Injury Time Read online

  And though sometimes the weather is extreme

  It seems no more so than when we were young

  Who soon will hear no more of this grim theme

  Reiterated in the special tongue

  Of manufactured fright. Sea Level Rise

  Will be here soon and could do such-and-such,

  Say tenured pundits with unblinking eyes.

  Continuing to not go up by much,

  The sea supports the sceptics, but they, too,

  Lapse into oratory when they predict

  The sure collapse of the alarmist view

  Like a house of cards, for they could not have picked

  A metaphor less suited to their wish.

  A house of cards subsides with just a sigh

  And all the cards are still there. Feverish

  Talk of apocalypse might, by and by,

  Die down, but the deep anguish will persist:

  His own death, not the Earth’s, is the true fear

  That motivates the doomsday fantasist:

  There can be no world if he is not here.

  Splinters from Shakespeare

  My name is Shallow. Lend me credit, pray,

  If I, at this stage, sound deep once or twice.

  They called me “lusty Shallow” in my day,

  But time ensured that I would pay the price,

  Which is to wonder where my juices went.

  Jesu, the mad, mad days that I have spent.

  My cousin Silence would attest, were he

  To find a voice, I left no woman cold.

  This poor forked radish once was a green tree,

  And now I hear Jane Nightwork has grown old

  Who said she spurned me, but that was not true.

  The death I owe to God has fallen due.

  I heard the chimes at midnight with Sir John,

  But he was stirring, even as he sighed.

  He sucked up his great sack-butt and moved on,

  And left me here alone to nurse my pride.

  I, too, have lived: a small life, but not mean.

  Jesu, Jesu, the days that I have seen.

  Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub

  But if you didn’t know, you’d never guess

  Whose bath it was. You’d see only the woman,

  So beautiful that since the time of Helen

  She’s started wars, the perennial temptress,

  But abstract nonetheless. You have to know her:

  Picasso’s friend, an angel of adventure.

  Sheer daring brought her sweet skin to this juncture

  With porcelain that would look dull without her,

  But not be famous now except the other

  Bare bottom that once sat in it was his,

  Killer of millions. Remember that this is

  Only a footnote. Don’t get in a lather:

  But while reflecting that a sponge wipes clean

  Only so much, do take time to recall

  That if this nymph were Leni Riefenstahl

  There would be less, not more, for her to mean.

  But we are safe, when contemplating this

  Unsmiling incandescent odalisque,

  From any hint of awe. That was the risk:

  To gloss trash with a misplaced emphasis.

  But me no buts. Enough to say that Lee

  Was not just lovely but sane, smart and good.

  By her, his squalor was well understood.

  Bless her for throwing light on perfidy.

  Sunt lacrimae rerum

  There are tears in things. Things mortal touch the heart.

  On the favela, sitting in the paste

  Of clay and urine, in the fever season

  At the festering tip of a high-level Hades,

  Is the plastic duck of a little girl who died

  Of typhus, and the image makes me blink,

  Recalling the lost earring found inside

  The crumpled dashboard of a crushed Mercedes.

  Choral Service from Westminster Abbey

  The Abbey choir sings “I Know Not the Hour”

  And once again we all sit silent where

  She, only, was not sighing for the waste

  Of youth, health, beauty and the savoir faire

  That might have served us all well later on

  Had there not been the panic-stricken haste,

  The concrete tunnel and the car’s crushed power,

  Almost as if she wanted to be gone,

  Even without a chance to say goodbye.

  From my seat on the transept’s left-hand aisle

  I saw the ceremony end. Six men

  Shouldered the coffin and I could have sworn

  That they brought her to me. You well might smile,

  But she could smile as if she were the dawn

  All set for a night out. That she would die

  So soon, and never race your heart again,

  Seemed not in nature. Then the guards wheeled right

  A yard in front of me, and their slow march –

  Spit-shine parade boots on a flagstone floor –

  Down the side corridor beyond the arch

  Crunched, boomed and whispered and went silent. So

  She started her flight home. It felt like theft.

  Until she vanished few of us could know –

  And now all knew, and nothing was more sure –

  A light could die just from the way it shone.

  Her fantasy, or ours? I couldn’t say.

  She pulled the names, she got them on her team:

  No question. Think, though, of some crippled kid

  She talked to a long time, and later on

  Wrote letters to, and never said she did.

  Tell yourself then that she was just a dream,

  Gone when the soldiers carried her away.

  Ayrton Senna Killed at Imola

  Thousands of miles away in Buenos Aires

  Juan Manuel Fangio, five times world champion,

  Watched Senna hit the Armco and sit still.

  The world over, we were all interpreting

  The silence. Fangio needed only that first glance

  And turned the TV off.

  Such stillness was a language,

  The signal that the angel had departed.

