Injury Time Read online

  What if this upsurge is a weakness too,

  The last flare of a fever overdue

  To break these many years? But surely not:

  Look at the park parade of what I’ve said –

  A Chinese opera among table-tops,

  The Russian Ballet and the Keystone Kops,

  The dust of diamonds from a pepper pot,

  Colours and metals out of Camelot –

  And envy me as I trudge back to bed.

  A whole new day is here, and still I live

  To strut my stuff, give what I have to give.

  Though it might not be much, it is my best

  And while it comes to me I know no rest,

  But must be at it, threading syllables,

  Timing the wind chimes, balancing the bells,

  Until each line reveals the harmony

  Of its creation by destroying me:

  Always my fate, still my imperative.

  I serve the joy-spring of the language. Let

  Me pass, therefore. I am not finished yet.

  I merely need to sleep awhile, and then,

  Perhaps before nightfall, begin again.

  Final Reminder

  Reading Laforgue, I love the way he crowds

  The world of things into his racing frame

  Yet makes them fit, like lightning in the clouds.

  The toads, the vermin get their blaze of fame

  In his high-speed, grab-bag democracy

  Of thought, perception and the sheer desire

  To live. Each stanza, as if meant for me,

  Spits like an ember of his funeral pyre

  Sculpted into a message of reproof

  For any moment that I doubt the worth

  Of effort, any wish to stand aloof

  At long last from the turmoil of the Earth

  Now my light fades. The stars are on display

  In the dark night, not the bright sky of day.

  Carpentry of the Quatrain

  A four-square stanza is the magic box

  Neat thoughts fit into and combine their glow

  Into a furnace. Lucky the lid locks,

  Or we’d see ashes fluttering like snow.

  Given the chance I’d work no other way,

  But there are ideas that refuse to fit,

  The thought that needs more space to have its say

  No matter how severe you are with it.

  But even then, the best way to contain

  The sprawl is to remember, flying blind,

  Your ideal of the right cup for the rain.

  With nothing spilled and everything designed,

  Wish and fulfilment click, the whirlpool swirls

  And freezes, and it’s there before your eyes:

  The cubic lattice of selected pearls

  Stacked rim to rim, the orderly surprise.

  Head Wound

  The carcinoma left a bullet hole

  High on my forehead. It looked like a tap

  By a pro hit-man. In fact the killer’s role

  Was played not by a pistol-toting chap

  But by a pretty female whose light touch

  Sliced out the blob and pieced a flap of skin

  Into the gap. It didn’t hurt that much.

  When finally the pit was all filled in

  A pink yarmulke of Elastoplast

  Topped off the job. The whole thing happened fast.

  The wound, alas, healed slowly, but the heap

  Of duct-tape mercifully was replaced

  By one neat bandage, though I had to keep

  Changing it each second day. I faced

  At least three weeks of wearing this square patch

  And there were interviews for my new book

  Demanding to be done. A tale to match

  My rather daring James Bond sort of look

  Seemed called for, so I mentioned MI5,

  A mild gun battle. I got out alive.

  No sooner did the first show go to air,

  A dear old lady stopped me in the street

  And said I really ought to take more care

  In gun fights. I thought her a shambling dunce

  But only for a moment. All the fault

  Had been mine, for expecting that my smirk

  Would flag the gag. Alas, there is a rule:

  The straight-faced joke that might work on the page

  Is death on TV. I should act my age.

  Candy Windows

  He runs in slo-mo with a wall of flame

  Boiling behind him like Valhalla’s fall

  In Götterdämmerung. He made his name

  From being bullet-proof. He summons all

  His skills to get the girl from Bucharest

  To Rome or Paris or wherever suits

  The budget. Somewhere she can get undressed:

  The only scene for which we give two hoots.

  The heavies blast the road or bomb the train.

  The dialogue is dreck, the plot inane.

  They make love. Breasts and bottoms fill the frame

  When suddenly the whole motel explodes:

  The bad guys in a tank. Devoid of shame,

  He frisks her lovely corpse for the launch codes

  Of the secret anthrax time-bomb missile thing.

  They’re tattooed on her thigh. But look, she stirs.

  The soundtrack fills with strings that soar and sing.

  When has he ever seen a face like hers

  Since his last movie? He, the Teflon star

  Scoops up the jail-bait and runs for the car.

  The enemy is an army: all the same

  He kills the lot, but finds himself alone.

  The girl is gone, and gradually the game

  Changes. He fails to steal the new nose-cone

  His HQ wants, and where once he could burst

  Through candy windows, now he fears they might

  Be real glass, and – much worse, the very worst –

  The gathering night could really be the night

  When he, immortal once, but not again,

  Must bruise and bleed and die like other men.

