Rick Barot

Poem-A-Day April 21: Unaccompanied

Venice, Unaccompanied

Waking
on the train, I thought
we were attacked

          by light:
chrome-winged birds
hatching from the lagoon.

          That first day
the buoys were all
that made the harbor

          bearable:
pennies sewn into a hemline.
Later I learned to live in it,

          to walk
through the alien city—
a beekeeper’s habit—

          with fierce light
clinging to my head and hands.
Treated as gently as every

          other guest—
each house’s barbed antennae
trawling for any kind

          of weather—
still I sobbed in a glass box
on an unswept street

          with the last
few lire ticking like fleas
off my phonecard I’m sorry

          I can’t
stand this, which
one of us do you love?

■

“Venice, Unaccompanied” appears in poet Monica Youn’s 2003 collection Barter. Thank you to Rick Barot for introducing me to this poem.

under the bed

Hello Friends,


We're going to follow up yesterday's poem by Walt Whitman with a contemporary poem about Walt Whitman — written by my teacher, Rick Barot, and featured in Best American Poetry 2016. That same man who spread his arms wide to take in all the open road also cowered under a bed in fear for his life.
— Ellen


Whitman, 1841
I don't know if he did or did not touch the boy.

But that boy told a brother or a father or a friend,

who told someone in a tavern, or told someone
about it while the men hauled in the nets of fish

from the Sound. Or maybe it was told to someone

on the street, a group of men talking outside
the village schoolhouse, where he was the teacher.

What was whispered about him brought everyone

to church that Sunday, where the preacher roared
his name and the pews cleared out to find him.

He was twenty-one, thought of himself as an exile.

He was boarding with the boy and his family.
The boy was a boy in that schoolroom he hated.

Not finding him in the first house, they found him

in another and dragged him from under the bed
where he had been hiding. He was led outside.

And they took the tar they used for their boats,

and they broke some pillows for their feathers,
and the biography talks about those winter months

when there was not a trace of him, until the trail

of letters, articles, stories, and poems started
up again, showing he was back in the big city.

He was done teaching. That was one part

of himself completed, though the self would never
be final, the way his one book of poems would

never stop taking everything into itself. The look

of the streets and the buildings. The look of men
and women. The names of ferry boats and trains.

The name of the village, which was Southold.

The name of the preacher, which was Smith.
■

Poet Rick Barot was also featured for Poem-A-Day April 11, 2016, Poem-A-Day April 9, 2015, Poem-A-Day April 7, 2008, and Poem-A-Day April 19, 2007.

so approximate

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem about the distance between words and what they mean appeared in the May 2013 issue of Poetry magazine and is also included in Rick Barot’s award-winninig 2016 collection Chord.

You can listen to the poet read his poem here.

Enjoy.
Ellen

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.

■

Poem-a-Day, April 8: Iron. Lust.

Hi Friends,

When I get asked to pick a single favorite poem in the whole wide world, I often answer with Emily Moore’s “Ghazal” from the January 2002 Yale Review.

Emily Moore will be the first to tell you why teachers are not “those who can’t” — she teaches high school English in New York City and has never published a poetry collection.

To learn more about the ancient Persian poetic form of the ghazal and its various rules and restraints, click here — and, if you really want to get into it, also here.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own 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). Remember that receiving your notes and comments on various poems is one of my favorite parts of Poetry Month, so feel free to write back!

Love,
Ellen

Ghazal

Beneath her slip,
the slip of her.

Iron. Lust.
The flint of her.

In dorms and parks, motels
and tents: the din of her.

What I would not have done
for another sip of her.

She swore she’d never love another.
The fib of her.

She kicked off the sheets; I held on,
breathless, through the fit of her.

Good or evil, she was first.
The rib of her.

That she could leave me after all
that I had been to her.

Hands pressed deep
into my mouth. The bit of her.

A lengthy, doe-eyed nuzzle
at the salt lick of her.

Cock sure,
the spit of her.

A week spent curled up on the floor,
gutted, sick for her.

Nights she ground my bones
to dust. The grit of her.

Teeth, nails, my name
whispered low. The grip of her.

Many thanks to Rick Barot for introducing me to this poem (among others).

“Ghazal” by Emily Moore was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 15, 2007.

Poem-a-day, April 7: a kind of gore

The Horses

The primary red striped onto the black, the dye
spotting the mirror and sink with
a kind of gore, a sulfur that is in the air for days:
you are twenty-two and this means

even folly has its own exacting nature. The hair
turned red, as easily as last month’s
blue; the puggish, miniature barbell pierced into
a nipple. At the club I watch you on top

of the speaker, tearing the shirt your brother gave
you, the music a murderous brightness
in the black room. Now you want it all off, down
to clear scalp. Your head in foam,

you ask me to do the places you can’t properly
reach: the neck’s mossy hairs, the back’s
escarpment, an edge of bone the razor nicks
to small blood, tasting like peppermint

and metal on my tongue. In the used-bookstore
this afternoon, in the master’s book of
drawings, pencil sketches of the heads of horses,
whose long nostrils had been slit open

as custom demanded. The Icelanders, Mongols,
and Italians finding a measurable
efficiency in what they could see: the horses, even
in their speed, as though not breathing.

***

Hi Friends,

Today’s poem is from Rick Barot‘s new collection Want (2008).

The drawing referenced in the last two stanzas is probably “The Slashed Nostrils of Horses” by the Italian artist Antonio Pisanello, part of the Louvre collection. In the Early Reniassance period, horse racing was big business, and in some cultures horse racers believed that slitting the nostrils allowed a horse to take in more air, making it faster.

A visually memorable tidbit of history. But then again, “The Horses” isn’t really about the horses. Why do you think Barot chose this title?

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. You can always learn more about National Poetry Month or sign up for a more official-like poem-a-day list at www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

Best,
Ellen

Poet Rick Barot was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 19, 2007.

Poem-a-Day, April 19: the tender machines of fact

Captivity Narrative

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Poem-a-Day, April 15: slip and sip, fib and rib

Ghazal

Beneath her slip,
the slip of her.

Iron. Lust.
The flint of her.

In dorms and parks, motels
and tents: the din of her.

What I would not have done
for another sip of her.

She swore she’d never love another.
The fib of her.

She kicked off the sheets; I held on,
breathless, through the fit of her.

Good or evil, she was first.
The rib of her.

That she could leave me after all
that I had been to her.

Hands pressed deep
into my mouth. The bit of her.

A lengthy, doe-eyed nuzzle
at the salt lick of her.

Cock sure,
the spit of her.

A week spent curled up on the floor,
gutted, sick for her.

Nights she ground my bones
to dust. The grit of her.

Teeth, nails, my name
whispered low. The grip of her.

*

Hello Friends —

When asked to name a single very favorite poem in the whole wide world, I often answer with today’s poem, “Ghazal” by Emily Moore, which appeared in The Yale Review, vol. 90, no. 1 (January 2002).

To learn more about the ancient Persian poetic form of the ghazal and its various rules and restraints, click here — and, if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty, also click here.

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

P.S. Many thanks to Rick Barot for introducing me to this poem (among others).

“Ghazal” by Emily Moore was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 8, 2010.