Collected Poems (1958-2015) Read online

  It is. A sketchy dirt track through the trees

  Leads to a pool just forty feet across

  Connected to the sea at such a depth

  That though as clear as air and always calm

  It shades down into darkness. Sufferers

  From vertigo can’t swim there. Parrotfish

  Like clockwork paperweights on crystal shelves,

  Their colour schemes preposterous, exchange

  Positions endlessly. Shadows below

  Look no more dense than purity compressed

  Or light packed tight. Things were clear-cut

  At that great moment of assault repulsed,

  The victors proud yet chivalrous to a fault.

  White flags, no matter how unsavoury

  The hands that held them, were respected. Two

  Of Batista’s most notorious torturers,

  Still wearing their original dark glasses

  (Through which they’d both looked forward to a prompt

  Resumption of a glittering career),

  Were singled out and shot, but otherwise

  Nobody missed a change of socks. They all

  Got shipped back undamaged to Miami –

  A better deal than they’d have handed out.

  That day the Cuban revolution showed

  A cleanliness which in the memory

  Dazzles the more for how it has been spoiled:

  What had to happen sullied by what might

  Have been avoided, had those flagrant beards

  Belonged to wiser heads – or so we think,

  We who were young and thrilled and now are neither.

  Credit where credit’s due, though. Let’s be fair.

  Children cut cane here still, but go to school,

  And don’t get sick; or, if they do, don’t die.

  La cienega is a charnel house no longer,

  And in this pool, which they call El Cenote,

  Young workers float at lunchtime like tree frogs

  Poised on an air column. Things have improved

  In some ways, so when they get worse in others

  It’s easier to blame Reagan than accept

  The plain fact that the concentrated power

  Which makes sick babies well must break grown men –

  The logic so obvious it’s blinding.

  From armchairs far away we watch the brilliant

  Picture grow dim with pain. On the Isle of Pines

  The men who wear dark glasses late at night

  Are back in business. Anyone smart enough

  To build a raft from inner tubes and rope

  Would rather run the gauntlet of the sharks

  On the off-chance of encountering Florida

  Than take the risk of listening to one more

  Speech by Fidel – who, in his unrelenting

  Urge to find friends among the non-aligned

  Countries, now heaps praise on the regime

  Of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Russian oil

  Pollutes Havana. How opaque, we feel,

  Those erstwhile glories have become, how sad –

  Preferring, on the whole, to leave it there

  Than enter beyond one long, ravished glance

  That cistern filled with nothing but the truth,

  Which we partake of but may not possess

  Unless we go too deep and become lost,

  By pressure of transparency confounded –

  Trusting our eyes instead of turning back,

  Drawn down by clarity into the dark,

  Crushed by the prospect of enlightenment,

  Our lungs bursting like a revelation.

  The Artificial Horizon

  Deus gubernat navem

  The artificial horizon is no false dawn

  But a tool to locate you in the sky.

  A line has been drawn.

  If it tilts, it is you that are awry.

  Trust it and not your eye.

  Or trust your eye, but no further than it goes

  To the artificial horizon.

  Only if that froze

  Would you look out for something on the level

  And pray you didn’t spot it too late.

  To stay straight

  You can’t just follow your nose –

  Except when the true horizon’s there.

  But how often is that?

  The sea at sunset shades into the air.

  A white cloud, a night black as your hat –

  What ground you glimpse might be at an angle,

  While looking flat.

  So the artificial horizon is a court

  Of appeal, your first line of defence

  And last resort:

  A token world whose import is immense.

  Though it seem unreal,

  If it moves it can’t be broken.

  Believe that it makes sense

  Or else be brought up short.

  The artificial horizon

  Is your Dr Johnson:

  It’s got its own slant.

  It says clear your mind of cant.

  What Happened to Auden

  His stunning first lines burst out of the page

  Like a man thrown through a windscreen. His flat drawl

  Was acrid with the spirit of the age –

  The spy’s last cigarette, the hungry sprawl

  Of Hornby clockwork train sets in ‘O’ gauge,

  Huge whitewashed slogans on a factory wall –

  It was as if a spotlight when he spoke

  Brilliantly pierced the histrionic smoke.

  Unsentimental as the secret police,

  Contemporary as a Dinky Toy,

  On holiday in Iceland with MacNeice,

  A flop-haired Cecil Beaton golden boy,

  Auden pronounced like Pericles to Greece

  The short time Europe had left to enjoy,

  Yet made it sound as if impending doom

  Could only ventilate the drawing room.

  Splendidly poised above the ashtray’s rim,

  The silver record-breaking aeroplane

  For streamlined utterance could not match him.

