Collected Poems (1958-2015) Read online

  And the shrieks of the dancing Queen as the hero splashed her

  While her cheer-squad of ladies-in-waiting giggled on cue,

  The eunuchs holding the towels.

  With salt in her eyes did she wrinkle the perfect nose

  Of which Pascal would later venture the opinion

  That had it been shorter (he didn’t say by how much)

  History would have been different?

  They were probably both naked. What a servant saw

  Did not count. They might even have boffed each other

  Right there at the water’s edge like a pair of dolphins

  Washed up in the middle of a mad affair,

  With her unable to believe the big lunk would ever

  Walk away from this, and him in his soul

  Fighting to forget that this was R&R

  And there was still the war.

  There is always the war. The Aussies in Tobruk

  Could hear the German bombers at El Adem

  Warming up on the airfield

  For the five-minute flight that is really the only distance

  Between bliss and blitz.

  Ears still ringing from kookaburras and whipbirds

  Were heckled by Heinkels.

  When Antony eyeballed her Coppertone tits and bum

  He was looking at Actium.

  Shake it, lady.

  Shake it for the Afrika Korps.

  Where the sea meets the desert there is always,

  There is always the war.

  The Lions at Taronga

  The leaves of Tower Bridge are rigged to open

  For any taxi I might chance to catch.

  They say that when the ravens leave the Tower

  It means they’ll use my rain-stained study skylight

  As a toilet. I can see Canary Wharf,

  A Russian rocket packed around with boosters

  Lit up to launch at dawn from Baikonur.

  The Blade of Light is cleared for butterflies

  To crash-land. When that lens-shaped office block

  Is finished it will bend a ray from space

  To burn the Belfast like a sitting duck.

  I’ve known the NatWest Tower since it was knee-high

  To the Barbican, another high-tech know-how

  HQ that used to look like the last word.

  From my place I can see last words in vistas

  As far downriver as the spreading spikes

  Of the Dome, some sad bitch of a sea urchin

  Losing its battle with a stray Dutch cap

  While hothouse pleasure boats leak foreign voices

  Like tourist minibuses nose to tail

  In the corridors of Buckingham Palace.

  Been there, done that. The Queen, she hung one on me.

  I’ve got it in a box. The box to frame

  My body will be built here, like as not,

  And probably quite soon. I’ve lived in London

  For longer than some people live all told.

  Except for the way out, I know it backwards.

  So at night when the lions at Taronga

  Roar in my memory across the water

  I feel the way they must have felt, poor bastards –

  Gone in the teeth. The food dead. On display

  All day and every day. Sleep in a fortress.

  Every familiar walkway leads to strangers.

  Dream Me Some Happiness

  John Donne, uneasiest of apostates,

  Renouncing Rome that he might get ahead

  In life, or anyway not wind up dead,

  Minus his guts or pressed beneath great weights,

  Ascribed his bad faith to his latest flame

  As if the fact she could be bent to do

  His bidding proved that she would not stay true:

  Each kiss a Judas kiss, a double game.

  Compared with him, the mental muscle-man,

  Successors who declared his numbers rough

  Revealed by theirs they found the pace too tough:

  The knotty strength that made him hard to scan

  Left him renowned for his conceits alone,

  Figments unfading as the forms of death

  Prescribed for Catholics by Elizabeth –

  Tangles of gristle, relics of hair and bone.

  Brought back to favour in an anxious time

  Attuned to his tormented intellect,

  By now he charms us, save in one respect:

  Framing his women still looks like a crime.

  We foist our fault on her we claim to love

  A different way. Pleased to the point of tears,

  She tells us that the real world disappears.

  Not quite the Donne thing, when push comes to shove:

  He wrote betrayal into her delight.

  We have a better reason to deceive

  Ourselves as we help her help us believe

  Life isn’t like that: at least, not tonight.

  Deckard Was a Replicant

  The forms of nature cufflinked through your life

  Bring a sense of what Americans call closure.

  The full-blown iris swims in English air

  Like the wreckage of an airbag jellyfish

  Rinsed by a wave’s thin edge at Tamarama:

  The same frail blue, the same exhausted sprawl,

  The same splendour. Nothing but the poison

  Is taken out. In the gallery, that girl

  Has the beauty that once gave itself to you

  To be turned into marriage, children, houses.

  She will give these things to someone else this time.

  If this time seems the same time, it’s because

  It is. The reason she is not for you

  Is she already was. Try to remember

  What power they have, knowing what sex is for:

  Replacing us. The Gainsborough chatelaine

  She studies wears a shawl dipped in the hint

  Of jacaranda blossoms, yet it might

  Remind her of sucked sweets, or the pale veins

  Of her own breasts. Setting the Thames on fire,

  The tall white-painted training ship from Denmark

  Flaunts the brass fittings of the little ferry

  That took you as a child to Kirribilli

  On its way to Wapping, then the Acheron

  And Hades. Those gulls that graze the mud

  Took sixty years to get here from Bundeena.

  At an average speed of forty yards an hour

  They barely moved. It seems you didn’t either.

  You stood still with your head wrapped in the armour

  Of perception’s hard-wired interlocking habits.

  Ned Kelly was the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

  Dazzled by lipstick pulped from waratahs,

  The smoker coughs, having been born again.

  Lucretius the Diver

  Things worn out by the lapse of ages tend

  Toward the reef, that motley wrecking crew

  Of living polyps who, to get ahead,

  Climb ruthlessly all over their own dead,

  But facts like those Lucretius never knew:

  He merely meant we can’t long buck the trend

  That winds up hard against a watershed.

  Horace had godly names for every breeze.

  Ovid himself was stiff with sacred stuff.

  Virgil talked turkey just once, about bees.

  Of ancient wits Lucretius alone,

  Without recourse to supernatural guff,

  Uncannily forecast the modern tone –

  Viewing the world as miracle enough.

  Imagine him in scuba gear, instead

  Of whatever kit a Roman poet wore –

  To find his fruitful symbol for the grave

  Not just inevitable but alive

  Would surely suit him down to the sea floor.

  Suspended before such a flower bed

  He’d bubble with delight be
neath the wave.

  The reef, a daughter, and the sea, its mother,

  In a long, white-lipped rage with one another

  Would shout above him as he hung in space

  And saw his intuition had been right:

  Under a windswept canopy of lace,

  Even down there in that froth-filtered light,

  The World of Things is clearly the one place –

  Death lives, life dies, and no gods intervene.

  It’s all so obvious, would be his thought:

  But then, it always was, at least to him,

  And why the rest of them were quite so dim

  On that point is perhaps a theme we ought

  To tackle, realizing it could mean

  Our chances going in are pretty slim

  Of drawing comfort from a Golden Age

  So lethally haphazard no one sane

  Could contemplate the play of chance was all

  There was to life. That took the featherbrain

  Lucretius seemed to them, and not the sage

  He seems to us, who flinch from his disdain

  As he stares seaward at the restless wall

  Of ruined waves, the spray that falls like rain.

  One Man to Another

  Salute me! I have tamed my daughter’s face

  With hot oil, and my honour has been saved.

  It’s not to be defied that I have slaved.

  She talks a lot less now she knows her place.

  Most of her mouth can still move, and one eye

  Could stare in hatred if she wanted to.

  I’m proud to say her protests have been few

  Apart from that absurd initial cry.

  That was the evil spirit leaving her.

  She really should have dealt with it herself.

  She said she’d rather end up on the shelf

  Than marry our best choice. What thoughts occur

  To girls nowadays! Next they will want a say

  In what to wear and when to buy a book.

  Here, take your mother’s mirror. Take a look.

  What have you got in store for me today?

  You thought to shake my faith? Well, you have found

  My faith shakes you, and will again, I swear,

  If you continue with that hangdog air:

  If you continue with that whining sound.

  Can’t you be grateful we still keep you here?

  We could have sent you out there to the dust

  Where people fight for every cowpat crust.

  We don’t ask for a grin from ear to ear,

  But now no man would want you, we still do,

  So cut the sulky pout. To many another

  Far worse than this has happened. Ask your mother.

  I don’t know what the world is coming to.

  See how she slinks inside. If not with grace

  She seems to have accepted, more or less,

  Some limit to a woman’s wilfulness.

  The lesson hurt us both, but met the case.

  Salute me! I have tamed my daughter’s face.

  Stolen Children

  From where I sit for cool drinks in the heat

  The Covent Garden Jumpzone seems to fling

  Kids over rooftops in a bungee dive

  The wrong way, and the thrill it is to swing

  Straight up and down you see when they arrive,

  In Heaven as on Earth, with kicking feet,

  And so depart. One flier takes the pip

  By somersaulting in her harness when,

  High overhead, there is a moment’s pause

  For rubber to recuperate. Not then,

  But later, as she signals for applause

  With a slow stride instead of a last flip,

  The penny drops. I’ve seen this girl before.

