The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered by Clive James

The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered

The book of my enemy has been remaindered

And I am pleased.

In vast quantities it has been remaindered

Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized

And sits in piles in a police warehouse,

My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles

In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.

Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles

One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,

Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews

Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book –

For behold, here is that book

Among these ranks and banks of duds,

These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns

Of complete stiffs. 

The book of my enemy has been remaindered

And I rejoice.

It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion

Beneath the yoke.

What avail him now his awards and prizes,

The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,

His individual new voice?

Knocked into the middle of next week

His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys

The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,

The Edsels of the world of moveable type,

The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,

The unbudgeable turkeys. 

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper

Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,

His unmistakably individual new voice

Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper 

Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,

His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,

His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,

Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots—

One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,

And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,

His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,

His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one

With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,

A volume graced by the descriptive rubric

"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun". 

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,

Though not to the monumental extent

In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out

To the book of my enemy,

Since in the case of my own book it will be due

To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error—

Nothing to do with merit.

But just supposing that such an event should hold

Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset

By the memory of this sweet moment.

Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets! 

The book of my enemy has been remaindered

And I am glad.

Did This Ever Happen to You by Franz Wright

Did This Ever Happen to You

A marble-colored cloud

engulfed the sun and stalled,

a skinny squirrel limped toward me

as I crossed the empty park

and froze, the last

or next to last

fall leaf fell but before it touched

the earth, with shocking clarity

I heard my mother’s voice

pronounce my name. And in an instant I passed

beyond sorrow and terror, and was carried up

into the imageless

bright darkness

I came from

and am. Nobody’s

stronger than forgiveness.

Atlantis by Wisława Szymborska

Atlantis

They were or they weren't.

On an island or not.

An ocean or not an ocean

swallowed them up or it didn't.

Was there anyone to love anyone?

Did anybody have someone to fight?

Everything happened or it didn't

there or someplace else.

Seven cities stood there.

So we think.

They were meant to stand forever.

We suppose.

They weren't up to much, no.

They were up to something, yes.

Hypothetical. Dubious. 

Uncommemorated.

Never extracted from air,

fire,water, or earth.

Not contained within a stone

or drop of rain.

Not suitable for straight-faced use

as a story's moral.

A meteor fell. 

Not a meteor.

A volcano exploded.

Not a volcano.

Someone summoned something. 

Nothing was called.

On this more-or-less Atlantis.

Insomnia by Elizabeth Bishop

Insomnia

The moon in the bureau mirror

looks out a million miles

(and perhaps with pride, at herself,

but she never, never smiles)

far and away beyond sleep, or

perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,

she'd tell it to go to hell,

and she'd find a body of water,

or a mirror, on which to dwell.

So wrap up care in a cobweb

and drop it down the well

into that world inverted

where left is always right,

where the shadows are really the body,

where we stay awake all night,

where the heavens are shallow as the sea

is now deep, and you love me. 

45 Mercy Street by Anne Sexton

45 Mercy Street

In my dream, 

drilling into the marrow 

of my entire bone, 

my real dream, 

I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill 

searching for a street sign - 

namely MERCY STREET. 

Not there. 

I try the Back Bay. 

Not there. 

Not there. 

And yet I know the number. 

45 Mercy Street. 

I know the stained-glass window 

of the foyer, 

the three flights of the house 

with its parquet floors. 

I know the furniture and 

mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, 

the servants. 

I know the cupboard of Spode 

the boat of ice, solid silver, 

where the butter sits in neat squares 

like strange giant's teeth 

on the big mahogany table. 

I know it well. 

Not there. 

Where did you go? 

45 Mercy Street, 

with great-grandmother 

kneeling in her whale-bone corset 

and praying gently but fiercely 

to the wash basin, 

at five A.M. 

at noon 

dozing in her wiggy rocker, 

grandfather taking a nap in the pantry, 

grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid, 

and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower 

on her forehead to cover the curl 

of when she was good and when she was... 

