Rachael Boast
Hotel Raphael
Contents
I
Hand, Match, Ashtray
Auspices
Gifts of the Weather Front
The Diversion
Mute
Evening’s Castle of Voices
Unfinished Admiration
Disfigurations
Lines Written in Provocation
Double Room
The Infernal Method
Tobias in the Fountain
Ablutions for Midsummer
To the Chief Rearranger of Raindrops
Ichthyosis
It Never Crossed my Mind
Room Service
Misprint
Gathering the Wood
Ariel Head of the River
II
Testament
Open Book
Silent Sea
Art2
Dark Saying
Timbre
External Line
Passing Through
Seven Protections
‘That one and only hour’
Leaves of Maria the Shepherdess
Winter Rose
Souvenir
Moment in a Labyrinth of Moving Images
Across the Listening Void
Belle Époque
Vertical Gardens
On Simplification
On Confession
St Raphael’s on the Moor
Footnote
Reading | Viewing
Acknowledgements
Ad-matai?
Book of Job, 19:2
I
Hand, Match, Ashtray
We are sitting here to memorise the poem
before the pages I have wrapped myself in
are taken off, like a pleated dress, and burned
over an ashtray. The matches are there on the table.
This pain is not just our own, we have
a thousand hands, we are a forest of birches
outside the devastated city, tired of ordeals,
and of the tortured metal of icons we remain silent.
I mean to offer you the sound of bells ringing
from a faraway abandoned church, the smell
of scorched rafters and rubble, to say that fire
is also light. All this I saw in the mirror
and in the dream of the mirror your figure
hurrying across fields to a room with no walls
where the body is poem. We held each other
in that room and, for a moment, there was no pain.
Auspices
It’s better not to move
in the long heat and languid evenings,
or maybe just this arm, looking
for a way of overcoming –
it will do its work. You bring
the silver breeze with you
up from the forest path, a delicate mercy
cool around my ankle like a bracelet.
Still I’m adorned with the fire
of the day. Don’t fan the flames,
don’t call the song thrush over
to beat her wings.
Gifts of the Weather Front
after Victor Erice
Today a Spanish plume will bring its trove of gifts
for the unwary, a wake-up call in the form of thunder
and a flash of night in an otherwise white sky,
the close air preceding it like a slow wave
that moves up from the south in a music box
containing only one note. I know this moment,
know it as a woman knows when something
breaks inside her. By dusk the sky will be red
and tomorrow will be clear, clear enough
to understand why things have to happen
in the order they happen according to the book
of the sky and the pages of the earth according
to the spine that keeps them all together.
And of that hinge Castilians still sing
healing gacelas, as in O my dove, who art
in the fissure of the rain-soaked rock
and in the secret places of abandoned buildings
or in the room where two children are sleeping
with a portrait of Tobias and the Angel
on the wall between them, the only waking thing.
The Diversion
He knew not what to do – Something, he felt must be done – he rose, drew his writing desk suddenly before him – sate down, took the pen – & found that he knew not what to do
– S.T. Coleridge, Notebooks
Scrambling down the fells
on a night walk lost for words
to describe the wilderness
between the peaks,
the wilderness of it all,
the ridges dropping in waterfalls,
the rocks themselves losing form
in the dark where mountains
become torrents turning
into lakes of skimming swallows,
the cottage swam into view.
What was said there no one will know;
the woman pouring tea,
her brother fetched from his bed
to hear the power of speech
at its most extraordinary –
a suspension of disbelief
written on the faces
lit by candlelight at an hour
that is neither night nor day –
then, disquiet silence,
falling back up the sides
of the fells in daylight witchery,
retracing steps taken only
a day or so ago, seeming now
so remote, his tongue sitting
in his mouth like a stone –
and he knew not what to do.
Brandy for bad dreams,
brimstone for burning pain,
poultices for swellings,
leeches to suck out the eyes
of boils: nothing was enough.
