A Hotel in the Rain

by Richard Tillinghast

Today this place seems chiseled out of the weather—
if you could hammer a hard edge into airy droplets
or drive a steel blade into the staticky
encroachment of the rain and hew out
these however-many square feet
of contentment and efficiency,
with two-foot-thick stone walls and infallible slates.

This hotel, this haven, your bower or burrow,
Badger’s hole from The Wind in the Willows,
where you waken layer by layer
after the best night’s sleep you ever got
like a storybook creature saved from misadventure—
half hearing finger-taps, then lashings
of rain against your windows.

Breakfast under a skylight alive with rain.
Then go out and trawl the second-hand bookstores.
Inhabit the pub till the talk gets dull
and your bad knee insists upon return
to your room up the stairs
where everything has been tucked and turned,
and a sliver of sunlight laid on your windowsill.

 

Richard Tillinghast is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Six Mile Mountain (Story Line Press, 2000). He is also active as a translator of Turkish poetry and frequently travels to Istanbul, where he is currently
staying. His prose books include Robert Lowell's Life and Work: Damaged
Grandeur (1995), and Poetry and What Is Real, due out in 2004, both from
University of Michigan Press. His work also appeared in AGNI 47.