Hotel Raphael Read online

  as emissary of light fragmented by movement

  I remember your face as a river of looking.

  Tear and mend me, currently. Be here again

  waiting to embark or as a wind speaking

  on the water, either way. No one else can.

  I gather up the erratic play of sparks

  and throw them back in to ask the question

  I asked before as to when and where this was

  Leaves of Maria the Shepherdess

  What an effort at life, this tree

  under which the poem lives,

  under which I have placed

  a blue chair. Her leaves

  press down the notes

  of the water. The silence

  is silver. I can’t stop looking

  to belong to the nation

  of small things. Falling leaves.

  Broken surface. Salvia in excelsis.

  Maria, Maria – the door

  of your wings is disintegrating.

  Winter Rose

  There being nothing to look at

  on the white page but for this

  pressing weight, and something

  that flowers in the deficit,

  where to begin feathering

  the emptiness from which I can

  survey my limits? These late hours

  are a cold medley of petals

  on a rose stubbornly open

  beyond its season, unspeakable,

  like the terrible work of God’s mercy.

  There being nothing to add

  and nothing as read, life keeps

  moving in me like a childlessness.

  My future, my lifeline in another

  form withheld. Instead I create

  conditions in which to thrive,

  albeit in a time like ours when

  to sing is easier than speaking.

  There’s danger in the setting

  down of the unsettled ultimately

  failing to fill this need. I want

  to lift you up and hold you.

  Song takes precedence again,

  left to age and seep through any

  dilemma, the pink breath of song

  defrosting the tongues of winter.

  Souvenir

  A book left open on a glass balcony

  overlooking terraces of wild country,

  leaves turning randomly by themselves

  next to a half-empty cup of coffee.

  Who is the author of these pages,

  the frontispiece giving way to a series

  of rapid quatrains, reading and re-reading

  the landscape, the wind coming over the hills?

  Moment in a Labyrinth of Moving Images

  after Alain Resnais

  You know this place, the hotel where voices

  go missing down baroque corridors

  leading nowhere, and then to the mirror,

  then back to her. Proportions of place

  and personage form an hourglass

  by cutting from one man picking up shards

  off the black and white tiles to another laying

  cards down on the table. Shuffle the sands

  of time. She doesn’t like to talk at night.

  Sentences frozen in space resume elsewhere.

  You know this place, the hotel where voices

  go missing down baroque corridors leading

  nowhere and then to the mirror. Then back

  to her. She doesn’t move from her chair.

  Why does she not move from her chair?

  As ever, no one will answer with an answer

  to the question that’s been asked but to another

  that hasn’t. What was it? You know this question.

  A rhyming shot in expression and decor,

  in evening dress. You are obsessed

  by absence, drawing her near with hours

  of conversation in a void. You know this place,

  an epic simile in one mirror after another

  then back to her, then nowhere, time and again.

  Across the Listening Void

  Beside each other perched

  On the Epidaurus steps

  – W. S. Graham

  I found the door you left on the page

  and turned its key, stepping into the words,

  noting each print on the white field holds

  the sound of the moment it was made,

  holds the slow pace of how time sings

  a life to a life across the listening void.

  My ears are full of the silence of snow

  melting on the moor, of mist in the trees

  hanging with all the other works of art

  that occur by themselves while I make

  these sounds like tins to ring out

  and say, well now, here is the door

  you left open on the page which

  holds the key to the printed field.

  Belle Époque

  What we’re given is a sidelong view of her, you say,

  meaning a view through the eyes of another

  in a chapter of a memoir, but what I see is a woman

  on a couch with raven hair tied back in contrast

  to the length of her limbs and the space allowed

  those long fingers softly abstracting into the white

  of the canvas to become completely relaxed,

  as is the neck and face, the attitude of the times,

  the growing need for her Parisian visits, the roses

  appearing on the floor so perfectly on the day

  the studio was locked by mistake, the elegance

  of the line from then on, each subject elongated

  in the reach that desire makes towards its ideal,

  reaching back to Anna, always Anna, silent woman

  with a memory that holds like ice the poems

  of the Neva, moving on through small joys

  and terror until the thaw, I say, looking over

  at your profile, your hand turning the yellowed page.

