Hotel Raphael Read online

and The Whole Heaven in Your Eyes

  falls on my face, tincture for this

  ancient duress, your speaking fingers

  pressed to the living moment of my lips.

  Ichthyosis

  Up against the wall you feel

  for the door along endless years

  of wall. Sometimes it’s there

  or disappears. Always the way

  is through to the same thing

  over. A wall, another door,

  a few years on. The same again.

  The act itself becomes mystery

  then art. Each wall and each door

  composes itself for your arrival.

  It Never Crossed my Mind

  [T]he wind will carry away their remains, and their achievements will be given over to the storm wind

  – ‘Advice to a Prince’

  In the new dispensation, we did ask

  a member of the government to come on

  the programme but no one was available.

  We did ask a member of the government

  to come on the programme but no one

  was made available. We did ask the government

  to talk to us but they didn’t want to.

  We did ask the government to join us tonight

  but they declined to do so. We did ask

  the government to respond but they said no.

  Peace did not break out across the party ranks

  or among the angelic orders. And so

  if the advisor or the chief officer decrees

  hostility on the judges of the land, the land

  will fail and the queen of destinies

  will cover their houses in shame.

  If you inscribe a treaty void to levy

  favourable winds, the northern walls

  of the kingdom will shatter. In light of this,

  the committee has met for breakfast.

  Someone proffered anchovies and vodka.

  Someone had nothing to offer. Someone

  was polishing a knife. The chief officer

  speaks from the same forlorn rose garden.

  Listening is salutary, so pay attention

  to your distraction. (God speed o fly,

  heavenly sign, god speed star of the show,

  wiping your feet on timely denial.)

  Naturally, the topiary provides no solution

  and in seasonal passage we cover our faces,

  in loud weather, in a land without leaders.

  Retrograde to 700 BC. Peace did not

  break out across the party ranks

  or among the angelic orders, who refused

  to be interviewed. Instead, the oracle

  speaks through her fog of chemicals.

  The greenness of water hosts a clean signal

  when the trees are singing, the air is singing,

  and everything is in the balance.

  Lamentation echoes across cities,

  in the mirrors of hallways, in absentia.

  Step away from the door. Tyrants always fall.

  Room Service

  The difficulty of being at the Welcome

  is having two rooms on the go –

  room twenty-two for breakfast juice

  and enduring the police patrol

  and room twenty-three for the work

  of waking dreams and the mysteries

  of the birdman. Here the windows

  remain closed for the self-portraiture

  that comes of wrestling with angels –

  flashbacks of young Heurtebise

  writing at the desk in the rue d’Anjou

  now taking on horrific proportions,

  one wing folded behind his neck,

  the other cruel with razor-sharp

  grimaces. The walls have eyes, lodged

  from a past of the litanies of pilgrims.

  Nothing much has changed –

  time alternates, prostration to agitation,

  mind and body suffering in the sun,

  life dragging on through nigredo,

  dark night of the soul, outer blackness

  and the blackness within consuming

  all poisons, all ecstasies, all forms of love.

  Misprint

  after Andrei Tarkovsky

  The green and blue distance

  bending slightly as she sits

  on the fence rebalancing

  the hours spent measuring

  time by apparitions there

  at the edge of the silent field

  relenting into the space

  between where she is

  and who she will become

  in a vision of walking towards

  the mirror to see her hair

  has turned grey in the black

  and white room of rain

  falling through the falling

  ceiling all those years later

  searching for the fateful word

  with nothing to hold to

  but the sound of her shoes

  echoing along the corridor

  becoming the stresses of the lines

  of a lament for delayed light

  for words that will not stop

  and can’t be wiped away.

  Gathering the Wood

  White blossoms faint on drafts of air

  sweep the blue floor of the ancient wood.

  My hands have become like wood,

  gathering these branches and logs

  leaning their dry gravity against

  the tree, all of it in the balance of the rest.

  No one knowing where I am

  where no one passes on the high slope

  I have made a place to camouflage myself,

  to hold language over what is most

  keenly unsaid. Songs in the carriages

  of the wind ride over my head.

  Ariel Head of the River

  I sit down to gather myself

  upstairs in the old boathouse

  where everything is broken,

  the signage loose from its bolt

  swaying from the rusted veranda.

