Rick Barot

It turns out there’s a difference between a detail and an image. If the dandelion on the sidewalk is mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicep is an image because it moves when her body does, even when a shirt covers the little thorny black sun on a thin stalk. The same way that the bar code on the back of another friend’s neck is just a detail, until you hear that the row of numbers underneath are the numbers his grandfather got on his arm in a camp in Poland. Then it’s an image, something activated in the reader’s senses beyond mere fact. I know the difference doesn’t matter, except in poetry, where a coffin is just another coffin until someone at a funeral calls it a wooden overcoat, an image so heavy and warm at the same time that you forget it’s about death. At my uncle’s funeral, the coffin was so beautiful it was like the chandelier lighting the room where treaties are signed. It made me think of how loved he was. It made me think of Shoshone funerals, where everything the dead person owned was put into a bonfire, even the horse. In that last sentence, is the horse a detail or an image? I don’t really know. In my mind, a horse is never anywhere near a fire, and a detail is as luminous as an image. The trumpet vine on the sagging fence. The clothes in the fire. And each tattoo that I touch on your back: the three-part illustration of how to use chopsticks, the four-leaf clover, the clock face stopped at 12:05.

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.

When I read about the garden designed to bloom only white flowers, I think about the Spanish friar who saw one of my grandmothers, two hundred years removed, and fucked her. If you look at the word colony far enough, you see it traveling back to the Latin of inhabit,till, and cultivate. Words that would have meant something to the friar, walking among the village girls as though in a field of flowers, knowing that fucking was one way of   having a foreign policy. As I write this, there’s snow falling, which means that every angry thought is as short-lived as a match. The night is its own white garden: snow on the fence, snow on the tree stump, snow on the azalea bushes, their leaves hanging down like green bats from the branches. I know it’s not fair to see qualities of injustice in the aesthetics of a garden, but somewhere between what the eye sees and what the mind thinks is the world, landscapes mangled into sentences, one color read into rage. When the neighbors complained the roots of our cypress were buckling their lot, my landlord cut the tree down. I didn’t know a living thing three stories high could be so silent, until it was gone. Suddenly that sky. Suddenly all the light in the windows, as though every sheet of glass was having a migraine. When I think about that grandmother whose name I don’t even know, I think of what it would mean to make a garden that blooms black: peonies and gladiolas of deepest purple, tulips like ravens. Or a garden that doesn’t bloom at all: rocks poised on clean gravel. When the snow stops, I walk to see the quiet that has colonized everything. The main street is asleep, except for the bus that goes by, bright as a cruise ship. There are sheet cakes of  snow on top of cars. In front of   houses, each lawn is as clean as paper, except where the first cat or raccoon has walked across, each track like a barbed-wire sash on a white gown.

Someone is in the kitchen washing the dishes. Someone is in the living room watching the news. Someone in a bedroom is holding a used stamp with tweezers and adding it to his collection. Someone is scolding a dog, barking now for decades, a different dog for each of the decades. Someone is reading the paper and listening to a baseball game on the radio at the same time — At the base of the altar, you drop some coins into a wooden box and the lights reveal the vast, worn painting in front of you. The holy subject is illuminated for a few minutes before it is dim again. There are churches all over Italy where you can do this. The smell of incense, stone — Someone is taking the ashes out of the small cave of the fireplace, though this might have been a hundred years ago, when the house was new and we didn’t live in it. Someone is writing a letter on thin blue paper. Someone is putting down the needle onto a spinning record, just so. On the couch, someone is sleeping. Upstairs, someone is looking into the bathroom mirror — While we were waiting for her surgery to finish, I walked around the hospital and came across a waiting room that had an enormous aquarium. The black fish with red stripes, the yellow fish with blue stripes, the triangle fish, the cylinder fish, the little orange schools and the cellophane glints of their quick turns in the box of water, among arrangements of coral, the city of bones — Someone is walking down the creaking staircase in the dark, a hand sliding on the rail. Someone is on the telephone, which means nobody else can use it for another hour. Someone in his room is doing homework, me or someone almost like me, twenty, fifty years ago. Someone is reading in her room. Someone is talking to the gray wall. Someone is talking to the gray wall. In summer, on a hot afternoon, someone peels at a corner of wallpaper and sees more wallpaper beneath — I used to think that to write poems, to make art, meant trying to transcend the prosaic elements of the self, to arrive at some essential plane, where poems were supposed to succeed. I was wrong.

