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)
This electronic edition published 2021 by Picador
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ISBN 978-1-5290-3754-8
Copyright © Rachael Boast 2021
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