Rick Barot's most recent publications are a poetry collection, Moving the Bones (Milkweed Editions, 2024) and a chapbook, The Emperor of the Cut Sleeve (Sixth Finch Books, 2025). His earlier books include The Darker Fall (2002), which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry; Want (2008), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and winner of the Grub Street Book Prize; Chord (2015), which received the PEN Open Book Award and the UNT Rilke Prize, as well as being a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; and The Galleons (2020), which was longlisted for the National Book Award. His poems have appeared in the New Republic, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, the New Yorker, and others. The recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, Barot won the Shelley Memorial Award in 2020. He was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and later became a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, where he directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.
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.
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.
The Wooden Overcoat
It turns out there’s a difference between a detail
and an image. If a dandelion on the sidewalk is
mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicep
is an image because it moves when her body does,
even when a shirt covers up the little black sun
on a thin stalk. The same way that the barcode
on the back of another friend’s neck is just a detail,
until you hear that the row of numbers underneath
are the numbers his grandfather got on his arm
in a camp in Poland. Then it’s an image, something
activated in the reader’s senses beyond mere fact.
I know the difference doesn’t matter, except in poetry,
where a coffin is just another coffin until someone
at a funeral calls it a wooden overcoat, an image
so heavy and warm at the same time that you forget
it’s about death. At my uncle’s funeral, the coffin
was so beautiful it was like the chandelier lighting
the room where treaties are signed. It made me think
of how loved he was. It made me think of Shoshone
funerals, where everything the dead person owned
was put into a bonfire, even the horse. In that last
sentence, is the horse a detail or an image? I don’t
really know. In my mind, a horse is never anywhere
near a fire, and a detail is as luminous as an image:
the trumpet-vine, the fence, the clothes, the fire.
Child Holding Potato
When my sister got her diagnosis,
I bought an airplane ticket
but to another city, where I stared
at paintings that seemed victorious
in their relation to time.
The beech from two hundred years ago,
its trunk a palette of mud
and gilt. The man with olive-black
gloves, the sky behind him
a glacier of blue light. In their calm
landscapes, the saints. Still dripping
the garden’s dew, the bouquets.
Holding the rough gold orb
of a potato, the Child cradled
by the glowing Madonna. Then,
the paintings I looked at the longest:
the bowls of plums and peaches,
the lemons, the pomegranates
like red earths. In my mouth,
the raw starch. In my mouth, the dirt.
The Galleons 1
Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part
of history. No, her story is an illumination
of history, the matchstick lit in the black seam of time.
Or, no, her story is separate
from the whole, as distinct as each person is distinct
from the stream of people that led
to the one and leads past the one. Or, her story
is surrounded by history, the ambient spaciousness
of which she is the momentary foreground.
Maybe history is a net through which
just about everything passes, and the pieces of her
story are particles caught in the interstices.
Or, her story is a contradiction, something ordinary
that has no part in history at all, if history is
about what is included, what is made important.
History is the galleon in the middle
of the Pacific Ocean, in the middle of the sixteenth
century, swaying like a drunk who will take
six months to finally reach his house.
She is on another ship, centuries later, on a journey
eastward that will take weeks across the same ocean.
The war is over, though her husband
is still in his officer’s uniform, small but confident
among the tall white officers. Her hair
is marcelled like a movie star’s waves,
though she has been too sick with the water’s motion
to know that anyone sees her. Her daughter is two,
the blur of need at the center of each day’s
incessant rocking. Here is a ship, an ocean.
Here is a figure, her story a few words in the blue void.
The Flea
At a certain point I stopped and asked
what poems I could write, which were different
from the poems I wanted to write, with the wanting
being proof that I couldn’t write those poems, that they
were impossible. What I could do
was different from what I wanted. To see this
was the beginning of work that could be work,
not simply pursuit after pursuit that was
bound to fail, yearning for qualities that were not mine
and could not be mine. Aiming for a muscular
logic that could be followed by a reader’s mind
like an old stone wall running along a landscape, I got
nothing so solid or continuous. The authority
I wanted dissolved always into restlessness,
into a constant gathering of images whose aggregate
seemed like things that had come to settle
inside a glove compartment. I had no faith
in my flaws, but I had a grudging faith
in the particular. There was the actual stone wall,
its mongrel irregular blocks harmonized into use, rich
and ordinary as a soul. There was the flea
that landed on my forearm one night as I sat reading.
