Barot - Chord: poems

2015 by Rick Barot FIRST EDITION All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to: Managing Editor Sarabande Books, Inc. 2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200 Louisville, KY 40205 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barot, Rick, 1969 [Poems. Selections] Chord / Rick Barot. pages ; cm. pages ; cm.

ISBN 978-1-941411-03-2 (softcover : acid-free paper) I. Title. PS3602.A835A6 2015 811'.6dc23 2014032732 Cover image: Landscape #7 by Vanessa Marsh. Pigment print from Photogram Negative. Image copyright 2014 Vanessa Marsh. eBook ISBN: 978-1-941411-07-0 This book is printed on acid-free paper. eBook ISBN: 978-1-941411-07-0 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. to my comradesMichael Dumanis, Rigoberto Gonzlez,Salvatore Scibona, C. Dale YoungACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to the editors and staff of the following publications, where the poems in this book first appeared: American Poetry Review, The Asian American Literary Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Cerise Press, Diode, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, Memorious, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, Tongue, TriQuarterly, Waxwing, West Branch Wired, ZYZZYVA. Child Holding Potato was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2012 (Scribner).

Ode: 1975, Ode: 1986, and Particle and Wave were reprinted in Field of Mirrors: An Anthology of Philippine American Writers (PAWA Press). Election Song was reprinted in In Tahomas 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-Pickers 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. ITARP 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 neighbors shed, the color the only color inside the winters 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 isnt 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. 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. 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, theres 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 its 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 didnt 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 dont 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 doesnt 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 are sheet-cakes of snow on top of cars. 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. 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.