Captivity Narrative
1.
He is running across the ice
fast enough so that it doesn’t know it should
be breaking. At some point
you will breathe again. This could be
a movie, will be the movie you play
when you tell the story somewhere,
sometime, else: this boy in the avocado
windbreaker, the sky the white
of pills. In one of the captivity narratives
you have read, the Indians took a woman
on an ice floe big as a room.
You don’t know anything yet.
You are on this side still. The ice
is scarred like the moon.
2.
If the eyes were brown, you should
have known this. You thought green.
If there is money in his pockets,
you should know this. Think of licking
the hands clean. You can ask with some
pleasure, Why do you smell like gym?
You want the paradigm of love
you think of all day
to become the tender machines of fact.
Something is like a spigot, another like a toaster.
His thumb flicks on the lighter,
hinges stop things from falling apart.
The planes keep going over cities, intricate below
as the insides of watches.
3.
The streets of your city
are white. But he writes you about the muezzin
calling the heat’s changes—
heavier, then less. The blue
concentrated day, curved: he wears his headphones
walking in the gold market.
In other words he writes the insect-like script
for lemon and electric,
each a bladed, calligraphic secrecy.
Here, the plastic stapled over your windows keeps
the cold out. In one dream that you wake from,
the bug skitters
into your ear, rapid with fright, eating itself
to the other side.
4.
Still, you are no more certain
for every image you have. His figure
up ahead, the tree stripped, each
warped into something you need.
The chair is peeling outside under a waterlogged
sky. The child is asked,
Why is your face so dirty? You are no more happy
for having seen them:
a girl rubbing her nose on the boy’s
cheek, beyond them the streets in the bus window
passing, moving. It is an industry, love.
The tree’s fingers brightening
into your notice one day, the child holding
a coin in his mouth.
5.
When he is five and his father
has not yet lost it, they would climb
to the top floor of the downtown
building and put mail into the chute that fell
all the way down, a straight glass
spine. You see the scrawled North Pole
address, the sepia-colored stamp showing
the Wright Brothers and their plane.
This many years later, just outside
the museum, he says he sees his father, skinny
as a string, dirty Santa beard, garbage clothes.
He would like to kick him
for what he did and didn’t do. He would like to
take him with him.
6.
First they laid a round
of flat stones, then smaller rocks and a layer
of sand. Then twigs,
and bunched, dry grass, and larger pieces
of wood. The fire caught quickly where one
of the men had struck one, out
of his hands. From that long interval
now to the home of particular
rooms, what returned to her came
in a colorless stream, things recalling
only themselves. The curiously solid footing
of the ice, the fire
they made on it. And the snow, the sky coming
down to the ground.
7.
You will have to keep traveling.
This far north the light will not sleep.
So there must be other ways of being
held. Can it be that there is only one bird.
only one: Who made the eyes but I?
One barn and its stricken panes:
Where are my window songs? Backyard pools
are blue as his envelopes,
though the leaves have dropped, shadows
clumped at the bottoms. You’re walking
not knowing you’re walking, just someone
turning in sleep, someone turning
a corner and appearing unannounced
on a storefront’s dozen TVs.
*
Hello Friends —
Today’s poem is by Rick Barot, from Five Fingers Review Issue 22 (2005), and will probably also be included in his forthcoming sophomore collection Want.
April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.
To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.
Enjoy.
Ellen
Poet Rick Barot was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 7, 2008.