  Elephant in the Room

  On slow last legs it comes to the right spot

  Near the dried-up river bed where it may kneel

  And die. The plain is open, with one clump of trees

  Parched, bleached, more grey than green,

  Much like the grass:

  The perfect setting for what happens next.

  What happens next is nothing. Still upright,

  Precisely balanced on its bended knees,

  The elephant decays. All by itself

  It loses its last flesh with neither vultures

  Nor hyenas to help with the unloading:

  They seem to have been paid to stay away.

  When all the meat is gone

  There is only skin, draped thickly on its cage

  Of bones. Perhaps the ants are in there

  Like vagrants in the ruins of New York.

  There might be termites cleaning out its tusks.

  If so, it shows no signs of pain or anger.

  Through hollow eyes it looks out of the screen

  With what seems an inflexible resolve.

  The shadow of its former self has timed

  Its exit to sum up what it did best,

  To bulk large as a thing of consequence

  Even though emptied of its history.

  A breath of wind will knock it down, an hour

  Of rain wash it away, but until then,

  Sustained by stillness, it is what it is:

  A presence, a whole area in space

  Transformed into a single living thing

  That now, its time exhausted, lives no more.

  Quiet Passenger

  When there is no more dying left to do

  And I am burned and poured into a jar,

  Then I will leave this land that I came to

  So long ago, and, havi
ng come so far,

  Head home to where my life’s work was begun.

  But nothing of that last flight will I see

  As I ride through the night into the sun:

  No stars, no ocean, not the ochre earth,

  No patterns of dried water nor the light

  That streams into the city of my birth,

  The harbour waiting to take down my dust.

  So why, in that case, should I choose to go?

  My day is done. I go because I must:

  Silence will be my way of saying so.

  In Your Own Time

  Ridi, Pagliaccio

  Back to the gate, back to the lounge, back to

  The shuttle bus, the same airport hotel,

  This flight continues to go nowhere. You

  Long ago realised that you would do well

  Not to complain at one more wasted day:

  The flight is going nowhere anyway,

  And there is nothing wasted as you learn –

  Almost as if life had begun again –

  To use the time, to read, to write, to earn

  Your keep. That you are frail like other men

  Is now proved, with a force that even you

  Can’t laugh off. What we are is what we do.

  Back, then, to what you do best. Give a thought

  The curve of words that makes a wing of it.

  Get one more line to sing the way it ought.

  Anything well expressed is holy writ:

  Your occupation, even now, when time

  Is almost gone, is honest. It’s no crime

  To spend these stolen hours as if your fate

  Depended on the balance of a phrase.

  It always did, and even now, so late,

  As your pen feels its way through the word maze,

  The thrill of getting things exactly right

  Prepares you for the long flight through the night.

  The Back of My Hand

  I used to know the back of my hand

  Like the back of my hand

  But things are happening now that I can’t

  Quite, in my mind, command

  To make sense of themselves.

  On the smooth plateau from the root

  Of the index finger

  To the thumb joint where a light plane

  Without the slightest danger

  Could once have glided in for a dead-stick landing

  There are bumps that would stop a truck.

  It’s all so demanding,

  This ageing business. It starts with

  The simple exaggeration

  Of veins making tracks like the river system

  Of a whole new nation

  Suddenly put in place by the Space Invaders,

  The flyers from Atrophon

  Who built all this stuff and then died out.

  And now they are gone,

  And the ruins of whoever saw them off

  Are being overtaken

  By other ruins: the product,

  Unless I’m very much mistaken,

  Of a people wedded to chaos

  In the first instance,

  Who keep what they take and cover it

  With a carpet of decrepitude.

  I was proud of these hands once.

  Now I don’t even care to look.

  It would be like sitting in a canvas

  Chair at Angkor Wat

  To watch the jungle taking back

  That elegant structure

  While some expert gave me a personal lecture.

  Or do I mean Oaxaca? Carlos Fuentes told me

  That was the place to see. In his last years

  Did the backs of his hands still say “hold me”

  To all those women who loved his eyes?

  At least I have a voice,

  Or I did until I started the new tablets.

  But no one has a real choice

  We have to take what’s given to us,

  Especially in here

  While the campfires of the onslaught

  Draw nearer every night

  To this place that I know by now

  Like the back of my hand.

  Take a look if you like. You know what this is?

  It’s the Promised Land.

  Ibrutinib

  The Marvel Comic name should tip you off

  That this new drug is heavy duty stuff.

  You don’t get this one just to cure a cough.