I. The worker’s pants on a spider-filament line, strung waist to waist to waist to dry. The neat green wedge of park, always empty; the length of concrete paced by convalescents. The lead impastos of interesting weather, though mostly the shadowless blue of long days. The sprawl of water beyond the band of beach, copper or tinfoil depending on the sun coming down, the moon rising. The storefront and the thumb of hydrant in front of it, in all kinds of light solidly composed and unspeculative. The garage’s brick side facing a warehouse wall; between them, the alley’s cold black aisle. The swells of a scalloped awning; the sheetlike descent of streetwise birds. Tubercular with rust, the flue leaking steam. And behind the blind-eye panes, the figure who must have chosen to be here. II. At a window someone watches for daybreak, which begins for him with a spar of sun lighting a stringcourse on the opposite building, its tendrils and blooms freshly chiseled when mornings have an acidly clean brightness, or mildewed, chalky with soot, when the overcast will not pull back from the day. Hobbled now, but still ardent, wandering, he looks at the postcards showing the city and its lit grids, touches mangoes going soft in crates, and listens always for the murmurings:An object, after all, is what makes infinity private. Spare a dollar for a lobotomy? Everything taken up, pocketed, added to an accrual having less to do with weight than with lightness: the plane of a wall, say, with pink stucco rough as emery, and the little fish, green as muscat grapes, selling out at a dime a dozen. III. Fender-chrome, gravel molars, brittle sepals holding up the dead rose, the bottle collecting rain—a precise light found for each like the faded brown for leaves, ground-down crystal for frost. The formless moil of paint, spread into surface, depicts the day exact. So with the persimmons almost forgotten into ordinariness, the moons of candle-wax on the table—things clearer somehow for entering the orange, brown, and white I make use of. Rising, I am elated by the light on cold red leaves and on successive clouds, each one edge-lit, its heart incinerate. And the light makes use of me in ways only line, curve, and shadow can describe, drawn toward what pity or love that the day, emptied but unsubdued, gives in to: Every day he poured himself into it, as water might pour from a flask.

I. Dusk, thus: a shirt drops, the bellybutton rune showing. Clouds are soaked, the sea now iron, muscle-heavy. The pond begins reflecting on astronomy. The fruit wait. The furniture call back their atoms. The tree asks for its leaves. II. Winter brought into the room is the whisk of holly. The purse is a hare limp on the table, its eye gone amber. The birdcage is the work I am after: bold-barred, so no bird leaves. The celadon throat, the iceberg teeth, the matted grass of an armpit . . . A pear, or maybe a stone, the chilled shoulder shifts under cover, not persuaded into similitude. III. In the snail-tracked sky, the mineral grains, a dozen eyes. You tell me thread is for seam and hem, not the mica bead-stitched on the dark. You refuse to have the shards the broom gathered be the moon, seen as aftermath. But like the thimble, I have no guile. So let your window open to the rain coming down, drumming on the hidden shells. IV. Black cherries. Glass of milk on a tablecloth. An arm of bread. The coins. Green scarab beetle. The compact’s sleeping mirror. The fig branch. The sundial. The harlequin leaves. V. Votive-light evening, cipher ridden. The marsh air, and my finger in places. Among the lesser constellations, the fractured kite, the anemone. The geese thread-pulled into the hard sleep. The clothespin, the gold in your hair. The seeds spread are a flung field. I sleep on stone, you on moss. VI. The red-haired figure in the station, the man selling carnations. The scarecrow landscape, the suitcases getting heavier with every stop. Those served as props. I dreamed we each played a part. One of us was given to say: I wanted your distance whispered down small enough for this room. And one to say: I saw you always just a little out of reach, with white hair. VII. A fish-scale moon: who doesn’t want to be left used windsock-hollow? Now for morning: the lit wick of each grass-blade, the saplings like legs of deer, the four walls verifying the house, and the slip of last night’s chive in your teeth.