The black speck of it, then the outsize sting.
The flea that is an insect, has no wings, can jump
vertically seven inches and horizontally thirteen inches.
The flea that looks, through the magnifier,
like the villain spaceship from a science-fiction movie,
that can live for years in good conditions, and lives
by drinking the blood of animals and birds,
in a practice that is called, by science, hematophagy.
Cascades 501
The man sitting behind me
is telling the man sitting next to him about his heart bypass.
Outside the train’s window, the landscapes smear by—
the earnest, haphazard distillations of America. The backyards
and back sides of houses. The back lots of shops
and factories. The underpasses of bridges. And then the stretches
of actual land, which is not so much land
but the kinds of water courses and greenery that register
like luck in the mind. Dense walls of trees.
Punky little woods. The living continually out-growing
the fallen and decaying. The vines and ivies taking over
everything, proving that the force of disorder is also the force
of plenty. Then the eye dilating to the sudden
clearings—fields, meadows. The bogs that must have been left
by retreating glaciers. The creeks, the algae broth
of ponds. Then the broad silver of rivers, shiny
as turnstiles. Attrition, dispersal, growth—a system unfastened
to story, as though the green sight itself
was beyond story, was peacefully beyond any clear meaning.
But why the gust of alertness that comes
to me every time any indication of the human
passes into sight—like a mirror, like to like, even though I am not
the summer backyard with the orange soccer ball resting
there, even though I am not the pick-up truck
parked askew in the back lot, its two doors opened
wide, and no one around to show whether it is funny
or an emergency that the truck is like that. Each thing looks new
even when it is old and broken down.
They had to open me up—the man is now telling the other man.
I wasn’t there to see it, but they opened me up.
The Galleons 10
I come from the lowlands.
My mother’s city was built on the river
where the mountains fanned out to the sea,
and the city thrived there.
I come from farmers.
I come from childhood’s green radio,
from the kalachuchi tree
and its white flowers. I come from prayer.
My parents took me to a faith healer
once, though no one now recalls
the malady or the terms of the cure.
I had a fate, it took me
across an ocean. It has taken half a life
to turn back and see
what it was I left behind.
I come from teachers and soldiers.
On the island where my father comes from,
the people covered their bodies
with tattoos. I come from soot,
from ink. I come from people who honed
their teeth to sharp points,
who buried their dead in coffins
shaped like boats for a journey.
I come from horizon. I come from water.
Pleasure
You are told to believe in one paradise
and then there is the paradise you come to know.
The shoes lined up in pairs by the door
and the herd moving with its mysterious intent
across a dark plain. The blue of the sky
which is the zenith of all colors
and the love of the man in the next room,
strong and rough as a hog’s back.
My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow
to understand what anything means,
but it understands that if you look at something
long enough, it will have something
to say to you. The sun that is strangely bright
on some days, a poisoned canary,
and the crop of winter rocks in a meadow
in April. Learning decades later
the name of the hospital where you were born
and watching the child eat a mango
as though it is time he is eating, time shining
on his lips. On fewer days I agree
with the poet’s dread of being
the wrong person in the right world, and believe
in adhesion, in never showing up
empty-handed, even if the pleasure I know best
is fused with the abject. There is always
the other side of the heart, its coaxing:
You are here. You can begin again. You can rise.
Of Errands
On a table in the living room
there is a gray ceramic bowl that catches
the light each afternoon, contains it.
This is the room we turned into
the room of her dying, the hospital bed
in the center, the medical equipment
against the walls like personnel.
In Maine, once, I rented a house hundreds
of years old. One room had been
the birthing room, I was told, and I sat
in that room writing towards the bright
new world I am always trying
to write into. And while I could stop
there, with those two recognitions
of endings and beginnings, I’m thinking
of yesterday’s afternoon of errands.
My father and mother were in the backseat,
my sister in the passenger seat,
and I driving. It was like decades ago
but everyone in the wrong places,
as though time was simply about
different arrangements of proximity.
Sometimes someone is in front of you.
Or they are beside. At other times
they are behind you, or just elsewhere,
inconsolably, as though time was
about how well or badly you attended
to the bodies around you. First, we went
to the bakery. Then the hardware.
