Sentenced to Life Read online

  Attacking out of retreat at Sidhi Barani,

  But no, he stayed modestly in the background

  While our cameraman, intrepid as all get out

  Knocked off the required footage of lions and tigers

  And cheetahs licking their lips, with even a glimpse of leopard,

  Considered unfindable save by Denis’s sidekick

  Kungu, who muttered comments in Swahili

  Which Denis translated as ‘Leopard over there, I think.’

  And there she was, a set of spots deep in a tree-clump

  Stuck to the spot with her spots resolutely unchanging

  For the full two hours till she finally took a crap.

  ‘A bowel movement, but at least she moved’ jested Denis

  Who had a million of them.

  So it went on:

  Good usable stuff up till the day we rested

  The crew, as the union dictates. Thank God for those rules

  Or there would be crosses all over the Masai Mara

  To mark the death by exhaustion of the modern impi,

  The tough men in sleeveless bush shirts

  With the tricep tattoos and a camera on their shoulder

  That you and I could barely pick up. Our chap was Mike:

  ‘We’re doing OK so far but nothing fantastic,

  So if you two see anything don’t for Christ’s sake tell me.’

  Denis thought that an off-piste mini-safari

  With me up front while Kungu taught me Swahili

  And him in the back at ease like Diana Dors

  In a Daimler (his showbiz images tended to be

  A bit out of date, though it’s never wise to argue

  With a man who actually knew Ava Gardner),

  A trip to show me a few unscripted attractions

  That often won’t sit still for a movie camera,

  Would be a good thing. He was like a book collector

  Showing you his library. I could tell from how he spoke

  He was Africa mad, so he had his favourite locations

  For shooting stills, like a ford five miles away

  Of bumpy driving, nothing too bad, he promised.

  And pretty, even if nothing happened. Well he

  Was right, it was pretty. Just wrong about the nothing.

  We stood on the inner bank of a curve in the river

  And I had to take it on trust that under the surface

  Was a shallow stretch the bigger beasts could walk on.

  ‘Elephant,’ he said ‘quite often cross here.

  You see whole families of them at a time.’

  As if on cue, three elephant, four elephant,

  An entire family showed up out of the bush

  Which guarded the other side like a crescent moon

  And assembled on the bank. ‘Well, there you are’

  Laughed Denis. ‘Your luck’s uncanny. Straight from the movies.

  No wonder Kungu wants to touch you so often.’

  But even as he spoke, there were lots more of them,

  So the first ones had to move, like shunted box cars,

  Into the oxtail water. More than thirty

  Were now in the frame, except we had no frame;

  But Denis’s Nikon made a rare appearance.

  ‘Well, Kungu can pick them. This is all your doing.

  I’ve never seen this, never in all my time

  In Africa. And neither has he.’

  And Kungu was speaking:

  In between the air-horn blasts from a New York gridlock

  With half of downtown occupied by Mack ten-wheelers

  I caught a few mentions of tembo, meaning elephant,

  But the other words were double Dutch to me.

  ‘He hasn’t seen this since he was a boy.’

  And there were more to come, but by now the Kombis

  Of all the tourist firms were gathering

  At the point where the first family were now emerging

  To climb the bank on the side near us.

  A lane was left

  To let the elephant by, but the flashing lights

  On the cameras must have seemed a storm. One tusker

  Flared out its ears and bellowed. ‘By Christ’

  Said Denis ‘If this one charges, they all will.’

  They didn’t charge, but there was a bit of a panic,

  And that was scary enough. I know I sound

  Like Falstaff telling Hal how many thieves

  He put to flight, but really there were fifty

  Elephant tightly packed and churning around

  To take their turn at scrambling from the soup.

  In the river, the tots beside their mothers

  Were near invisible, their little trunks

  Held up like snorkels.

  Open mouthed

  (Like the Three Stooges, Denis later said,

  Bang up to date as usual. Thanks a bunch.)

  We watched one hip-deep mother tuck her trunk beneath

  Her pup and hoik him out, swing like a crane

  And put him on the bank. And guess who didn’t

  Get the shot. ‘Oh blast!’ said Denis, fiddling

  With the switches that had changed his life.

  Kungu

  Was of the opinion that the magic touch

  Was mine, but he was also the first one –

  As we bumped slowly home across the veldt –

  To say what needed saying. Denis said

  ‘He says we have to keep our day a secret.’

  I dumbly added ‘Especially from my crew.’

  ‘That’s who he meant,’ said Denis. Pale pink light

  Was growing deeper in the sky

  When we got back to camp. Cameraman Mike

  Said ‘Anything good happen?’ From the way

  We said it hadn’t he soon guessed that it had

  But kept shtum for our young producer’s sake,

  And anyway next day we filmed two leopard.