  As I write this now

  Schumacher is out walking at his home

  On Lake Geneva,

  Getting the exercise he just might need

  If ever his mind comes back.

  Moss when he spun across the grass

  At Donington with me beside him looking

  As if I had seen my own ghost;

  Or Derek Warwick on the autostrada

  Driving me down to Monza;

  Or Alan Jones in that brutal Lamborghini

  In Adelaide when we entertained the crowd

  With our brilliant imitation of a champion driving

  His panic-stricken friend to hospital . . .

  But now all these faces are from long ago

  And even

  When Damon, in my dreams, comes back to drive me

  Under police escort to the airport in Hungary,

  I can’t believe how very young he looks.

  Deborah, my elder daughter’s friend,

  A magnet for adventurous men,

  Was taken to a Grand Prix one weekend.

  She got so bored she lay down for a sleep

  Beside a pile of tyres.

  When she woke up again she couldn’t see.

  Her eyes were full of rain.

  Verse Letter

  In reply to Ann Baer, aged 101, of Richmond-on-Thames.

  Your handwriting, so perfect for its style

  And firmness, made me feel that this must be

  A brilliant schoolgirl. Hence my knowing smile

  At your comparing of my maple tree

  With Tennyson’s. But further down the page,

  And seemingly in passing, you revealed

  The
secret of your learning: your great age.

  In your day, verse was not a special field,

  It was a language, so to speak: a tongue

  For all who read books. No such luck today,

  Alas. Just look at how it keeps you young,

  This love for words that time can’t take away

  From anyone touched with it early on.

  No wonder that you write a hand so fair.

  I swear that you’ll be here when I am gone,

  Just as my fiery tree will still be there –

  Bathed in its poetry, the rain, the air.

  Aldeburgh Dawn

  I

  From slate sea that would gleam white were it not

  The Gulf Stream cooled by nothing except England,

  A run-down sun emerges to remind me

  How far it came last night from where it always

  Behaves as if it had never been to Europe

  And burns your cheeks. This version chills them stiff.

  The light is thin, even the wind is thin –

  The strain of love as sung by Peter Pears –

  And on the roofs of cars that shone before

  Under the lamps but now are lit from space,

  Those tears are not the dew of the Pacific,

  Just drops of rain.

  Three quarters of the poets

  Here at the Festival speak double Dutch

  From where I stand, still stuck with rhyme and rhythm.

  This isn’t Edinburgh or Cheltenham:

  It’s more like, well, a modest out-of-town

  Gig with the smell of fish thrown in. You read,

  Take questions, sign your books and hit the sack.

  In charge, the fine young lady with the eyes –

  Toast Catalogue meets Poetry (Chicago) –

  Will spark a poem from the chap who looks

  Like the top half of Ted Hughes, but that’s the lot,

  Unless you clock the haddock they bring in

  On toy boats with no names but only numbers,

  To fill the crunchy gold beer-batter sleeves

  In the restaurant your hotel is famous for.

  II

  But look, you must have done well. On the second

  Pale morning when the same dawn walks again,

  Poseidon, with his Maserati logo

  Wrapped to the barbs in kelp and bladderwrack,

  Comes bubbling up and shouts to you: “Good choice!

  I make this scene at least one day a year.

  You have to keep it real sometimes, and I

  Get tired of Acapulco and the Hamptons.

  Too many big yachts I can’t tower over.

  Too many Russian girls. Too much Ralph Lauren.

  Bling eats the soul.”

  His beard, indeed, I note,

  As well as all the standard shells and pearls,

  Has plastic bags in it. What better warrant

  For throttling back on pretty talk? And if

  I can’t do that, what am I doing here,

  Watching the nun-like progress of Aurora?

  She bends to touch the ever-shifting shingle,

  Her grey-on-grey cloak pink just at the edges,

  And breathes cold light on salt-cured wildflowers –

  Small, pinched, set wide apart. Lives of the poets.

  III

  The sun is up, the low clouds drained away

  From the horizon, and beside the shell

  Rigged on the beach as if for selling petrol

  To veteran Ducks that got lost after D-Day,

  I scan the flat sea and the pale blue vault

  Streaked at the far edge with the vapour trails

  Of the morning’s first jets racing into Holland.

  This fan of metal Maggi Hambling built,

  Apparently from concentrated rust,

  Is hard edged, two men high, and takes the sun

  No better than a half-track opened up

  By a Typhoon’s rocket in the Falaise Gap,

  But the rubric at its rim shines clear and bright:

  “I hear those voices that will not be drowned.”

  Words meant to make us think of Peter Grimes,

  But I think of the Deutschland and the festivals

  That Hopkins never went to. Pagan gods

  Are all I see where he saw Christ in glory:

  A matching shell, but this time luminous,

  Awash with lustre, rises from the water,

  And Venus speaks.

