Paula V. Smith

St Pancras, Shine

It may beggar belief that a luxury hotel could flood
all the way up to the fourth floor, or sink
into the ocean like a giant liner with dazzling neon deck chairs,
but I see a screen of waves lapping against the top of the vault-
ed ceiling, its panoply of stars, as if

to touch the panels displaying freshly-repainted virtues
of all stripes. Cobwebs stayed in place like spit-curls
through Vogue’s fashion shoot on the curving staircase,
rail worked in Gothic curlicues, intricate tile-work
gracing each landing, stained glass now irrigating its color
over our bodies and wondering faces. What a surprise

to come upon an unlighted service room, the window blocked,
nothing but a projector in the middle of the floor
and a set of mirrored rotating spheres that made shadowy words
come and back endlessly move across the dim wallpaper,
filling the room with futile adjuration.

Who would insist that scenes in rough pressed glass,
the model staircase glowing from within,
or even a set of unused teacups inverted on low tables,
signify in themselves a shipwreck? Already, restoration
reveals columns of veritable marble under
thick layers of gooey paint, rooms once papered in gold leaf,
delicate balconies overlooking London town.

Here we regain a sense of the decorous hush falling
in the halls of a hotel that boasts three employees per guest,
each room’s hot water delivered up the back stairs,
the immense ceilings and grandiose hallways,
the music, the ever-present fears of fire that continue today

as the visitors file in slowly, for reasons of safety
meted out one or two at a time, ghostly in re-photographed halls
beckoned by eerie music, silver globes receding from sight,
followed by the stairs themselves, a point of focus
in rare confluence of their antique sunbeams
with things that radiate unnatural light.