  Asma Unpacks Her Pretty Clothes

  Wherever her main residence is now,

  Asma unpacks her pretty clothes.

  It takes forever: so much silk and cashmere

  To be unpeeled from clinging leaves of tissue

  By her ladies. With her perfect hands, she helps.

  Out there in Syria, the torturers

  Arrive by bus at every change of shift

  While victims dangle from their cracking wrists.

  Beaten with iron bars, young people pray

  To die soon. This is the middle ages

  Brought back to living death. Her husband’s doing,

  The screams will never reach her where she is.

  Asma’s uncovered hair had promised progress

  For all her nation’s women. They believed her.

  We who looked on believed the promise too,

  But now, as she unpacks her pretty clothes,

  The dream at home dissolves in agony.

  Bashar, her husband, does as he sees fit

  To cripple every enemy with pain.

  We sort of knew, but he had seemed so modern

  With Asma alongside him. His big talk

  About destroying Israel: standard stuff.

  A culture-changing wife offset all that.

  She did, she did. I doted as Vogue did

  On her sheer style. Dear God, it fooled me too,

  So now my blood is curdled by the shrieks

  Of people mad with grief. My own wrists hurt

  As Asma, with her lustrous fingertips –

  She must have thought such things could never happen –

  Unpacks her pretty clothes.

  Nina Kogan’s Geometrical Heaven

  Two of her little pictures grace my walls:

  Suprematism in a special sense,

  With all the usual bits and pieces flying

  Through space, but carrying a pastel-tinged

  Delicacy to lighten the strict forms

&nb
sp; Of that hard school and blow them all sky-high,

  Splinters and stoppers from the bombing of

  An angel’s boudoir. When Malevich told

  His pupils that their personalities

  Should be suppressed, the maestro little knew

  The state would soon require exactly that.

  But Nina, trying as she might, could not

  Rein in her individuality,

  And so she made these things that I own now

  And gaze at, wondering at her sad fate.

  She could have got away, but wished instead

  Her gift devoted to Utopia.

  She painted trams, designed official posters:

  Alive until the siege of Leningrad

  And then gone. Given any luck, she starved:

  But the purges were still rolling, and I fear

  The NKVD had her on a list,

  And what she faced, there at the very end,

  Was the white cold. Were there an afterlife,

  We might meet up, and I could tell her then

  Her sumptuous fragments still went flying on

  In my last hours, when I, in a warm house,

  Lay on my couch to watch them coming close,

  Her proofs that any vision of eternity

  Is with us in the world, and beautiful

  Because a mind has found the way things fit

  Purely by touch. That being said, however,

  I should record that out of any five

  Pictures by Kogan, at least six are fakes.

  Star System

  The stars in their magnificent array

  Look down upon the Earth, their cynosure,

  Or so it seems. They are too far away,

  In fact, to see a thing; hence they look pure

  To us. They lack the textures of our globe,

  So only we, from cameras carried high,

  Enjoy the beauty of the swirling robe

  That wraps us up, the interplay of sky

  And cloud, as if a Wedgwood plate of blue

  And white should melt, and then, its surface stirred

  With spoons, a treasure too good to be true,

  Be placed, and hover like a hummingbird,

  Drawing all eyes, though ours alone, to feast

  On splendour as it turns west from the east.

  There was a time when some of our young men

  Walked plumply on the moon and saw Earth rise,

  As stunning as the sun. The years since then

  Have aged them. Now and then somebody dies.

  It’s like a clock, for those of us who saw

  The Saturn rockets going up as if

  Mankind had energy to burn. The law

  Is different for one man. Time is a cliff

  You come to in the dark. Though you might fall

  As easily as on a feather bed,

  It is a sad farewell. You loved it all.

  You dream that you might keep it in your head.

  But memories, where can you take them to?

  Take one last look at them. They end with you.

  And still the Earth revolves, and still the blaze

  Of stars maintains a show of vigilance.

  It should, for long ago, in olden days,

  We came from there. By luck, by fate, by chance,

  All of the elements that form the world

  Were sent by cataclysms deep in space,

  And from their combination life unfurled

  And stood up straight, and wore a human face.

  I still can’t pass a mirror. Like a boy,

  I check my looks, and now I see the shell

  Of what I was. So why, then, this strange joy?

  Perhaps an old man dying would do well

  To smile as he rejoins the cosmic dust

  Life comes from, for resign himself he must.

  Change of Domicile

  Installed in my last house, I face the thought

  That fairly soon there will be one house more,

  Lacking the pictures and the books that here

  Surround me with abundant evidence

  I spent a lifetime pampering my mind.

