Hello Friends,
In the opening poem of his newest collection Moving the Bones (2024), poet Rick Barot tells us, “if you look at something / long enough, it will have something / to say to you.” I love the presence of that act of looking in today’s poem from the same collection, about the humble mussel.
This poem is written in quatrains, or groups of four lines. We call each group of lines in a poem a stanza — which can be traced to the Italian word for “room” or “stopping place.” As Edward Hirsch tells us in A Poet’s Glossary, “each stanza in a poem is like a room in a house, a lyric dwelling place.” Notice how this poem flows from room to room as you read.
Enjoy.
Ællen
In the opening poem of his newest collection Moving the Bones (2024), poet Rick Barot tells us, “if you look at something / long enough, it will have something / to say to you.” I love the presence of that act of looking in today’s poem from the same collection, about the humble mussel.
This poem is written in quatrains, or groups of four lines. We call each group of lines in a poem a stanza — which can be traced to the Italian word for “room” or “stopping place.” As Edward Hirsch tells us in A Poet’s Glossary, “each stanza in a poem is like a room in a house, a lyric dwelling place.” Notice how this poem flows from room to room as you read.
Enjoy.
Ællen
The Mussel
One way of being hidden
is to be in plain sight, looking like a black rock
among other rocks in a streambed.
Another way is to be small
and latch on to the fins and gills
of fish and travel up rapids,
up rivers, across lakes, then let go,
away from the home that is every beginning.
Still another way is to live
so long you outlive counting,
like the pine twisted into its thousand
years, like the cousin species deep in the silt
of its two centuries. Another way
of being hidden is to be a part
of something large, a speck in the vibrating
web of water and earth.
And still another way is to be
quiet and rare, the gold
of broken places, though what we might see
as love continues in the fire, rain,
snow, light, and pollen that keep their touch
on those broken places.
One more way of being hidden
is to close so completely you contain
the world’s dreaming, the skies
of that sleep glowing like nacre: faintly blue,
as though it were water,
faintly pink, the eyeshadow of spring.
■
One way of being hidden
is to be in plain sight, looking like a black rock
among other rocks in a streambed.
Another way is to be small
and latch on to the fins and gills
of fish and travel up rapids,
up rivers, across lakes, then let go,
away from the home that is every beginning.
Still another way is to live
so long you outlive counting,
like the pine twisted into its thousand
years, like the cousin species deep in the silt
of its two centuries. Another way
of being hidden is to be a part
of something large, a speck in the vibrating
web of water and earth.
And still another way is to be
quiet and rare, the gold
of broken places, though what we might see
as love continues in the fire, rain,
snow, light, and pollen that keep their touch
on those broken places.
One more way of being hidden
is to close so completely you contain
the world’s dreaming, the skies
of that sleep glowing like nacre: faintly blue,
as though it were water,
faintly pink, the eyeshadow of spring.
■
If you enjoyed today’s poem, Rick Barot was also featured for several previous Poem-A-Days (either as the author or as the professor who introduced me to the poem).