Hotel Raphael Page 2
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