  The new place will be of a different sort,

  Dark and austere, and I will have to find

  My way along its unforthcoming walls.

  Help is at hand here should I fall, but there

  There will be no-one to turn on the lights

  For me, and I will know I am not blind

  Only by glimpses when the empty halls

  Lead me to empty rooms, in which the nights

  Succeed each other with no day between.

  I may not see my tattered Chinese screen

  Again, but I shall have time to reflect

  That what I miss was just the bric-a-brac

  I kept with me to blunt my solitude,

  Part of my brave face when my life was wrecked

  By my gift for deceit. Truth clears away

  So many souvenirs. The shelves come clean.

  In the last, the truly last house there will be

  No treasured smithereens to take me back

  To when things hung together. I’ll conclude

  The way that I began so long ago:

  With nothingness, but know it fit for me

  This time around, now I am brought so low,

  Yet ready to move soon. When, I can’t say.

  Rounded with a Sleep

  The sun seems in control, the tide is out:

  Out to the sandbar shimmers the lagoon.

  The little children sprint, squat, squeal and shout.

  These shallows will be here until the moon

  Contrives to reassert its influence,

  And anyway, by then it will be dark.

  Old now and sick, I ponder the immense

  Ocean upon which I will soon embark:

  As if held in abeyance by dry land

  It waits for me beyond that strip of sand.

  It won’t wait long. Just for the moment, though,

  There’s time to question if my present state

  Of bathing in this flawless afterglow

  Is something I deserve. I left it late

  To come back to my family. Here they are,

  Camped on their towels and putting down their books

  To watch my grand-daughter, a natural star,

  Cartwheel and belly-flop. The whole scene looks

  As if I thought it up to soothe my soul.

  But in Arcadia, Death plays a role:

  A leading role, and suddenly I wake

  To realise that I’ve been sound asleep

  Here at my desk. I just wish the mistake

  Were rare, and not so frequent I could weep.

  The setting alters, but the show’s the same:

  One long finale, soaked through with regret,

  Somehow designed to expiate self-blame.

  But still there is no end, at least not yet:

  No cure, that is, for these last years of grief

  As I repent and yet find no relief.

  My legs are sore, and it has gone midnight.

  I’ve had my last of lounging on the beach

  To see the sweet oncoming sunset light

  Touching the water with a blush of peach,

  Smoothing the surface like a ballroom floor

  As all my loved ones pack up from their day

  And head back up the cliff path. This for sure:

  Even the memories will be washed away,

  If not by waves, by rain, which I see fall,

  Drenching the flagstones and the garden wall.

  My double doors are largely glass. I stand

  Often to contemplate the neat back yard

  My elder daughter with her artist’s hand

  Designed for me. This winter was less hard

  Than its three predecessors were. The snow

  Failed to arrive this time, but rain, for me,

  Will also do to regis
ter time’s flow.

  The rain, the snow, the inexorable sea:

  I get the point. I’ll climb the stairs to bed,

  Perhaps to dream I’m somewhere else instead.

  All day tomorrow I have tests and scans,

  And everything that happens will be real.

  My blood might say I should make no more plans,

  And when it does so, that will be the deal.

  But until then I love to speak with you

  Each day we meet. Sometimes we even touch

  Across the sad gulf that I brought us to.

  Just for a time, so little means so much:

  More than I’m worth, I know, as I know how

  My death is something I must live with now.

  Elementary Sonnet

  Tired out from getting up and getting dressed

  I lie down for a while to get some rest,

  And so begins another day of not

  Achieving much except to dent the cot

  For just the depth appropriate to my weight –

  Which is no chasm, in my present state.

  By rights my feet should barely touch the floor

  And yet my legs are heavy metal. More

  And more I sit down to write less and less,

  Taking a half hour’s break from helplessness

  To craft a single stanza meant to give

  Thanks for the heartbeat which still lets me live:

  A consolation even now, so late –

  When soon my poor bed will be smooth and straight.

  Leçons de ténèbres

  But are they lessons, all these things I learn

  Through being so far gone in my decline?

  The wages of experience I earn

  Would service well a younger life than mine.

  I should have been more kind. It is my fate

  To find this out, but find it out too late.

  The mirror holds the ruins of my face

  Roughly together, thus reminding me

  I should have played it straight in every case,

  Not just when forced to. Far too casually

  I broke faith when it suited me, and here

  I am alone, and now the end is near.

  All of my life I put my labour first.

  I made my mark, but left no time between

  The things achieved, so, at my heedless worst,

  With no life, there was nothing I could mean.

  But now I have slowed down. I breathe the air

  As if there were not much more of it there

  And write these poems, which are funeral songs

  That have been taught to me by vanished time: