A Japanese Maple Tree (taken from a UK site)
Dear friends and readers,
This week I spotted yet a third moving poem by Clive James about these last years of his: he is apparently dying and living with his daughter
Japanese Maple
Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.
See James’s Sentenced to Life and Rounded with a Sleep.
**********************
What was bright and then was gone. As I was walking back to my car from the Northern Virginia Jewish Community Center, I found myself remembering something Jim used to say one summer all summer long: we spent our last bright NYC summer (a very hot 1980) almost every day at a “haven” of pools and grass (for picnics, tennis, games) by a Bronx seashore called Shorehaven. “No one could be anti-semitic who experiences these sorts of places which Jews are good at creating,” he’d say. He was especially impressed with how crowded, how many people were there, in close proximity and no one getting into a quarrel at all. You didn’t have to be Jewish to join; it was somehow set up so comfortably, non-threateningly, a place for fun things in social life to be quietly carried on.
There it was mostly swimming; at this NVJCC it’s a wide variety of activities from exercise (I do “Dance Fusion” and next Friday will try “Core”) and swimming to classes, to trips, to plays put on (yes, my older daughter was a stage manager for one quite a number of years ago), but then the NVJCC is for all year round while Shorehaven closed in September and opened in May. You don’t have to be Jewish, but Jewish heritage is stressed in some of the courses. And pro-Israel signs here and there. Changed times. Shorehaven is gone now; wiped out as the lower to middle class population in the boroughs and Manhattan that supported it moved out of the city. Sold to a “developer.” It’s now private houses and apartments. Near the shore what’s left is wasteland. A sad loss.
At Shorehaven I was surrounded by mother, father, husband and baby daughter. My mother and father are dead too. My baby girl is now 36 and lives 20 minutes from me, a continual blogger (among other things). I walk alone to and from a year-round suburban Northern Virginia version of Shorehaven, circa 2014.
Sylvia
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
A lovely, moving poem, Ellen. We have the same problem with redevelopment here. Worthwhile community areas and other local council public facilities are being cleared away, mainly for housing. The enormous influx of European economic migrants and an aging housing stock has created a housing crisis. Much green land is also being taken to build “new towns”, many in areas which where unemployment is already high. You wonder at the lack of intelligence applied to such problems by government.
Clare
From a couple of articles in the LRB I discovered the gov’t has helped make the crisis. The giving away of the council housing stock makes demand high and sources low as the gov’t stopped building public housing at the same time. So rents go sky high at the same time as standards for quality are systemically undermined and by private interests ignored as much as they dare. One of the articles was about how owning your own place has become almost impossible for the younger generation. This has been engineered by the gov’t as a front for capitalism in private property. No job programs of course. Squeeze ’em, some character in Dickens probably says.
This poem is so beautiful. Jim liked James; at the time, the poems were satiric, witty, mocking, social verse, but they are powered by passion. Jim would have liked these three poems very much.
You are correct. Under Thatcher people were given the right to buy, and now councils have given the remaining housing stock to Trusts to look after. Many if the old council houses have been now sold on by the original tenants or their estate and are now in the hands of private landlords. What a surprise!
From a friend: a worthwhile article on grief: The Guardian, an interview with Edward Hirsh:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/14/edward-hirsch-gabriel-poem-interview
Ellen, The poem is “Japanese Maple”, not marble…
This article made me think of you… Not much new if you have been following him of late, but it may be of interest. (I had always thought of James as very clever but irritating in his cocksureness [just made that word up] but these latterday productions have a serenity that can stop you in your tracks.):
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/16/clive-james-new-poem-japanese-maple-terminally-ill-author
Susan
Thank you for the column. I did not know what was happening to James, just found three of his recent poems: 2 in the LRB and now 1 in TLS. It has taken 4 years for him to reach death (for the cancer to kill him); Jim’s devoured him in 4 months. Maybe James used chemo and perhaps his was a slower growing one, and not one which tempted him into a terrible operation.
Jim liked James — as I wrote in one of my blogs we have four of the books: verse satire, rhyming couplets not quite in 18th century couplet style.
These latest poems are very different in mood and you don’t need any specialized knowledge of people or events — they might have surprised Jim, but in retrospect they are also strong in style, rhythm, not at all free verse, old-fashioned, literary — like Anthony Hecht’s poetry whom Jim also liked and I did too – Hecht’s most famous is a mock on Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” but most of Hecht’s poetry is meditation and Proustian-like, one on ice-skating very lovely.
Briefly home before we leave for the train to France early tomorrow — saw this and of course must send it on to you… I haven’t read it, but I will, eventually.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/clive-james-japanese-maple-dying-valedictory-farewell
Susan
Thank you. It is a ceremonious poem. A couple of people said to me the poem didn’t move them because their experience of someone else’s death was so searing, wretched, with the implication I was identifying James’s way of dying with Jim’s. No not at all — rather I see it as a general statement. So I agree. And he’s not the only poet to perform his death or regard it as he dies. I don’t know how old Swift was when he wrote his retrospective one — it’s bitter bitter by contrast.