1 Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part of history. No, her story is an illumination of history, the matchstick lit in the black seam of time. Or, no, her story is separate from the whole, as distinct as each person is distinct from the stream of people that led to the one and leads past the one. Or, her story is surrounded by history, the ambient spaciousness of which she is the momentary foreground. Maybe history is a net through which just about everything passes, and the pieces of her story are particles caught in the interstices. Or, her story is a contradiction, something ordinary that has no part in history at all, if history is about what is included, what is made important. History is the galleon in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in the middle of the sixteenth century, swaying like a drunk who will take six months to finally reach his house. She is on another ship, centuries later, on a journey eastward that will take weeks across the same ocean. The war is over, though her husband is still in his officer’s uniform, small but confident among the tall white officers. Her hair is marcelled like a movie star’s waves, though she has been too sick with the water’s motion to know that anyone sees her. Her daughter is two, the blur of need at the center of each day’s incessant rocking. Here is a ship, an ocean. Here is a figure, her story a few words in the blue void. 2 Research is mourning, my friend says. Which means what, exactly, for the things listed in the archives as filling the galleons when they left Cebu and Manila — ivory objects, jade objects, copper objects, brass objects, lacquer objects, mother-of-pearl inlaid furniture, pearls, rubies, sapphires, bolts of cotton cloth, silks and gauzes, crepes and velvets, taffetas and damasks and brocades, stockings, cloaks, robes, kimonos, bed coverings, tapestries, linens, church vestments, rugs, blue-and-white porcelain that numbered 1,500 in one ship, wax, tallow candles, cordage, sailcloth, musk, borax, camphor, cigars, varieties of tea, cinnamon that was dried and powdered, 40,000 pounds of it listed in one ship’s manifest, cloves, pepper, nutmeg, tamarind, ginger, martaban jars from Burma, dragon jars from China, Vietnamese jars, Siamese jars, Spanish jars, 800 jars found with the wreck of one salvaged ship, jars that would have contained tar for caulking, oil, wine, bizcocho bread, salted meats, dried fruits, lard, bacon, beans, chickpeas, lentils, flour, garlic, cheese, honey, rice, salt, sugar, food for months, not enough food, not enough water, chickens, cows, pigs, up to one thousand souls depending on whether the ship had a tonnage of 300 or 500 or 1,000 or 2,000, ships that in the 250 years of the trade route wrecked somewhere along the way more often than they arrived in Acapulco, sailors, mercenaries, officers, noblemen and their entourages, priests and missionaries, slaves that were called indios or chinos, nails, tools, iron cask hoops, fireworks, opals — elegy? 3 We didn’t want to be noticed, so we put charcoal on our faces. I listen to the hours of tape, of the two of us at the dining table. All the girls, looking like dirt./My father was always drinking Questions about the town, her parents, the names of people or with women, my mother had to take care of the business./ that only she could now remember. The images, I imagined, My sister broke her back when she was a child, she grew up scrolling in her mind, and translated into the answers she gave. into a hunchback. She died very young./They set up a dance Sometimes pausing, not because she couldn’t recall, but didn’t at the municipal tennis courts to celebrate the end of the war, want to recall badly, the pause a kind of gap between what she and he was there, in hisUSuniform./He always insisted that knew and what the words could do. The two things a voice we sit at the front, but when I was by myself on the bus I sat can say when it is saying one thing, the things that suddenly somewhere in the middle. I didn’t want trouble./I was around return when you are speaking, like pockets of color coming to fifty-five when I had my first real job, working as the security life in your mind: I listen to her with my skin and my eyes, at Macy’s./I always liked to read. I wanted to go to college my ears. I had had the notion that asking her about her life like my sisters, but I got married./You know that wedding might add something to what I thought of as my art, as though dress in the picture, we had to borrow it from our neighbor./ her past and her love could be vectors of use. But I started to I liked Japan when he was stationed there. It was so clean. realize that what I actually needed to know, I would have Then Norfolk. Richmond./I was so sick on the ship, I can’t to conjure for myself, because what we know most deeply remember much. Your mama just kept running all around. we guard best, even as she spoke, laughed, passed the glow It was a navy ship./My mother’s name is Canuta Sacay and of each story to me, like a document I could have in hand my father’s name is Enrique Omega. My grandparents were but could not understand. I put the tape away, felt for years farmers outside Ormoc./I was born in Ormoc, December 8, that it was enough, the responsibility done. Our conversation 1924or25./This was the apartment we lived in in Maryland. stopped when my aunt came to take her out for some errands. That’s Junior there in the picture. And there’s your mama. Chatter, chairs moved around, then noises that are just noises. 4 In Madrid I orient myself     I walk on the wide boulevards and know an empire is its boulevards     I stand below the angel skeptical of the beauty of angels     at the royal gardens I count the 138 kinds of dahlias     at the crystal palace I imagine the exhibition of plants indigenous to my islands     I walk up the street of the poets     read the bronze lines on the ground the longing and song of the pirate     in one museum I stare at Picasso’s lightbulb     in the oldest neighborhoods I wonder if  José Rizal walked these streets     studying diseases of the eye during the day     writing his novel in the night in another museum I look     at the paintings of the dwarves of  the horses     of  the undying fruit     in the train station I visit the memorial for the murdered     in the great white square at dawn I walk     inscribe myself  like letters on a page at the naval museum I look into the face of  Magellan     show the painting my face     I sing the neighborhoods of Huertas and Chueca     maybe only in Madrid     is the light a gold weight always     at the supermarket I overhear     two Filipinos speaking and I turn away and break     I find myself in the cathedral     in the movie theater     where I watch a movie without understanding the words spoken     around a corner I stop because a kind of meadow     has been grown on the side of a building     like a tallness of heart     a dream carried into waking     my life breathing before it     incredible and true

