Paul StJohn Mackintosh’s blog

Fantasia for Woods

Green ivy creeps down crumbling walls
of rotting marble, swamps and drowns
the white acanthus: broken crowns
embossed with dark oak apple galls.

Gold motes waltz in the cool wood’s gloom,
transfixed in stillness long accrued
and pooled in lightwells; yew glades brood
where bluebells ring an empty tomb.

Shades’ fingers trace a sundial,
telling the Jacob’s ladder rungs;
butterflies sip with watchspring tongues
at muddy footpaths’ puddled bile

- panikon deima - sleek beasts prowl
through leafshadow’s thick forest glass,
brushing dark swathes through dewy grass,
observed by the unblinking owl,

and ancient woodland’s holy grounds
hear late the flutes of twilight pine;
frosted with silver sylvanshine,
hewn trees weep jewels from their wounds.

Rain Garden

(for Lilla and Diana)

This garden is the falling rain:
fresh plashes are its shoots and sprays,
the raindrop ripples are its blooms,
the petrichor its sweet bouquets.

Dewberry buds hung on each bough
blossom in rainbows without light
to grow this garden of the mind:
this garden only grows at night.

Sentosa

Sun, sea and sand, and torrid spring
set all the East at play;
I trod you like a cock his hen
that Easter holiday.

Your blue eyes burned right through your head,
the clearest I had seen;
red sealing-wax palms flared against
the dark of forest green.

Forked lightning earthed into the sea
against a stony sky:
shock-headed coconuts bowed low
before the storm’s blow-dry.

The air was warm, the beach was clean,
the weekend crowds were blithe,
and to complete the seaside fun
I buried you alive.

An orchid blossomed in your mouth,
a stoup of purple wine;
the Asian shore’s southern extreme
stretched down towards the Line.

Lilla goes up to the roof and comes back down with a bucketful of stars for baby.

Fort Canning

Easter bells ring over Singapore,
filling the evening sky above
the terrace and the shining blue pool;
house geckoes chirrup around the fans
orbiting slowly overhead,
and old friends meeting you the first time;
“She’s lovely”: the same words everywhere
across age and race, culture and clime.

This is a revised version of a sonnet I wrote earlier. You can click back in the previous Poetry posts to find the earlier version, if it interests you

We stake ourselves on words’ illusive boons:
Odin hung on the trunk of Yggdrasil
nine nights self-sacrificed to win the runes,
howling, full stretch, impaled by his own will;
since we’re not born that way, with silver spoons
shoved in our mouths, but bound to hone our skill
through inane phases fickle as the moon’s
two faces, though it may be all worth nil.
While some read destinies in blood and earth,
I put down my roots in black and white,
careless of my accident of birth;
talking up my idiolect to write
off earth’s grubstake in me, for what it’s worth,
from scratch, charged with the debt I must requite.

I strip naked and wash myself to welcome my daughter into her home.

It’s a very practical ritual. When her waters first broke, Lilla did a Marie Celeste from the kitchen just after a pan of cocoa boiled over on the stove. Four days subsequently, there were floaters of mould on the surface of the chocolatey water in the pan. I had to wash everything. And until Diana has had her BCG, we have to be constantly on the alert against tuberculosis spores. So we will have clean room conditions, strip off and scrub down constantly.

Diana sings in her sleep. She’s a little enchantress. Just like her mother. We’re spending the first few precious days of her whole long life together, with each other. So many birthdays to come for my lovely little girl. Two days and two nights in the outside world, and already she has made my life so much larger.

She lies on her back in her cot, her little breaths lifting her blanket, small rippling and burbling sounds occasionally coming from her mouth as milky bubbles form and pop in passages so tiny, tuned to the clearest, sweetest, highest notes of the organ’s thinnest pipes. I would clean and wipe her constantly if I could, to keep the shit and pee and miconium from irritating her adorable pink skin, but I can’t disturb her and have to let her be.

Lilla lies in the bed beside her, catching up on sleep, head resting at the same angle as her newborn daughter, well-sucked nipples exposed to the air. The voices of staff and visitors outside in the corridor and in adjacent rooms don’t disturb them at all. My phone vibrates periodically with incoming SMSs of congratulation: it’s on silent mode and well away from mother and baby. When Diana makes a noise, it’s her inner life, the flowering of body and soul, like twin vines intertwining, that is the cause. Her hat slipped off her head, but she doesn’t mind and sleeps on. Lilla’s rest is more disturbed: Diana’s is tranquility itself.

Lilla’s right hand rests above her head beside the four-coloured toy ball she sewed for Diana, her fingers folded with the forefinger pointed skywards, in a mudra or the gesture of a saint. Her other hand, the one with the scar across its back, lies across her front, under her breasts.

Diana is already raising and turning her head, and sometimes she rolls it one side only to slip back into the same sleeping positing on her right cheek. Her mouth opens in a miniature yawn while her eyes stay shut. The whorls and coils of her left ear are as pink and delicately involuted as a conch washed up on the shore, a gift of the elements, jewel of the sea, with the rushing sound of the tides, their ebb and flow, always inside it. You hold a shell to your ear to hear the sea, and hear your own blood, the inner sea talking to the outer, whence it came.

So small, and yet her breath and every noise she makes fills the room at night, a presence that was never there before but now is everywhere, filling every space, leaving nothing empty. Tears come to my eyes as I look down at her, standing in slippers and bathrobe, Filofax and pen in hand, over her cot. The clear plastic bassinet gives a view of her from all sides as she lies in her swaddling wrap under her bright blue blanket, actually a soft towel. She yawns in her sleep, opens her mouth with a little coughing splutter, lifts and turns her head, arms twitching under the covers, then settles back with her head on the other side, tiny inhalations and exhalations whistling through her nose. The clock ticks peacefully, continuously. Under their lids, her eyes are moving.

I haven’t shaved since Friday, and the glittering golden stubble stands out millimeters from my cheeks in the bathroom mirror. Lilla didn’t have time to add my sponge bag to the luggage on the way out to the ambulance, so I’ve been without razors or clean underpants up until yesterday evening. Diana’s incredibly soft skin would be scratched if I nuzzled her now: I have to be careful just to kiss her with my lips.

There is already so much going on in there, a whole universe lying there waiting to be explored. She came in answer to my prayers and put all my fears to rest. Thank You.

European Elegy

Delphic effusions shadow forth
the shabby pageant
of phantasms I left behind
and washed my hands of.

Dire friezes of prophetic masks
deck plaster facades;
proud eagles flutter vainly from
the Citadella.

Sigils glitter on tile shingling
the Golden Roof;
black ravens circle the White Tower
near Traitors Gate.

Karst relics of forgotten seas
crown crumbling summits;
vast shadows pivot round the gnomon
of Grosser Mythen.

Ragpicking on the bones of gods,
tour parties picnic
among the shards of shattered nations
crazed in the recessional
of the Hall of Mirrors
and Trianon.

The Milky Way dives in the river
at Stari Most:
an ashlar scimitar across
the cold Neretva.

Titanic Saturn eats his sons,
the Golden Age
cannibalizing rabidly
the family silver.

Ada Kaleh’s lost haven sinks
beneath the Danube;
gypsies corral their caravans
on urban spoilheaps.

I woke from fever dreams,
stiff with shit and stardust;
you errant conscience strays,
a gaunt hussar
lost on the glacis of a starfort
vaster than worlds.