Chord. Rick Barot

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СКАЧАТЬ In Tahoma’s Shadow (Exquisite Disarray Publishing). “Whidbey Island” was reprinted in Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press). “After Darwish,” “Inventory,” and “The Poem Is a Letter Opener” were reprinted in The Rag-Picker’s Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process (University of Michigan Press). “Looking at the Romans” was reprinted on Poetry Daily. “Brown Refrigerator” was reprinted on Verse Daily.

      I am indebted to the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Pacific Lutheran University. Last but nowhere least, my thanks to the good people of Sarabande Books for their continuing support of my work.

I

TARP

      I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets

      under the trees, catching the rain

      of olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness

      of the one covering the bad roof

      of a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color

      inside the winter’s weeks. Another one

      took the shape of the pile of bricks underneath.

      Another flew off the back of a truck,

      black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air.

      I have seen the ones under bridges,

      the forms they make of sleep. I could go on

      this way until the end of the page, even though

      what I have in my mind isn’t the thing

      itself, but the category of belief that sees the thing

      as a shelter for what is beneath it.

      There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over

      a wave. You cannot put a tarp

      over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken

      oil well miles under the ocean.

      There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind

      that sits in a corner and shreds receipts

      and newspapers. There is no tarp for dread,

      whose only recourse is language

      so approximate it hardly means what it means:

      He is not here. She is sick. She cannot remember

      her name. He is old. He is ashamed.

ON GARDENS

      When I read about the garden

      designed to bloom only white flowers,

      I think about the Spanish friar who saw one

      of my grandmothers, two hundred years

      removed, and fucked her. If you look

      at the word colony far enough, you see it

      travelling back to the Latin

      of inhabit, till, and cultivate. Words

      that would have meant something

      to the friar, walking among the village girls

      as though in a field of flowers, knowing

      that fucking was one way of having

      a foreign policy. As I write this, there’s snow

      falling, which means that every

      angry thought is as short-lived as a match.

      The night is its own white garden:

      snow on the fence, snow on the tree

      stump, snow on the azalea bushes,

      their leaves hanging down like green

      bats from the branches. I know it’s not fair

      to see qualities of injustice in the aesthetics

      of a garden, but somewhere between

      what the eye sees and what the mind thinks

      is the world, landscapes mangled

      into sentences, one color read into rage.

      When the neighbors complained

      the roots of our cypress were buckling

      their lot, my landlord cut the tree down.

      I didn’t know a living thing three stories high

      could be so silent, until it was gone.

      Suddenly that sky. Suddenly all the light

      in the windows, as though every sheet

      of glass was having a migraine.

      When I think about that grandmother

      whose name I don’t even know, I think of

      what it would mean to make a garden

      that blooms black: peonies and gladiolas

      of deepest purple, tulips like ravens.

      Or a garden that doesn’t bloom at all: rocks

      placed on a plane of raked gravel,

      the stray leaves cleared away every hour.

      If you look at the word garden

      deep enough, you see it blossoming

      in an enclosure meant to keep out history

      and disorder. Like the neighbors wanting

      to keep the cypress out. Like the monks

      arranging the stones into an image

      of serenity. When the snow stops, I walk to see

      the quiet that has colonized everything.

      The main street is asleep, except for the bus

      that goes by, bright as a cruise ship.

      There СКАЧАТЬ