At a certain point I stopped and asked what poems I could write, which were different from the poems I wanted to write, with the wanting being proof that I couldn’t write those poems, that they were impossible. What I could do was different from what I wanted. To see this was the beginning of work that could be work, not simply pursuit after pursuit that was bound to fail, yearning for qualities that were not mine and could not be mine. Aiming for a muscular logic that could be followed by a reader’s mind like an old stone wall running along a landscape, I got nothing so solid or continuous. The authority I wanted dissolved always into restlessness, into a constant gathering of images whose aggregate seemed like things that had come to settle inside a glove compartment. I had no faith in my flaws, but I had a grudging faith in the particular. There was the actual stone wall, its mongrel irregular blocks harmonized into use, rich and ordinary as a soul. There was the flea that landed on my forearm one night as I sat reading. The black speck of it, then the outsize sting. The flea that is an insect, has no wings, can jump vertically seven inches and horizontally thirteen inches. The flea that looks, through the magnifier, like the villain spaceship from a science-fiction movie, that can live for years in good conditions, and lives by drinking the blood of animals and birds, in a practice that is called, by science, hematophagy.

Scintillas of the anatomical on the vines, buds opening— make me a figure for the woken. On the vines, buds opening— blue, little throats. For the woken, this different tin sky. Blue, little throats speak to me in the right voice. This different tin sky, the playground thawing. Speak to me in the right voice, only clean, sweeter. The playground thawing into its primary colors. Only clean, sweeter, briary as honeysuckle, into their primary colors the words come:bitter, astral. Briar—as honeysuckle, as attic webs, constellated into their primary colors. White, or whiter. The words come:bitter, astral. Make me a figure, blue little throats, scintillas of the anatomical.