Chord. Rick Barot

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СКАЧАТЬ of snow on top

      of cars. In front of houses, each lawn

      is as clean as paper, except where the first cat

      or raccoon has walked across, each track

      like a barbed-wire sash on a white gown.

LOOKING AT THE ROMANS

      in the museum, the heavy marble busts

      on their white plinths, I recognize one likeness

      as my uncle, the retired accountant

      whose mind, like a conquered country, is turning

      into desert, into the dust of forgotten things.

      The white head of an old man, big as a god,

      its short curled hair still rich

      as matted grass, is my grandmother,

      a Roman on her deathbed, surrounded

      by a citizenry of keening, her breaths rising out

      of the dark of a well, the orange medicine bottles

      massed like an emergency on the table.

      The delicate face of the serious young man

      is another uncle, the one who lost

      his friends when a plane hit their aircraft carrier,

      the one who dropped pomegranate fires

      on the scattering villagers, on the small

      brown people who looked like him.

      One bust is of a noblewoman, the pleats

      of her toga articulated into silky marble folds,

      her hair carved into singular strands:

      she is the aunt who sends all her money home,

      to lazy sons and dying neighbors.

      Another marble woman is my other aunt,

      the one who grows guavas and persimmons,

      the one who dries salted fish on her garage roof,

      as though she were still mourning

      the provinces. Here is the cousin who is a priest.

      Here is the cousin who sells drugs.

      Here is the other grandmother, her heart still

      skilled at keeping time. Here is my mother

      in the clear pale face of a Roman’s wife,

      a figure moving softly, among flowers and slaves.

BLACK CANVAS

      The painter believes he can see better

      by not seeing at all, so in the dark of his studio

      he paints the dark. The canvases look like

      oil slicks or nights without stars. In faintly brushed

      arcs, white appears on the rough black,

      as though to show where the light continues

      to stay in the room: a glint on a ficus-leaf ’s edge,

      a smudge on a mirror. Art in its intention

      wants to be in the condition of poetry,

      but most art is in the condition of prose.

      This is not a slander to prose. Prose is what happens

      when we watched a backyard rat die

      during a hot Los Angeles afternoon, while

      inside, a party ignited for an uncle turning

      seventy-five. The rat had scurried across the yard,

      stopped midway, and didn’t move again

      except to drag towards a brick planter,

      where it finally stopped, its face to the brick side,

      its back pumping irregularly. At first

      the children toyed with it, until the dark import

      became clear: dying was the afternoon

      lesson. There were two tables of food, three

      birthday cakes, a whole suckling pig, an apple shiny

      in its mouth, its legs like a racehorse

      on the run, all feet off the ground.

      When my friend and I saw the black paintings

      in the gallery, he said that a trip

      to Home Depot and he could make what

      was in front of us. The point made me realize that

      what’s visible isn’t always superior

      to what can’t be seen, like ideas proven only

      by poor means, as though the invisible

      were a ventriloquist saying something important

      with his mouth shut. The dying of the rat required

      the rat to be there, its own illustration.

      The dying of the uncle required that he be

      at his birthday party, though certain cells, like ravens

      in a winter landscape, winged through

      his body, a slander to the man blowing out

      seventy-five candles on three birthday cakes.

      Because one condition of art is that it tries too hard,

      in his studio the painter mixes twigs and sand

      into the tub of black paint, a substance

      active as tar, spread on the canvas like a road.

      For the painter, there are stones, objects turned

      now to stone, all kinds of ruin to plant

      into the canvas. The things that don’t need any more

      light. СКАЧАТЬ