  Oblique but no more often than the rain,

  Impenetrable only to the dim,

  Neurotic merely not to be insane,

  He seemed to make so much sense all at once

  Anyone puzzled called himself a dunce.

  Cricket pavilion lust looked a touch twee

  Even to devotees, but on the whole,

  Apart from harsh reviews in Scrutiny,

  All hailed his triumph in Cassandra’s role,

  Liking the chic he gave her, as if she

  Wore ankle-strap high heels and a mink stole –

  His ambiguity just further proof

  Here was a man too proud to stand aloof.

  By now, of course, we know he was in fact

  As queer as a square grape, a roaring queen

  Himself believing the forbidden act

  Of love he made a meal of was obscene.

  He could be crass and generally lacked tact.

  He had no truck with personal hygiene.

  The roughest trade would seldom stay to sleep.

  In soiled sheets he was left alone to weep.

  From the Kurfürstendamm to far Shanghai

  He cruised in every sense with Isherwood.

  Sadly he gave the talent the glad eye

  And got out while the going was still good.

  New York is where his genius went to die

  Say those who disapproved, but though they could

  Be right that he lost much of his allure,

  Whether this meant decline is not so sure.

  Compatriots who stuck it out have said

  Guilt for his getaway left him unmanned,

  Whereat his taproot shrivelled and went dead,

  Having lost contact with its native land.

  Some say it was the sharing of his bed

  With the one ma
n nobody else could stand

  That did him in, since poets can’t afford

  The deadly risk of conjugal concord.

  But Chester made bliss hard enough to take,

  And Wystan, far from pining for his roots,

  Gaily tucked into the unrationed steak.

  An international figure put out shoots.

  Stravinsky helped the progress of the rake:

  Two cultural nabobs were in cahoots.

  No, Auden ageing was as much at home

  On the world stage as Virgil was in Rome,

  If less than salonfähig still. Regret

  By all accounts he sparingly displayed

  When kind acquaintances appeared upset,

  Their guest rooms wrecked as if by an air raid.

  He would forgive himself and soon forget.

  Pig-like he revelled in the mess he made,

  Indecorous the more his work lost force,

  Devoid of shame. Devoured, though, by remorse,

  For had he not gazed into the abyss

  And found, as Nietzsche warned, that it gazed back?

  His wizardry was puerile next to this.

  No spark of glamour touched the railway track

  That took whole populations to the hiss

  Of cyanide and stoked the chimney stack

  Scattering ash above a vast expanse

  Of industry bereft of all romance.

  The pit cooled down but still he stood aghast

  At how far he had failed to state the case

  With all those tricks that now seemed so half-arsed.

  The inconceivable had taken place.

  Waking to find his wildest dreams outclassed

  He felt his tongue must share in the disgrace,

  And henceforth be confined, in recompense,

  To no fine phrase devoid of plain prose sense.

  The bard unstrung his lyre to change his tune,

  Constrained his inspiration to repent.

  Dry as the wind abrading a sand dune,

  A tightly drafted letter of intent,

  Each rubric grew incisive like a rune,

  Merest suggestions became fully meant.

  The ring of truth was in the level tone

  He forged to fit hard facts and praise limestone.

  His later manner leaves your neck-hair flat,

  Not standing up as Housman said it should

  When poetry has been achieved. For that,

  In old age Auden simply grew too good.

  A mortal fear of talking through his hat,

  A moral mission to be understood

  Precisely, made him extirpate the thrill

  Which, being in his gift, was his to kill.

  He wound up as a poor old fag at bay,

  Beleaguered in the end as at the start

  By dons appalled that he could talk all day

  And not draw breath although pissed as a fart,

  But deep down he had grown great, in a way

  Seen seldom in the history of his art –

  Whose earthly limits Auden helped define

  By realizing he was not divine.

  Last Night the Sea Dreamed It Was Greta Scacchi

  Last night the sea dreamed it was Greta Scacchi.

  It wakes unruffled, lustrous, feeling sweet –

  Not one breath of scandal has ever touched it.

  At a higher level, the rain has too much power.

  Grim clouds conspire to bring about its downfall.

  The squeeze is on, there is bound to be a shake-out.

  The smug sea and the sky that will soon go bust

  Look like antagonists, but don’t be fooled:

  They understand each other very well.

  We are caught between the hammer and the anvil.

  Our bodies, being umpteen per cent water,

  Are in this thing up to the neck at least.

  If you want to feel detached from a panorama,

  Try the Sahara. Forget about Ayers Rock –

  The sea was once all over it like a rash.

  The water in the opal makes it lovely,

  Also unlucky. If not born in October

  You might be wearing a cloudburst for a pendant.