  Above the birthplace of the Son of God

  It had pleased Botticelli to impose

  The perfect circle of a trained cheer-squad

  Dancing barefoot with light fantastic toes

  As angels do, the cloudless blue their floor.

  The second from the left was my dream girl.

  Outside, Trafalgar Square filled up with snow.

  Winter in England was a culture shock

  More ways than one. The gallery’s warm glow

  Seemed concentrated in a flowing frock,

  A flash of ankle gleaming like a pearl.

  Back down with us, she saunters past my chair.

  About thirteen, with more than blips for breasts,

  She wasn’t born before I saw her first

  On a glass board surfing the troughs and crests

  Of the air waves. Nor was her mother. Worst

  Of all is how the longing lingers there

  Yet leaves us nothing else to bless at last

  Except our luck that we were not insane.

  The Standard says the missing girls are still

  Not found. A man is held. The writers strain

  The law’s pale letter, closing for the kill

  As once the mob did, not far in the past.

  Suppose he did it, don’t I know that face?

  I shave it every morning. The same eyes

  Plead innocent. In his case, one loose screw

  Switched the desire a priest can’t neutralize

  To children, and permitted him to do

  What we don’t dream of even when God’s grace

  Stuns us with glory walking in the sky.

  Grace, but not justice. If an impulse makes

  Mere fools of most but monsters of the rest,

  A balance sheet of what it gives and takes

  Implies a mediator who knows best

  If you can just surrender. Nor can I.

  Think of the fathers, praying. They must know

  No one exists to listen who did not

  Choose them for this, but where else can they ask

  The same exemption all the others got

  By chance? They beg for mercy from a mask.

  Had it a mind, they’d not be weeping so.

  Time to go home. The things I tried to tell

  My own two daughters churn in my hot head.

  The stranger won’t come on like Captain Hook.

  He’ll laugh like me, crack jokes, yet want you dead.

  Good story, Dad. I turn for one last look

  At Paradise, and how we rose and fell.

  Young Lady in Black

  The Russian poets dreamed, but dreamed too soon,

  Of a red-lipped, chalk-white face framed in black fur:

  Symbol of what their future would be like –

  Free, lyrical and elegant, like her.

  In the love songs of their climacteric

  I met you before I met you, and you were

  The way you are now in these photographs

  Your father took outside the Hermitage.

  You stand on snow, and more snow in the air

  Arrives in powdered form like rice through space.

  It hurts to know the colour of your hair

  Is blacker than your hat. Such is the price

  Figments exact by turning real: we care

  Too much. I too was tricked by history,

  But at least I saw you, close enough to touch,

  Even as time made touch impossible.

  The poets never met their richly dressed

  Princess of liberty. The actual girl

  Was lost to them as all the rest was lost:

  Only their ghosts attended the snowfall

  The camera stopped when you stood in the square,

  Fiction made fact at long last and too late.

  My grief would look like nothing in their eyes.

  I hear them in the photographs. The breath

  Of sorrow stirs the cold dust while hope dies

  The worst way, in the vision of rebirth,

  As by whole generations they arise

  From pitted shallows in the permafrost


  And storm the Winter Palace from the sky.

  Each spirit shivering in a bead of light,

  They fall again for what they once foretold –

  For you, dawn burning through its cloak of night.

  They miss what I miss, and a millionfold.

  It all came true, it’s there in black and white:

  But your mouth is the colour of their blood.

  In Town for the March

  Today in Castlereagh Street I

  Felt short of breath, and here is why.

  From the direction of the Quay

  Towards where Mark Foy’s used to be,

  A glass and metal river ran

  Made in Germany and Japan.

  Past the facade of David Jones

  Men walked their mobile telephones,

  Making the footpath hideous

  With what they needed to discuss.

  But why so long, and why so loud?

  I can recall a bigger crowd

  In which nobody fought for space

  Except to call a name. The face

  To fit it smiled as it went by

  Among the ranks. Women would cry

  Who knew that should they call all day

  One face would never look their way.

  All this was sixty years ago,

  Since when I have grown old and slow,

  But still I see the marching men,

  So many of them still young then,

  Even the men from the first war

  Straight as a piece of two-by-four.

  Men of the Anzac Day parade,

  I grew up in the world you made.

  To mock it would be my mistake.

  I try to love it for your sake.

  Through cars and buses, on they come,

  Their pace set by a spectral drum.

  Their regimental banners, thin

  As watercolours fading in

  The sun, hint at a panoply

  Dissolving into history.

  As the rearguard outflanks Hyde Park,

  Wheels right, and melts into the dark,

  It leaves me, barely fit to stand,