Hotel Raphael Read online

  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