  I’m trespassing again.

  I need to hear myself think

  next to the long mirror

  of whatever moves with zero

  velocity and gets to where

  it needs to be in dry weather.

  I’m looking for the slowness

  with which things fall apart,

  the poem which cannot be written

  anywhere but in the dust

  of disuse, in derelict light,

  at a table I imagine to be here.

  The low vibrato of an owl

  fills the room which is neither

  out nor in. I swing on my chair

  conducting this chaos

  of images rhyming internally

  with the things of the world

  to contest their separateness,

  while time like the grey rag

  of a bird stands in the shallows,

  feet relaxed in mud;

  the escapade of living rings

  she leaves behind collapses

  into its own. I watch them go.

  I am smoothed over, a moment

  in a mirror continuing to survive.

  II

  Testament

  (November 1918)

  From Apollinaire’s star-shaped head wound

  grew your signature, flower of shrapnel,

  mercurial flower, the fatal hurt

  of a moment’s fire bursting into life –

  for such is art, such is the calligram

  of its five petals of resistance seeping

  into the edge of an age to indicate

  that sometimes, instead of closing,

  the wound stays open and speaks.

  The star continues turning itself

  into a flower, the flower into testimonies

  of distance such as those that remain

  when others leave us, or never
arrive –

  star that doesn’t know the meaning

  of goodbye, only see you, or night sky

  Open Book

  (London, 2011)

  The smog thickens towards nightfall.

  Let Akhmatova walk with me

  as far as the corner.

  A choir of discord is growing

  in the city. All the stores

  are open late, everything

  under lock and key displaced

  as the noise increases,

  the air crackling with static,

  with slogan, the Party HQ

  billowing smoke from its doorway.

  I wipe my eyes and step

  into the shattered road.

  ‘Here? Is this the place?’

  Nothing has been touched.

  I wasn’t to know that whoever

  presses their face to the glass

  will see themselves become sylvan

  through an uncommon visage.

  A decorated tree is flourishing,

  pushing up from under the floor,

  ancient and inevitable.

  A book slips from its purchase

  in the branches, falling open

  at a page on which is written

  the language of a silent cache

  where time has not been passing.

  Silent Sea

  (Paris, 2015)

  We were the first that ever burst

  Into that silent sea

  – S. T. Coleridge

  Another vessel sheds the chrome

  of its silver mile until a mile

  meanders into three, triples again

  over the reef. Nothing can breathe

  under oil, nor register that

  dark membrane’s slick

  over sight. We were the first

  cracking the hull of the earth

  open, our foolish husbandry

  a metallurgy that’s brimmed

  with false gold too often

  we can talk and talk and talk

  but on a ship in space, manned

  by non-thinking from non-feeling,

  we say absolutely nothing at all.

  Art*

  (on Chatterton by Henry Wallis)

  For the sake of art

  I praised the metals

  that purged me.

  Thank fuck for Zarnikh!

  Etcetera. Etcetera.

  O parapets!

  My porches of deed and word.

  The walls I was up against!

  Art as a verb. My beingness!

  Not this!

  A tinsel-haired fetch

  pretending to be me

  when, like Christ,

  I was in two places

  at once, admiring

  the trove of buried languages

  only to pull out

  my posthumous assessment

  of your appalling depiction

  of my death.

  O Meredith!

  Tyme nowe you mov’d alonge

  for Mary Ellen has gon!

  Ill-treated in life

  and in art, here I am,

  backlit, posed as pietà,

  a stage-managed non-being.

  Not I.

  I haunt this room in the form

  of a pulled back

  curtain. I am

  the window and the view!

  I am the plume of violet smoke,

  the one rose.

  I am all colours

  and I am not, Meredith,

  there at all!

  O gargoyles!

  My porches of lust and word.

  And look what befalls those

  who assume they know my pain,

  passing it off

  with a pissy flourish.

  O Meredith!

  Tyme nowe you mov’d alonge

  for Mary Ellen has gon!

  Dark Saying

  In ancient tales of ordeal

  protagonists were urged

  to inhabit a place of rival

  certainties: with their backs

  against a wall maybe,

  or blind between two pillars,

  or sitting on an ash heap,

  the body wincing in its wrapper.