  Vertical Gardens

  This could be any city in one lifetime or another,

  at a hotel we’ve never been to, at the Square

  which could be the Square of Pegasus

  where the Lady Inanna sings her dark songs

  to a slide guitar in a language unheard,

  in a time not yet ours. I’ve been waiting

  for this moment beyond the moment

  where I’m waiting for the waiting to end

  as we try not to look over at each other,

  except from the corner of our eyes,

  for it’s not that the room we’re in is too bright

  but that we see the light that lives inside

  our looking, within which vines and creepers

  of scented flowers cover a gate made of cedar

  and wrought iron in the shape of thoughts

  that can’t be spoken – but somehow it opens –

  and we find ourselves on the roof of a ziggurat

  where offerings have been left for centuries

  or more, the sides and the stairways covered

  in foliage, turned into vertical gardens

  for the god of the star of planetary strife

  and the star of the life-giving water

  and the word. We see it all in a blink,

  drawn back to the room where the lady still sings

  of the sanctum that cannot be entered

  except in moments like this, when heaven

  is left hanging in the underworld.

  Now let’s wake from this verdant dream,

  and let the early hours heal us, having drunk

  the ordeal poison from the poisoned stream.

  On Simplification

  These words come easily into their meaning now,

  a fragrant hand that opens out the residue

  that the years come down to, the crushed

  lavender picked from the steps lead
ing up

  to your house, or to where you are now.

  Life fades into the full flower of the dark.

  The gift of the dead is the remembrance due,

  your hand reaching out, just as it used to,

  for the matches laying there on the table,

  for lighting, one more time, the sleeping candle.

  On Confession

  The waters are hid as with a stone

  – Job 38:30

  I wouldn’t want to put it down in writing

  but perhaps, in a speak easy way, confess

  to a pleasure for how a porous host

  exaggerates its bitters. An ozone smell

  of weather fronts released into static air

  isn’t giving much away as summer presents

  herself for stormy inspection. Meanwhile,

  in the Land of Uz, anxiety is impersonal.

  The corporeal dress of our lady of sorrows

  embroidered with everything under the sun

  carries this advice to leaders tucked in its hem:

  If you heed a rogue, Naˉbû, who organises

  heaven and earth, who directs all things,

  will throw your people into chaos

  and your land will be devastated.

  Which is fair enough. But who are we now,

  walking the night-vaulted corridors

  of the Hôtel–Dieu, looking for our twin,

  knowing that where we wake up depends

  on how we dream? Here, signals and laughter

  hang in the willows that herald the dawn.

  Over there, arrears of vesper and winter.

  St Raphael’s on the Moor

  Down along the trail where the course

  of the water and the path are confluent

  over the loose stones given the voice

  of a singing path that saves me

  from thinking, I’m somewhere

  between setting out and arriving.

  I wash my face in its vowels.

  I soak my eyes with its momentary silver

  and carry on, over the black and white

  glissando in fragments of granite

  until the road passes between there

  and there-over, into a prayer house,

  the double doors painted blue,

  the scrape of oak across flagstone,

  the late hour’s holding back

  of the bell of tears. What a world –

  how it swings between this and that,

  how it calls and calls. At the end

  of the pews, white quills to match

  the white walls with arched wings

  of silent stone waiting for me to write

  something. But my words come out

  altered, lifted into this after-place

  of what can be relied on. I fold this

  message up into my stepping out

  to take the path back into the wood.

  Footnote

  Art2

  * archaic or dialect second person singular present of be: I am a Gentleman as thou art not.