The stars moved around the sky
too rapidly, the landscape
changing as though centuries
were lost in a matter of days,
the fear of sleep leading
to a waking dream
in which fragments of speech
despise themselves and turn
against their speaker,
everything coming down
in deteriorating weather –
for he who, praying always,
prays in sleep unquietly,
prays again to rise from it.
He rose and drew his desk
towards him, ignored
the knocking at the door –
Gillman, Godwin
or Geraldine – ignored
the knocking in his head –
Ebon Ebon Thalud –
and knew not what to do
to stop the telescopic habit
of staring into his soul,
watching his own guiding star
crash into the eye of Antares.
Bitters for gout,
vinegar for nervous stress,
aquafortis for warts,
sal ammoniac for resurrection:
enough was enough,
for he who, praying always,
prays in sleep unquietly,
prays again to rise from it.
Mute
Switching the receiver to her other ear
with the thin cord around her neck she’s not
on the phone to anyone talking of a yellow box
a yellow box in which she wants to put
the ashes of burned letters of sweet nothings
of blank photographs undeveloped and give them
back to no one as she lies down on the floor
speaking
to no one cut off from the real world even as
the clock ticks and she lights another cigarette
waiting and waiting until she resumes her slow
octatonic ascent of language shifting between
the prevailing key and chromatic flashes of cold fury
that keep the door closed and the relationship
broken like a lock that can’t be opened when no one
can help push her out of the room of the human voice
when it speaks without listening to the sound it makes
without the necessary aloneness and the heart
to ask herself who she is sitting there holding a pair
of driving gloves in her hand but not pulling them on
saying no, nothing, nothing, no, no, no darling, it’s nothing.
Evening’s Castle of Voices
(Hôtel Biron, 1911)
Those who, moving into their rooms,
sweep away the dust of disrepair
finding something written there
in the light that falls across the floor,
those who’ve chosen the right time
and place for a turning-point,
the hotel breathes them; its flourish
of steps leading to a lawn
where a party enjoys the fêtes galantes
of disturbing Venetian songs
floating over the heads of the wild roses
and brutal angels, unaware of the man
at his desk, in a high-backed chair,
whose possessions amount
to nothing as soon as he reaches
to grasp them; who no longer grasps
his own dimensions in that open room
where springtime doesn’t need you,
where love means being alone.
Unfinished Admiration
Up in the woods on a level with the moon lifting
above the trees at the curve of the water
where the owls say peut-être with sharp tongues
having the wherewithal to continue exchanging
one side of the river for the other sounding out
the dark in a dialogue of place and displacement
as they come closer for a time playing safe
from a distance their proximate song, no longer
bothering with what hour or another has passed,
I’m looking for the poem which is sometimes
a place or a person or whatever immediately
makes the road a little brighter than it was before
with a sense of arrival – you at last, perhaps.
Disfigurations
John 5
How / do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?
– Mahmoud Darwish, ‘In Jerusalem’
I
To a heap of stones broken from one stone;
to rubble, not without shape,
arid, not without something to say,
written in the dust, speaking, but not
with words; to a cairn considered
like this, all that is immovable in us
made into an offering to when the dust
of boundary stones becomes a road,
just as hours of grief create the need
for a journey, hours absolved by tears
that soften the stones of the road;
to the order of the journey and the stations
of rest; to the pool where the five porches
wait as a stranger troubles the waters.
II
I touch the back of my neck and feel grit,
a second skin that has no use other than
to make me a breach, and between
two separate ideas of normality I am
the tower with its embarrassment
of bells. I touch the face of rough metal
keeping it still, and then I push my luck.
It swings both ways until it finds a song
among all the other bells peeling away
the skin of the silence from the silence.
Lines Written in Provocation
You ask why am I here
where time has put me
here in the moment
of it answering the call
of two hands together
as one | and only after
the clap of the silent o’clock
(time doesn’t like to be seen)
can I begin to ask why
I am here observing first
the room then the observing
of the room from my place
in time. Why am I here?
