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
when everyone who should be at work
is at work and the trees are meditating
on how muggy it will be today
and the fleets of strollers are out in the sunshine
expanse of the morning
the strollers that are like galleons
carrying their beautiful gold cargo
being pushed by women whose names once graced
the actual galleons Rosario
Margarita Magdalena along with other names
Essie Maja from places that history has patronized
like O’Hara going into the bank
for money or the bookstore to buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what
the poets / in Ghana are doing these days
or the liquor store for liquor
or the tobacconist for tobacco
and sitting at the Brooklyn Promenade I haven’t looked
at the news to see who now has died
though my fingers keep touching the phone’s face
to find out that when it is 10:30 in the morning
in New York it is 11:30 in the night
in Manila and it is 4:30 in the afternoon in Lagos
and in Warsaw and it is 9:30
in the morning in Guatemala City
where it is also Tuesday and where it is also summer
Copyright © 2017 by Rick Barot. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 12, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘The Galleons’ is part of a long sequence that's about, among many things, the centuries-long colonial structure that sustained Spanish control over Latin and South America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Doing a lot of reading about the Spanish galleons and their trade routes, I began to obsessively see the aftermaths of that history everywhere—in my own story as an immigrant from the Philippines, in the coffee and other goods I consumed, even in the O’Hara poems I was reading, and in the golden summertime mornings in New York when the nannies and their strollers are out and about.”
—Rick Barot
Rick Barot
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines in 1969 and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied at Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.