  I move the scene to the edge

  of a river – the Tigris

  or Jordan. Here they are,

  kneeling in an attitude

  of supplication. Who wins,

  the one bending to drink

  straight from the source,

  or one who cups their hands?

  The cradle of civilisation

  has been broken. The farmers

  protest in the city square.

  The rivers of the world

  run dry. Over and above,

  the moon looks and looks, says

  don’t call me priestess of grief –

  what you’ve been searching for

  is not in this silver box

  Timbre

  I

  The air of the road perpetuates

  the singalong of last night’s visit,

  Patrick, hours brimming with the snow

  of carbonated gold. The monotone

  white sky requires some examination

  but the pet names of Socrates escape me

  if, in this deafness of being half in

  and half out of the day, it matters.

  What did I tell you? In the cabinet of noon

  life is crystal to my licked finger.

  Aye, here’s the rub, I’m glad to hear

  you got home by raising your voice

  like a head-torch along the good road.

  II

  The ringing of crystal perpetuates

  the singalong of the night road

  a few days on. I’m drunk with this

  sound in my ears of waves reading

  a drowned volume falling through

  the depths of a lagoon somewhere

  off the map. Here is a leaf taken

  from that book to help to keep me

  pedalling these words against the air.

  What moves without sound? What

  with? Something legless and alive

  in the saying of it relays the din

  of this underwater ordnance.

  III

  The road of canticles perpetuates

  the singalong that suggests

  I could do a proper Berryman

  on this tinnitus. So much mileage

  to the road I’m walking down

  less alone in this bone cloud

  and closer to what matters.

  Lend me your ear, tuned to the hum

  I’ve turned into, this receptacle

  that longs for the waters of home

  until water is all that it knows.

  Malleus and Nimbus construct

  this wrought prayer house.

  External Line

  Here we are, silent for a moment

  between the words. I’m in

  the other room on the telephone,

  hearing the telephone ringing

  from the room you have landed in,

  falling through the ceiling

  from whatever shaped cloud

  has carried you. Pick up the receiver.

  Careful how you answer so the line

  doesn’t break . . . are you there?

  Here I am in my ice palace

  under the white sheet where only

  the language of your evening eyes

  will keep the cold prologues

  from freezing over. I wanted

  to say more about the line

  before giving you directions

  to the desk where I’m sitting

  with my breath visible in front

  of my face, how syntax is the weather

  and can alter the weather

  which in a second will change.

  Your room is made up from the light

  inside a thunderclap. Now

  go t
hrough the double doors

  at the end of the hall, and on and on

  and through the door beyond that.

  I’ll turn around to see the shadow

  of your form on the paper-thin wall.

  I’m here with you only to pull

  your full figure of speech towards me.

  Passing Through

  Dr Blackall’s carriage tears around Brake Corner

  en route to the highest point as the stars appear.

  I’ve lost track of time, and so has he, it being

  hard to say if the hour is such and such or not

  on a night as wide as this one is, the loose stones

  of words rolling sharply under the wheels of time.

  He and I are sound and vista, in memory

  of prayer and sanctuary – two hands together

  rubbing along. I talk too much while he looks out

  across the moor at the various upheavals.

  Let’s say it might be three fifteen, or five past one.

  We pass through our lives in a flicker of habitation.

  How did he turn that corner? He lights his wood pipe

  ahead of Mel Tor, holding fast its house of bees.

  Seven Protections

  Protection by Beech trees, their roots

  watered with wine, their leaves

  a glossary of rhyming words.

  Protection by Birch, the white lady

  of the woods, her sky-ladder

  intensified by winter dreams.

  Protection by Quicken Tree, the red one,

  holding its oracular branches

  to draw yourself up and over the wall.

  Touch wood. Pick up sticks

  for locating metal, water, boundaries,

  paths that take you up again.

  Protection by the broad Oak, who speaks

  slowly, rustling his messages

  as the sun opens a door into the hillside.

  Protection from sleeplessness,

  tap-tap-tap the saplings of Holly divine

  this dream-like stepping. Then up again.

  Protection by eating the cold air

  blowing across hieroglyphic bracken,

  the book of the land lying open.

  ‘That one and only hour’

  All for nothing a feather floats backwards

  surfaces appear of white and pink extremities

  of blossom and wings. Across this line

  and the next of the tide moving towards me