  The ban on flash photography is lifted.

  The reception area expectantly lights up.

  No contest. It’s just life. Don’t try to fight it –

  You’ll only get wet through, and we are that

  Already. Every dimple in the swell

  Is a drop in the ocean, but then who isn’t?

  No, nothing about women is more sensual

  Than their sea smell. Look at her lying there,

  Taking what comes and spreading it on her skin –

  The cat, she’s using her cream as moisturizer.

  Milt Jackson’s mallets bounce on silver leaves.

  Strafed by cool riffs she melts in silent music:

  Once we walked out on her, but we’ll be back.

  Drama in the Soviet Union

  When Kaganovich, brother-in-law of Stalin,

  Left the performance barely halfway through,

  Meyerhold must have known that he was doomed,

  Yet ran behind the car until he fell.

  In Pravda he’d been several times condemned

  For Stubborn Formalism. The ill will

  Of the All Highest himself was common knowledge,

  Proved by a mud slide of denunciations

  And rubbed in by the fact that the Great Teacher

  Had never personally entered the theatre

  Which this enemy of the people had polluted

  With attitudes hostile to the State.

  Thus Meyerhold was a dead man of long standing:

  Behind the big black car it was a corpse

  That ran, a skull that gasped for air,

  Bare bone that flailed and then collapsed.

  His dear friend Shostakovich later said

  How glad he was that he had never seen

  Poor Meyerhold like that. Which was perhaps

  Precisely why this giant of his art

  Did such a thing: to dramatize the fear

  Which had already eaten him alive

  And make it live.

  Stalin, meanwhile,

  Who didn’t need to see how it was done

  To know that the director’s trick of staging

  A scene so it could never be forgotten

  Had to be stamped on, was the acknowledged master

  Of the one theatrical effect that mattered –

  He knew how to make people disappear.

  So Meyerhold, having limped home, plummeted

  Straight through the trapdoor to oblivion.

  Nobody even registered surprise.

  Specific memories were not permitted.

  People looked vague, as if they didn’t have them.

  In due course his widow, too, was murdered –

  Stabbed in the eyes, allegedly by thieves.

  Budge up

  Flowering cherry pales to brush-stroke pink at blossom fall

  Like watermelon bitten almost to the rind.

  It is in his mind because the skin is just that colour

  Hot on her tight behind

  As she lies in the bath, a Bonnard flipped like a flapjack.

  His big black towel turns a naiad to a dryad,

  No pun intended. Then,

  An unwrapped praline,

  She anoints herself with liberal Oil of Ulay.

  It looks like fun.

  Her curved fingers leave a few streaks not rubbed in.

  He says: here, let me help.

  The night is young but not as young as she is

  And he is older than the hills.

  Sweet sin

  Swallows him at a gulp.

  While cherry blossom suds dry on the lawn

  Like raspberry soda

  He attends the opening of the blue tulip

  Mobbed at the stage
door by forget-me-nots.

  For a short season

  He basks in her reflected glory.

  Pathetic fallacy,

  Dispelled by the clattering plastic rake.

  Bring Me the Sweat of Gabriela Sabatini

  Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini

  For I know it tastes as pure as Malvern water,

  Though laced with bright bubbles like the acqua minerale

  That melted the kidney stones of Michelangelo

  As sunlight the snow in spring.

  Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini

  In a green Lycurgus cup with a sprig of mint,

  But add no sugar –

  The bitterness is what I want.

  If I craved sweetness I would be asking you to bring me

  The tears of Annabel Croft.

  I never asked for the wristbands of Maria Bueno,

  Though their periodic transit of her glowing forehead

  Was like watching a bear’s tongue lap nectar.

  I never asked for the blouse of Françoise Durr,

  Who refused point-blank to improve her soufflé serve

  For fear of overdeveloping her upper arm –

  Which indeed remained delicate as a fawn’s femur,

  As a fern’s frond under which cool shadows gather

  So that the dew lingers.

  Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini

  And give me credit for having never before now

  Cried out with longing.

  Though for all the years since TV acquired colour

  To watch Wimbledon for even a single day

  Has left me shaking with grief like an ex-smoker

  Locked overnight in a cigar factory,

  Not once have I let loose as now I do

  The parched howl of deprivation,

  The croak of need.

  Did I ever demand, as I might well have done,

  The socks of Tracy Austin?

  Did you ever hear me call for the cast-off Pumas

  Of Hana Mandlikova?

  Think what might have been distilled from these things,

  And what a small request it would have seemed –

  It would not, after all, have been like asking

  For something so intimate as to arouse suspicion