And where she was begat 

and in a generation 

the third she will beget, 

me, 

with the stranger's seed blooming 

into the flower called Horrid. 

I walk in a yellow dress 

and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes, 

enough pills, my wallet, my keys, 

and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five? 

I walk. I walk. 

I hold matches at street signs 

for it is dark, 

as dark as the leathery dead 

and I have lost my green Ford, 

my house in the suburbs, 

two little kids 

sucked up like pollen by the bee in me 

and a husband 

who has wiped off his eyes 

in order not to see my inside out 

and I am walking and looking 

and this is no dream 

just my oily life 

where the people are alibis 

and the street is unfindable for an 

entire lifetime. 

Pull the shades down - 

I don't care! 

Bolt the door, mercy, 

erase the number, 

rip down the street sign, 

what can it matter, 

what can it matter to this cheapskate 

who wants to own the past 

that went out on a dead ship 

and left me only with paper? 

Not there. 

I open my pocketbook, 

as women do, 

and fish swim back and forth 

between the dollars and the lipstick. 

I pick them out, 

one by one 

and throw them at the street signs, 

and shoot my pocketbook 

into the Charles River. 

Next I pull the dream off 

and slam into the cement wall 

of the clumsy calendar 

I live in, 

my life, 

and its hauled up 

notebooks. 

In Love with You by Kenneth Koch

In Love with You 

                                                      I

O what a physical effect it has on me

To dive forever into the light blue sea

Of your acquaintance! Ah, but dearest friends,

Like forms, are finished, as life has ends! Still,

It is beautiful, when October

Is over, and February is over,

To sit in the starch of my shirt, and to dream of your sweet

Ways! As if the world were a taxi, you enter it, then

Reply (to no one), “Let’s go five or six blocks.”

Isn’t the blue stream that runs past you a translation from the Russian?

Aren’t my eyes bigger than love?

Isn’t this history, and aren’t we a couple of ruins?

Is Carthage Pompeii? is the pillow the bed? is the sun

What glues our heads together? O midnight! O midnight!

Is love what we are,

Or has happiness come to me in a private car

That’s so very small I’m amazed to see it there?

                                                       2

We walk through the park in the sun, and you say, “There’s a spider

Of shadow touching the bench, when morning’s begun.” I love you.

I love you fame I love you raining sun I love you cigarettes I love you love

I love you daggers I love smiles daggers and symbolism.

                                                       3

Inside the symposium of your sweetest look’s

Sunflower awning by the nurse-faced chrysanthemums childhood

Again represents a summer spent sticking knives into porcelain raspberries, when China’s

Still a country! Oh, King Edward abdicated years later, that’s

Exactly when. If you were seventy thousand years old, and I were a pill,

I know I could cure your headache, like playing baseball in drinking-water, as baskets

Of towels sweetly touch the bathroom floor! O benches of nothing

Appear and reappear—electricity! I’d love to be how

You are, as if

The world were new, and the selves were blue

Which we don

Until it’s dawn,

Until evening puts on

The gray hooded selves and the light brown selves of . . .

Water! your tear-colored nail polish

Kisses me! and the lumberyard seems new

As a calm

On the sea, where, like pigeons,

I feel so mutated, sad, so breezed, so revivified, and still so unabdicated—

Not like an edge of land coming over the sea!

End of Winter by Louise Glück

End of Winter

Over the still world, a bird calls

waking solitary among black boughs.

You wanted to be born; I let you be born.

When has my grief ever gotten

in the way of your pleasure?

Plunging ahead

into the dark and light at the same time

eager for sensation

as though you were some new thing, wanting

to express yourselves

all brilliance, all vivacity

never thinking

this would cost you anything,

never imagining the sound of my voice

as anything but part of you—

you won't hear it in the other world,

not clearly again,

not in birdcall or human cry,

not the clear sound, only

persistent echoing

in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye—

the one continuous line

that binds us to each other.