  “I’m stunned that you can face me.

  When have you ever suffered for your art?

  Men who weren’t mad for glamour gave their lives

  To work here. You should try it for ten minutes.”

  The men she meant, of course, were Britten’s crew:

  Abbots of music I enjoy so little

  I long for an old world put back together

  So Erich Wolfgang Korngold might have written

  A lot more operas. I made that much clear,

  Yet still she lay down on the rug I’d brought,

  Saying she didn’t feel the cold. I did:

  I kept my clothes on and just looked at her,

  Trying to tell myself it was enough

  To see her, since the memory would serve,

  And she need not appear to me again –

  Not her nor any of the other gods

  I stole from Bullfinch back in the year dot.

  One last kiss, then. Roll up the empty rug,

  And back to the hotel across the pebbles,

  So far from the hot sand that formed my habit

  Of softening reality with dreams.

  High time, I thought, for putting paid to that:

  If I see revenants, then they should come

  From the latest burned-out girls’ school in the Valley

  Of Swat, be cursed with sense enough to see

  That this place – silent, bleak, so short of action

  You can hear the lichen grow – is next to heaven.

  IV

  The second and last night, my main event:

  On stage to talk about my favourite poems

  By everyone but me. Points of technique.

  (Nothing is catchier than talking shop.)

  The audience has copies. I point out

  Frost’s “Silken Tent” is put together like

  Its subject – all the tensions are resolved,

  Simply by balance, into relaxation –

  While Larkin knows there is no sanctuary.

  By which of them is beauty more hard-won?

  Scanning the crowded hall, I duly note

  That the top half of Ted Hughes is moving in

  On the ash blonde with the Téa Leoni profile:

  A legend now throughout the festival

  For never having heard of Andrew Marvell.

  There was a day – like, yesterday – when I

  Would have cast her as Helen’s sister Phoebe,

  The thoughtful one with the career-girl glasses

  And a killing line in loose La Perla smalls,

  But now my gaze is drawn to a young woman

  Distinguished only by her concentration

  As she takes notes. Later, I ask her why.

  A schoolteacher, no vamp, except her eyes

  Burn with her love of poetry, as if

  It loved her in its turn. So what we said

  Might have a further life beyond our time:

  One quoted phrase, one line, one anecdote –

  The only immortality that lasts.

  No god for that save Mercury, the messenger.

  V

  Later, near midnight, on the esplanade,

  A pair of ancient people hand in hand

  Sit on a bench. Ideally they should be

  The ghosts of Vishnevskaya and Rostropovitch,

  Once happy to make music here. But no,

  They’re real. “We liked that one about the tent.”

&nbs
p; Feeling my age, I go back to my room,

  Make tea, and catch a re-run of The Wire.

  Too Many Poets

  Too many poets pack a line with thought

  But melody refuses to take wing.

  It’s not that meaning has been dearly bought:

  It has been stifled, by a hankering

  For portent, as if music meant too much.

  Sidney called this a want of inward touch.

  True poets should walk singing as they weep,

  As Arnaut Daniel once epitomised;

  But nothing written will be worth its keep

  Composed by one who has not realised

  This to be true, and tested his own song

  On others, seeing if they listen long

  Or turn away. Verse is a public act

  To that extent at least. As cruel as love,

  The wished-for gift declines to be a fact

  Except for the elect. The gods above

  Loll on their clouds and lazily look down

  To choose who gets the laurels of renown

  Even if deaf. For them, it’s just a game,

  But not for us, and though there might well be

  Too many poets, we all nurse the same

  Faith in the virtue of our mystery.

  Courage, my friend: the world will not forget

  What you have written. Or at least not yet.

  Apotheosis at the Signing Table

  Looking ahead for places to sit down,

  Come spring I might, one last time, limp downtown

  And into Heffers, into Waterstones,

  In either order, haul my creaking bones,

  To stand, with a long-practised half-lost look,

  Somewhere beside the stack of my new book

  Until I’m asked to sign. As if surprised

  I’ll sit down, slowly, seeming paralysed

  By sheer humility as they bring stock

  Of books that I forgot I wrote. I’ll sign

  Each tempting title-page with my by-line

  Like a machine for hours on end. The clock

  Will seem not to exist. My signature

  Will grow, however, steadily less sure,

  Until, the felt-tip quivering in my grasp,

  I scrawl the hieroglyphs of my last gasp.

  A final short sip from my cup of tea

  And I will topple, croaking tragically.

  Slumped on the carpet, I will look around,

  And all the walls of books in the background,

  More splendid even than they were before,

  Will seem to hear my small voice from the floor.

  “Heffers or Waterstones, this is goodbye,

  But I rejoice that I came here to die,