The moment draws in
its full breath | I am here
for certain only between
nuances of time that memory
works on, chiselling quartz
to make the hours
of aloneness lengthen.
Here I am. Where time
has put me to the test
of making something of it.
Let me see if I can make use
of it to answer – as it sounds
to my ear – your question.
Double Room
The way you last on me long after
our private minds like revolving doors
have led to a city hotel. It wouldn’t matter
where, or when. Except for the need I’ll have
for pots of hibiscus on either side
of the driveway. It could be Sharuhen
or Shaaraim. Anyhow, we’ll know
where we are if the wallpaper
depicts a bluebird and a swallow
eating the eyes of the women of stone.
You’ll call out Sophia or Sharon,
knowing full well I don’t have a name.
We’ll sleep soundly in the aromatic dream,
easily forgetting each other again.
The Infernal Method
‘Enough! or Too much!’
– William Blake
It all boils down to a chalk seam,
duress of minerals, the wrong kind of rain.
Jupiter gives, Saturn takes away.
Your aggravated skin grows at a rate
envied by the best amphibious relative –
salamander or frog, eyes popping
into fresh sockets, the lizard bingeing
on its own calcium deposits, sometimes
in pieces and sometimes in one piece.
You walk along St Swithun Street
signalling nonchalance, a need not
to have to explain the inexplicable hell
of circles, and then loop back to a bench
by the cathedral, hoping no one’s noticed
the colours of ordeal, the hot and dry
cartography of scars. To no avail. Start again.
You’re learning the infernal method:
how to treat fire with fire, if all else fails;
a caustic pilgrimage ‘salutary and medicinal,
melting apparent surfaces away’ – except
it doesn’t. Stop. Start again. Jupiter gives,
Saturn takes away. You continue along
the perimeter wall by the Itchen river,
her green curtains closed. How to hold fire
and keep moving? Fire on fire, cancelling
itself out. And round again, assuming
a measured pace as you pass back
through the city gate to College Street
where a fine dust spreads over the books
in P&G Wells and you pull out a copy
of Answer to Job with the god-awful
cheese grater on the cover,
sliding it back into its capable abyss.
Jupiter gives, Saturn takes away everything
except for the catastrophic weather of skin.
Tobias in the Fountain
In days of heat the water iris falls open
in the fountain next to the boy
standing up to his ankles,
his thighs
and groin soaked to darken the stone
of selfhood with an endless stream
pushing through him and out
of the mouth of the fish swept up
in his arms. There is no sign of a struggle,
none at all. The water pours. The fish,
in giving its life to the boy, is twice alive,
like it or not. Like it or not, I sit
as near as I can to the absconding drops.
Ablutions for Midsummer
Over and over the moon washes her fragments
in the water, moving downstream as she does so,
following the foxglove wall to where yesterday
I walked on, seeing what I hadn’t seen, hearing
what I hadn’t heard, alert to the stresses
falling into water-paths excited by stone,
echoing the above into the below
as they move towards the hinge of the valley,
the river in spate, page after page turning
on a rhyme, repeating the word water
over and over again. Over and over again
the moon washes her fragments in the water
moving downstream as she does so, following
the foxglove wall to where the dark wood
listens into itself. A slab of cloud holds
in the shape of an anvil hammered by nothing
into nothing. My mind is bracken, catching
the flying sparks of rain over and over again.
The moon washes her fragments in the water
but this doesn’t last. I’m glad it doesn’t last.
How else could I come back to this house
on the rock overlooking the moor, listening
to long waves of air releasing another shower
from the speaking leaves of the wood?
To the Chief Rearranger of Raindrops
Tonight all the stars are falling,
all the falling lucky stars of rain at once
a happiness and necessary psalm of tears.
It will happen again, given our bodies
are alert to changes in the weather
and at times must curl in fear of the storm
of our near-enemies. But sit here
at my right hand. I’ve taken off my clothes,
am standing outside, laughing
as the downpour softens my skin
Hotel Raphael Page 1