The pharmacy, the grocery. Then the bank.
The Singing
There are eight of us in the waiting room
of the service department in the car dealership.
Some are reading newspapers, or scrolling on their phones,
or watching the TV with the news on, the sound
off. There’s a woman sitting in the corner
looking down at her phone. She is humming, very softly.
The room is more like a lounge just off the lobby
of a nice hotel, with tall plants and couches.
I am reading paperwork for my job, one part of my mind
thinking about that, another part thinking
about the things the mechanic might find wrong
with my car, acting like it has a bad cough.
The humming woman is sitting near enough
that I can hear her humming begin to take on words
in a language I don’t know. It sounds
like an African language, its soft registers making me think
the woman is singing a lullaby or a nostalgic song
about a landscape, though for all I know
she might be singing about a war or the clanging streets
of a city. In the half hour all of us are there
together, no one entering the room, no one called away,
the woman’s humming begins to turn
insistently into singing. As her voice gets louder and lifts
into what must be the song’s sad ecstasy,
an equal disquiet seems to thicken the air of the room.
Everyone is listening. No one is looking
at her, but everyone is now aware that she is there,
brought into this consensus. At first the singing
is a novel kind of delight. The unabashed woman is a story
we will get to tell about later. But as it goes on,
demanding our attention, it becomes another thing.
In one part of the room is a coffee station. In another part
is a popcorn machine where you can help
yourself to little bags of popcorn. On the TV, the face
of the man speaking looks like a square of ham.
The woman is looking down at her phone
and singing. It is the same song, looping, the same eerie
rise and fall. Someone, I think, will walk to her and tell her
to stop. Someone, I think, will tell someone
in the car dealership to make her stop. Someone will call
the police, or think of doing so, as one part
of my mind is doing now, crouched in a declivity
of shame. With kind curiosity, I also want
to go to the woman and ask her what the song is about.
One span of the song sounds like a scorched house,
while another quavers upward, as when
the plane sharply banks, filling the window with the sky.
No one in the room has moved for a long time.
There is no resolving the moment until it ends.
Whether the woman is aware of the rest of us, she does not
give any indication by lowering her voice.
She sings. She sings. She sings. She sings.
The Field
Two people are asleep in a field.
The light is not yet up. The air is cold, even though it is summer.
I cannot get closer than where I am. I know only so much
about them. I know they are not dead.
I know they are asleep because one of them has moved, just enough
to show it is a movement you make in sleep, an adjustment
of resting weight. I don’t know if it is romantic
that they are in this field. Or if it is drunkenness or despair.
From this distance their clothes are black.
They are two men, or a man and a woman,
or two women. I am not near enough to learn what their bodies are,
or how proximate or distant from each other.
It is the corner of my eye that has seen them,
walking quickly past. It is a corner of my mind that has seen them,
a startled glance, then that glance widening.
They have no belongings, no things that speak of displacement.
The field is askew with untended grass, except where
they have flattened it. Have they been here the full length
of the night, or just the previous hour?
Who are they for whom the grass is a bed? Who are those others,
elsewhere, sleeping in the open back of a truck,
or on the ground behind a guarded fence?
I am walking in the countryside, so maybe they are people of myth.
Or they are people of a labor I know nothing about.
There are birds singing to the dawn. There is the sound
of a big wheel rolling somewhere. There are trees,
as tall as parents, but they have not slept under them.
In the dark, alone, I went out to see the turn towards morning.
Then I saw them. What the imagination would do with two people
sleeping in a field is keep them where they are,
unknowable, untouched. The imagination also wants them
to stir, to wake them back into their stories.
The day will be hot. The smell of yesterday’s heat
is still in the air, like the sweat of a body. What would bring me
to a field in the night and have me sleep there?
Whose hand would I be holding, out of desire or fear?
My pants’ hems are heavy with dew. I know how far away
I am from everyone. Am I a child again, am I old?
Or am I only who I am now, astounded at the transport of the body
from one end of time to another.
from Chord:
Tarp
Looking at the Romans
The Wooden Overcoat
Child Holding Potato
from The Galleons:
The Galleons 1
The Flea
Cascades 501
The Galleons 10
from Moving the Bones:
Pleasure
Of Errands
The Singing
The Field
Innisfree 42
A Closer Look: