Adjacent, Against, Upon

Rick Barot

—after Michael Heizer

I may be looking at the set of boulders
that is now in front of me, but it is you I am addressing.

You are near or you are far,
depending on the accuracy of the words I have chosen.

When my teacher told me to use this
instead of the, she was talking about the range between

the intimate and the conventional. The gray cluster
is radiant, but it is a melancholy radiance.

To describe it only seems to lean away
from what I intend. Maybe, then, touch is a better way

of explaining the pleasure of that
encounter: the surprise and familiarity of the plant

that you brush past in the dark of your
own house. Or maybe the always-new logic of a dream

is closer to the truth: the falling that takes place
in a place where there is no ground.

The boulders are there for me, an arrangement
and its warren of rooms. One door opening to foggy roses.

Another one opening to a dawn that is the color of tea.
Surely there will always be new language

to tell you who I am, imagination rousing
out of idleness into urgency, reaching now towards you.

I keep remembering my teacher and she is an image
of joy, the small and wordless music

of her silver bangles. This over the.
One of the rules for writing the poems of a lonely person.

Moving the Bones

There are too many ancestors, so we are gathering their bones.

The poor ones, their graves broken by the roots of trees. The ones whose headstones have been weathered as blank as snow-drifts.

We have bought the wide plot. We have built the mausoleum. And now we fill it with the bones.

The ones killed in the monsoon floods. The one buried in her wedding dress. The one buried with his medals.

Because there will be a time when we cannot keep track of them, scattered in the cemetery like prodigals, we collect the bones.

Rick Barot

2021

A Poem as Long as California

This is my pastoral: that used-car lot
where someone read Song of Myself over the loudspeaker

all afternoon, to customers who walked among the cars
mostly absent to what they heard,

except for the one or two who looked up
into the air, as though they recognized the reckless phrases

hovering there with the colored streamers,
their faces suddenly loose with a dreamy attention.

This is also my pastoral: once a week,
in the apartment above, the prayer group that would chant

Rick Barot

2017

The Galleons

Because I am reading Frank O’Hara
while sitting on a bench at the Brooklyn Promenade

I am aware it is 10:30 in New York
on a Tuesday morning

the way O’Hara was always aware
of what day and hour and season were in front of him

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
he wrote almost sixty years ago on a July moment

that must have been like the one I am having now
the summer hour blossoming

at the promenades by the rivers and in the parks
and in the quiet aisles of the city

Rick Barot

2017

Poems

Adjacent, Against, Upon

More by this poet

Moving the Bones

A Poem as Long as California

The Galleons

Poems

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Adjacent, Against, Upon

More by this poet

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