High time.

  France, army, head of the army, Josephine.

  Compendium Catullianum

  My girlfriend’s sparrow is dead. It is an ex-sparrow.

  Where once it hopped about between her knees,

  Today it limps along the same dark road

  I’ve come to know too well since she denied me

  The pathway to her lap. Cruel Lesbia,

  You asked for this, your sparrow with its feet

  Turned upwards as yours were when in the throes

  Of love. If I say ‘Screw it, it’s just a sparrow’

  I court your wrath, or, worse, your cold rejection;

  But I can live with that though you weep floods,

  Since I have friends who steer well clear of war.

  Give me charm over courage every time:

  The ease of bantering chaps, a faithful love

  From women or even for them, so long as they

  Don’t pester me like you and your dumb sparrow.

  Remember when I asked for a thousand kisses?

  Let’s make it ten. Why not just kiss me once?

  For I, tear-drenched as when my brother died,

  Miss you the way you miss that stupid bird:

  Excruciating. Let’s live and let’s love.

  Our brief light spent, night is an endless sleep.

  Bugsy Siegel’s Flying Eye

  In Havana, at the hotel Nacional,

  Lucky Luciano, or so the story goes,

  Persuaded a reluctant Meyer Lansky

  That Bugsy Siegel, who had squandered the mob’s money

  On taking years to finish the Flamingo

  And might even have skimmed from the invested capital,

  Would need to have his venture in Las Vegas

  Brought to a sudden end.

  But the execution happened in LA

  With Bugsy unwisely sitting near a window.

  The first bullet took out his right eye

  And flung it far away across the carpet

  Into the tiled dining area.

  He should have known that something bad would happen

  Because when he got home he had smelled flowers

  And when there are no flowers in the house

  But you still smell them, it means death.

  After the window shattered, the smell of jasmine

  Seeped through the house, but that was no premonition,

  Because Bugsy was already dead.

  Scholars still ask the question why

  He never guessed that he would soon get hit,

  Even after closing down his dream-land

  For yet another re-design. He was

  An artist among gangsters. The others weren’t.

  When I got to Vegas, the original Flamingo

  Had been torn down, with a garden on the site,

  But in Havana, at the Nacional,

  I met the waiter who had built a long career

  Out of once having slept with Ava Gardner,

  And I sat to drink mojitos where Meyer Lansky

  And Lucky Luciano might once have done the same

  While they pondered what to do about Bugsy.

  Maybe they did. It was mob business

  So nothing got written down. Nobody can be sure

  Of anything except that flying eye.

  Only the Immortal Need Apply

  ‘I am as the demon of the tumult’

  – Gabriele d’Annunzio, quoted by Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Pike

  In Paris, at Diaghilev’s Cleopatra –

  Décor by Bakst, choreography by Fokine,

  Ida Rubinstein in the title role –

  D’Annunzio and his powerful halitosis

  Sat beside Robert de Montesquieu,

  The model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus.

  Rubinstein, who could not dance a step,

  Merely stood there looking beautiful

  Or adopted the occasional Egyptian pose,

  While d’Annunzio laid his plans.

  Backstage in her crowded dressing-room

  The Nile-nymph recovered from her exertions

  By lying back in her couch.

  D’Annunzio was six inches shorter than she was

  But her posture put him within range.

  He fell to his knees and kissed her lovely legs

  Upward from toes to crotch.

  As he plunged his face into the tarte tatin,

  Barrès and Rostand bowed their heads in awe

  And Montesquieu adjusted his moustache.

  Later on a man in the street was arrested

  And charged with not being famous.

  He remains nameless to this day.

  Plot Points

  On the rafting ice

  The afterbirth of seals

  Leaves stains like pink blancmange.

  Glyco proteins in the fish

  Keep them from freezing.

  M13 in Hercules

  Is a globular star cluster –

  A glitterball that my mother

  Could have danced the Charles
ton under.

  She had lovely hands.

  Renoir, choosing models, always looked

  At their hands first.

  After the war, at Lodz,

  On a tour of the concentration camp,

  Rubinstein said ‘I was born here.’

  In Melanesia, the House of Memories

  Contains the treasures of the tribe.

  The Somme chalk was good for tunnels.

  When the barrage broke them,

  The parapet bags spat white.

  At Kokoda, the treetop phosphorescence

  Turned the night to Christmas.

  The Aussies in Tobruk

  Brushed dust from bully beef.

  In the dry valleys of Antarctica

  Dust is raised by the katabatic wind.

  With the Wehrmacht stalled in front of Moscow,

  Even the grease froze. The 88s

  Were jammed by their own shells.

  Rasputitsa was the mud

  Of spring thaw and autumn rain.

  On a hard day in the Alhambra

  The Sultan sent an apple

  To the virgin of his choice.

  The logo on your Macbook

  Is an echo of the manner

  In which Alan Turing killed himself.

  In the battle for Berlin

  The last panzers were overrun

  Before they reached the start-line.

  A dead hippo in the Tiergarten

  Had an unexploded mortar bomb

  Sticking out of its side.

  While you were reading this

  Millions of stars moved closer

  Towards their own extinction

  So many years ago –

  But let’s believe our eyes:

  They say it’s all here now.

  One Elephant, Two Elephant

  Denis Zafiro, Last of the Great White Hunters –

  Reduced now, a fact worth blessing, to the role of guide –

  No rifle any more, just a mid-range Japanese camera

  And even that he would keep under wraps. ‘The last

  Of the great white photographers.’ One of his jokes –

  Took Hemingway out on the almost fatal safari

  In which Papa, extravagantly even for him,

  Contrived to be in a plane crash twice, thus smashing

  Himself up good, so that on his epaulettes

  Could be seen, Denis said, grey muck coming out of his skull

  Like oatmeal porridge.

  Last of the great white contacts,

  Denis, when our safari left Nairobi

  Could have ridden up front like Rommel in his staff car