Diana’s birth
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.
New Poem
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.
New poem
Night Lightning
I write this in the dark by lightning flashes,
squinting myopically, glasses off,
at half words half-seen half-guessed on the page.
Chain lightning, horizontal, frames the Peak
looming behind the glass; halogen lamps
burn, twin orange eyes on the skyline.
The rain retreats, reforms, rallies its strength,
descends in phalanxes charging downhill;
flash-powder detonations etch the crags
in drypoint silhouettes in monochrome,
echoing down long tunnels of the night.
When I first woke, I reached for the outstretched
hand of the mother of my unborn child,
foetal heartbeat flickering in her womb.
Now, groping above my head, my finger-ends
half-sleeping, find a pen, working by touch,
delving out words in darkness, sharp as moles,
unable to read what is on the page:
the blank pentameters, spontaneous
and elemental, awesome, reaming out
like automatic writing, worth a few
Lovecraftian nightmares for. The vigilant
security peephole’s Cyclops eye burns through
the door all night long, sleepless and ajar;
the streetlamps cast a shadow tracery
of drapes and window shades across the walls.
The stormfront passes: serenaded by
the long diminuendo of the rain
till dawning, I slip back to sleep content,
with outside, under firstlight, the first birds.
Swimming in a Force 8 typhoon
When we reached the coast road, the stormfront was already louring low over the horizon, shrouding the islets, drawing its curtains of rain across the view. Only the white wakes of the hydrofoils en route to Macau still caught the last glints of sun, streamers of swansdown trailing the SeaCats, brilliant white against the grey. And once on the beach, the dark ramparts stretched in an arc across the bay, from one headland to the other. Black cormorants skimmed the yellow boomline as it sea-serpented over the contours of the waves at the perimeter of the swimming area. Cantonese boys somersaulted into the surf. The breakers were slate grey now, a crazed ancient mirror whose silver had tarnished almost to black. Acid-yellow blooms flared against the waxen foliage of the undergrowth where it grew down to the shore.
Lilla, the world’s gutsiest swimmer, changed into her bikini and plunged straight in, taking care only to keep her contact lenses clear of the brine. I watched her head, its rich trail of brunette ringlets weaving like kelp, bobbing and dipping between the crests and troughs.
Within minutes, it had all blown over, and the few spots of rain gave way once more to patches of blue and intense sun on the golden sand.
[Top]Witch of Portobello shoot
Took the sound and lighting gear over to Mui Wo this morning from Tong Fuk. Beautiful rose pink cloud stacks over the islands in the early dawn light around 6.30 am – the strong sunlight throws sharp dark shadows in the dips and clefts of the mountainsides, more like the hills around Rome than ever. The sea is a slightly crazed mirror reflecting it all. Standing with Emil and Sam out on the balcony drinking juice and admiring the frail triangular web this little spider has spun from the railing to the eaves. Lilla cooking toasted baguette slices, goat’s cheese, ham and crudites for everyone: so motherly even before her first shoot in years.
Later, ridiculous in a dark suit and blue striped shirt, lugging sound year boxes down to the taxi rank. Struggling with the phone reception blinking in and out along the coast road, to call a cab for Lilla, Emil and Sam.
I feel so happy. Also feel ridiculously like Truffaut in Day for Night. I have a Life, and a Wife, Less Ordinary
[Top]New poem
Annals
The radiant identity
fills every vale; the wanderer,
a knight of the invisible,
explores the open frontier.
Walled citadels on mountaintops
command high passes: pilgrims wend
through snow past chamois hunters’ huts
to glowing inns at journey’s end.
Kings parley under cloth of gold,
contending for a Roman crown;
affronted by the molten calf,
horned Moses flings the tablets down.
Stained glass illuminates saints’ lives
in clerestories; vespers said,
monks gather in refectories:
the golden beer is liquid bread.
Selene’s frozen passion bathes
Endymion’s eternal dream;
dismembered by the Maenads,
the Orphic head floats down the stream,
singing. Ripples of sound expand
across still blue pools in the wood,
the ouzels ‘s mirror. Bills ring on
the hornbeam’s trunk of ironwood.
The sandaled congregation kneels.
Divines cleanse the cathedral air
with fuming incensed thuribles
in mighty gestures of sweet prayer.
Paprika flares on market stalls,
blue monkshood blooms in ruined garths
by chartreuse waters; under slates,
coal fires burn on open hearths
huddled below bleak louring fells
where goatherds lead capricious flocks;
straining beyond men’s reckoning,
Titans brawl among the rocks.
New translation: Austere Gardens
Have a new Romanian translation on board – Austere Gardens by Aura Christi. And the last one isn’t even published yet!
Seems the series is rolling. My co-translator is already saying she wants to move on to others.
[Top]New poem
Bird Garden
Under the net that is their sky,
bridges across the canopy
give bird’s-eye views of hosts of air:
imperial pigeons’ dove-grey necks,
purple tails, viridescent wings;
white Bali mynahs winking blue
above acidic mats of weed;
superb and beautiful fruit doves.
Red lories burn against dark leaves,
preen powder down out of their plumes;
loud Argus pheasants, watchful, creep
past stilt roots walking trunks across
the forest floor; cauliflory
burgeons above plank buttress roots,
ridged palm logs moulder beside paths;
male fairy bluebirds splash in pools,
Dyck texture weaves of bold cobalt
and turquoise modulate the light
in iridescence: rainbow hues
of Iris winging gifts to men,
the real birds of Paradise.
