Rachael Boast

In the emollient night of roses and paraffin,

of burning hands and of all that burns

of broken sleep piecing together what for

so long had remained lost of what was lost

not in the dark but in the fire of the dark

in the night and in the oil of the night

of everything you were led to believe in,

everything stays secret until – one morning –

you put your hands through the touch

of the unfinished light and took it back.

(St Andrews Cathedral)

These stones speak a level language

murmured word by word

a speech pocked and porous with loss

and the slow hungers of weathering.

And there, in the broken choir, children

are all raised voice, loving the play of outline

and absence where the dissembled god

has shared his shape and homed us.

At the end of the nave, the east front stands

both altered and unchanged,

its arch like a glottal stop.

And what comes across, half-said

into all that space, is that it’s enough

to love the air we move through.

I’ve heard the phrase between you

and me too many times to believe

it to be true, but between me and you

there was Cocteau, wagging his testimonial

finger, as usual, while flat out on the floor

with my arms in receipt of the flower

of thought, palms upwards, I envisaged

the inside eyes of his hands remaking words

for a song that is a drawing that is a film —

that is, a poem; and in the middle of all this

the books on the shelves float down while

falling upwards, slipping out of their jackets

as the naked petals of their pages turn

into mirrors, which is to say, they blossom.

Nothing was ever straightforward with you

and so, instead of returning to where

I left off, I re-entered the poem

from afar — it hardly mattered where —

and eventually reached the same clearing

marked, I’d noticed, by the hands of time

held up in prayer, where I’d seen you before —

or thought I had — at the midnight hour

you rhyme yourself with. Page after page

the light would change, to dark and back again,

reminding me of someone who, when put

on the spot, knows the dance of gain and loss

by the secret fidelity of moving

from one foot to the other, to the other.