  A chemo pill, and powerful enough

  To put the kibosh on your CLL,

  It gets in there and gives the bastard hell.

  Five years’ remission and the beast is back.

  It’s in your bones the way the Viet Cong

  Poured through their tunnels to the Tet attack,

  And what comes next might not last very long.

  But let’s see what Ibrutinib can do

  To win the war whose battlefield is you.

  Ibrutinib, you little cluster-bomb

  Of goodness, get in there and do your thing!

  All that the bad guys seek is martyrdom:

  Their own demise is in the death they bring.

  They work in cells. There is no high command.

  We drop you in and then it’s hand to hand.

  Should you prevail, we promise you a role

  From here on in until the natural end.

  Just beat them back and it will be a stroll,

  Unless you don’t, in which case things might tend

  To go bananas in a serious way.

  But not yet. Down the hatch. This is today.

  Side Effects of Medication

  I feel dull from the blue pill that I took,

  Notoriously a flattener of mood.

  I triple-read each sentence of my book

  And by slow-loping furies am pursued;

  Except they never reach me. Just their wheeze

  And whine and whistle irritate my ear.

  A Tiger tank is hidden in the trees:

  Time’s chariot broods on ways to hurry near.

  A whir, a blur, a whingeing void in flight,

  Shaped flame eats into me and halves my weight.

  The muscles in my legs are pipe-clay tight.

  Time for another pill. It must be late:

  It must be later than I think, I think.

  Another dose of Nothing Done begins,

  And there is lemon squash for us to drink.

  May Christ forgive me for the worst of sins,

  The one the old-style monks called accidie.

  It meant to have an ice-field for a face.

  I shave myself. I that knew ecstasy

  Cope with the clean-up of my fall from grace,

  And start another day on the inside.

  I try to write. The pieces will not fit

  Together. In the phrase “broke down and cried”

  Note what comes first. There is no end to it.

  Not Forgetting George Russell

  How funny, in the sense of not being funny,

  It ought to be that here, on the nut farm –

  A Cambridge feature Rupert Brooke left out

  For obvious reasons –

  In a cool morning when all except the nurses

  Are tranked out of their skulls,

  I haunt the kitchen reading an old essay,

  Trying to find my tone again –

  The one about Ernst Robert Curtius,

  The only modern scholar you called great –

  In praise of Dante’s long love for his teacher.

  You were Brunetto and I . . . Well, let that pass,

  Though we, of course, were butch as panther sweat.

  Ten years ago, when you were still alive

  If only just, we met for one last time

  When I came out to get my Hodgins medal,

  The literary gong that I most prize.

  It’s only justice if Les cops the Nobel,

  Don’t you agree? They say
the A380

  Airbus was built for getting him to Stockholm.

  When he gets given it, it might do something

  To tame our literati’s national sense

  Of isolation that you found so foolish:

  You that inhabited no other boundaries

  Save those of Christendom.

  From Adelaide I day-tripped to Mildura

  And then by car out to Cullulleraine,

  A six-house town parked in the open mulga

  Where, in an easy chair on the veranda,

  You lay with cling-film skin, and Isobel

  Controlled the cakes: “Another Lamington?”

  “There can’t be more,” I said. “The world supply

  Is here,” you whispered. Loving to be teased,

  She knew that these jokes might well be the last,

  As you, the master of the ars moriendi,

  Took in, with ruined lungs, just enough air

  To prove you could still smile.

  “Waste no time saying what need not be said”

  Was what you’d taught me, but I had a plan:

  A subtle plan for doing Dante over

  In English. But you had enough to cope with

  Just being proud of my wife, rising star

  Of the Società Dantesca,

  A ruthless cosa nostra. The prettiest

  Of all your brilliant creatures had to shoot

  Her way into that place and wade in blood.

  I’m sure she told you, loving you as always,

  When she came out to see you. But it’s time

  For my Caped Hero to come bursting forth:

  I, Dante, Flash of Lightning! At a cinema

  Near you! I wonder if there is one. Never mind:

  Books need no screens. This fanfare is a token

  Of how I valued all the times we spoke:

  Something to leave with you as I now leave you,

  The same way you invariably left us

  With some new thrill to chase up: Hindemith,

  Matisse, Stravinsky . . . any works that burn

  The brain like that are works of God, you said:

  They speak of what He lost. And now at last

  So say I, weeping, by my tears made blind,

  As the nurse comes with her cup of colours

  And your thin outline melts into the smoke.

  —Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, UK, July 1, 2011

  Imminent Catastrophe

  The imminent catastrophe goes on

  Not showing many signs of happening.

  The ice at the North Pole that should be gone

  By now, is awkwardly still lingering,