Mackintoshes

I’m writing this to tell my baby daughter
– who took my pen to chew just now – about her
rambunctious forebears, Papists or Dissenters,
before they were Glasgow artists or inventors:
nine hundred years of sanguinary glories,
blood-fuelled vendettas, feuding feudatories,
feral mosstroopers, breekless in the heather,
sleeping out plaid-wrapped through all Highland weather;
conveniently detained during Flodden,
second at Bannockburn, first at Culloden;
Jacobite malcontents, staunch in lost causes,
schooled by reverses and misfortune’s tawses;
clan wildcat totem for crest and supporters,
red lion, boar’s head, heart in hand, ship quarters;
proud bearings passed through gentleman and peasant,
from those ancestral mountains to the present
ludicrous days of raincoats and galoshes:
ferocious, feckless, fearless Mackintoshes.

Lantau

Our house looks east: dawn rays relume
Arcadia door and balcony
opening on the endless sea,
forming one wall of our front room;
and at this time of year, the sun,
rising between my feet, unshrouds
obscure horizons stretched beyond
islands ephemeral as clouds.

The earth prostrates itself before
the progress of god Helios,
echoing light’s footfalls across
the ocean’s polished ballroom floor;
cutwater of a hydrofoil
etches its wake across the calm
annealed by light’s prismatic oil,
annointed with chrismatic balm.

A full moon querned the night’s black flour,
milling the star-chaff angels glean,
filling the beamy lofts between
the blue hour and the golden hour;
now radiant day resumes its realm,
sunbeams flood streambeds, coursing down
the valley walls to overwhelm
shadow’s levees round field and town.

The mountaintops are glorioled,
round sapphire cupola of sky,
mosaic saints exalted by
the spiritual light of gold,
and wooded slopes throw back the roar
of ‘Great Pan lives’, great Pan reborn
panikon deima – sounded for
the piper at the gates of dawn.

Such bell metal-tongued calls break through
life’s brassy everyday pizzazz
in settings as prosaic as
a supermarket checkout queue:
prophetic conscience wakening
in an unprophetable time;
words come unbidden, following
the happy accidence of rhyme.

Far off, the old world’s heat death throes
twist under Nature’s interdict,
voracious scavengers evict
the Himalayas’ homeless snows.
Apocalyptic angels’ vials
descant on our stupidity;
the Furies’ chorus now reviles
lost souls’ loveless cupidity.

But, at a distance from it all,
I see, as if in Merlin’s glass,
everything that came to pass
since the Temptation and the Fall;
fit for my wife and child to live,
a magical, enchanted place
where I can ultimately give
my contribution to the race.

Lullaby
(for Diana)

Hush, little baby, I implore,
and let your mother sleep some more,
and you shall have a treasure trove
of everything that comes with love:
the Christmas tree with all its lights
keeping its vigil through the night,
dry corncobs hanging on a string,
pumpkins and gourds, and festive things;
a water castle in a lake
to charm your dreams where, for your sake,
messengers ride north, south, east, west,
to fetch you back whatever’s best –
the bees’ sweet gold in crystal jars,
white diamonds fallen from the stars,
tame singing birds with rainbow feathers,
the amaranth that blooms for ever,
a cross-eyed robin on a card –
while household presences stand guard
over your head, cosily wrapped
and cradled gently in my lap,
the perfect circle of good faith,
unbreakable, to keep you safe.
All this I promise you, and more,
so let your mother sleep some more.

The Night Angel
(for Lilla)

It is the night angel, the bright night angel
who clears the dark spirits from the skies;
her long gown covers the round world over
and stars are mirrored in her eyes.

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.

Their wet pelts dripping, 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.

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.

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.