  READING | VIEWING

  ‘Hand, Match, Ashtray’: cf. Lydia Chukovskaya, The Akhmatova Journals, Volume I (Harvill, 1994) | ‘Gifts of the Weather Front’: cf. The Spirit of the Beehive (dir. Victor Erice, 1973) | ‘The Diversion’: ‘Edon Edon Thalud’ is a reference to the druggist in 1001 Nights | ‘Mute’: based on Jean Cocteau’s La voix humaine as performed by Ingrid Bergman | ‘Evening’s Castle of Voices’: the last line uses a phrase from Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Requiem for a Friend’. Set in the Hôtel Biron (now the Musée Rodin), one of the figures on the lawn is Jean Cocteau, who never met Rilke although they were both living there at the same time. cf. Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography (Macmillan, 1970) | ‘Lines Written in Provocation’: written from a prompt – “Why am I here?” – from a narration by W. S. Graham in a BBC Monitor arts programme, Why Cornwall? | ‘To the Chief Rearranger of Raindrops’: cf. Psalm 110 | ‘It Never Crossed my Mind’: cf. ‘Advice to a Prince’ in Babylonian Wisdom Literature, ed. W. G. Lambert (Oxford University Press, 1960) | ‘Room Service’: Cocteau at the Welcome Hôtel, cf. Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography | ‘Misprint’: cf. Mirror (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975) | ‘Ariel Head of the River’: for a discussion of the meaning of the word ‘Ariel’ see Samuel Feigin, ‘The Meaning of Ariel’, in Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 39, No. 3/4 (Society of Biblical Literature, 1920) | ‘Open Book’: draws from Anna Akhmatova’s ‘The Way of All the Earth’ (in a translation by Peter Norman) and is a response to the unrest in London during August 2011 | ‘Silent Sea’: cf. Coleridge’s Notebooks, A Selection, ed. Seamus Perry (Oxford University Press, 2002) | ‘That one and only hour’: takes its title from a line in Ciaran Carson’s ‘Fée’, from In the Light Of (Gallery Press, 2012) | ‘Moment in a Labyrinth of Moving Images’: cf. Last Year at Marienbad (dir. Alain Resnais, 1961) | ‘Belle Époque’: on Akhmatova’s encounter with Amedeo Modigliani. cf. Anna Akhmatova, My Half Century, Selected Prose, ed. Ronald Meyer (Ardis, 1992) | ‘On Confession’: adapts lines from ‘Advice to a Prince’ and uses a phrase from Carolyn Forché’s The Angel of History (Bloodaxe, 1994).

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems, or versions of them, first appeared: 1914 Poetry Remembers (Faber, 2013), Bad Lillies, Chicago Review, Festival of the Future City (Bristol Cultural Development Partnership, 2015), Guardian, Magma Poetry, Off the Shelf: A Celebration of Bookshops in Verse (Picador, 2016), Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, Prac Crit, Stand, The Scores, Try to be Better (Prototype, 2019) | ‘The Diversion’, based on ‘Christabel’ being rejected from Lyrical Ballads volume two, was commissioned for the Bristol Festival of Ideas, ‘A New Lyrical Ballads’ | ‘Mute’ was commissioned for The Verb as part of the BBC’s Classical Voice season | ‘Testament’ was commissioned to mark the centenary of the start of the First World War | ‘Silent Sea’ was commissioned for the Guardian’s ‘Keep it in the Ground’ Climate Change Campaign and set to music by Sally Lamb McCune for the Judith Clurman Choral Series, published by Hal Leonard | ‘Art2’ was commissioned for Lyra Festival and the Bristol Cultural Development Partnership as part of ‘A Poetic City’, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund | ‘Timbre’ is dedicated to Patrick Brandon | ‘External Line’ was commissioned and recorded for ‘Dial-a-Poem’, a multimedia community project supported by the AHRC and Nottingham Trent University | ‘Passing Through’: i.m. Ciaran Carson | ‘Across the Listening Void’ was commissioned for BBC Radio 3’s The Verb for a programme celebrating the centenary of W. S. Graham | ‘Belle Époque’ won the 2015 Bristol Poetry Prize | ‘Vertical Gardens’ was commissioned for the Bristol Festival of Ideas, ‘Festival of the Future City’ | ‘On Simplification’: i.m. Sheila Zurbrugg | Thanks are due to the Society of Authors and Arts Council England for financial assistance | Grateful thanks to the Royal Literary Fund for their invaluable support | With love and gratitude to Annie Freud, Don Paterson and my three Eagle Rock hosts, Rupert Lane, Petra Tilly and Woodruff | Special thanks to Andy Ching to whom this book is dedicated.

  RACHAEL BOAST was born in Bury St Edmunds in 1975 and has a PhD from the University of St Andrews. Sidereal (Picador, 2011) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Pilgrim’s Flower (Picador, 2013) was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize. Void Studies (Picador, 2016) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She lives in Bristol.

  ALSO BY RACHAEL BOAST

  Poetry

  Sidereal

  Pilgrim’s Flower

  Void Studies

  Editor

  The Echoing Gallery:

  Bristol Poets and Art in the City

  (Redcliffe Press)

  The Caught Habits of Language:

  An Entertainment for W.S. Graham

  for Him Having Reached One Hundred

  (Donut Press)
r />   First published 2021 by Picador

  This electronic edition published 2021 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  The Smithson, 6 Briset Street, London EC1M 5NR

  EU representative: Macmillan Publishers Ireland Limited,

  Mallard Lodge, Lansdowne Village, Dublin 4

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  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5290-3754-8

  Copyright © Rachael Boast 2021

  Cover Images © Shutterstock

  The right of Rachael Boast to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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