Rick Barot
Rick Barot Poems
And what part of his reflection will tell me who I am,
that I am standing a little away, wanting in on his story?
...
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,
...
The boulder that is bigger than a house,
perched on the edge of another boulder, painted gold
and prayed to by monks in saffron robes.
...
I think about the mornings it saved me
to look at the hearts penknifed on the windows
of the bus, or at the initials scratched
...
Scintillas of the anatomical
on the vines, buds opening—
make me a figure
for the woken.
...
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;
...
I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets
under the trees, catching the rain
...
It is something to be thus saved,
a point on which the landscape
comes to a deep rest.
...
Would lightning do? Would a new watch?
There aren't going to be any plums, red
ones or green ones. My white shirt is dirty.
...
Why does it mean
anything that the girl
...
Because I was equipped with memory,
the cane fields are still burning somewhere,
the smoke boiling gold and gray.
...
It is not always joy
that is announced to you
in the mundane light.
Not always a wing
...
When my sister got her diagnosis,
I bought an airplane ticket
but to another city, where I stared
at paintings that seemed victorious
...
I want from love only the beginning.
Not this hillside above the twilight-awakening
city, where you are more absent
...
Bridges and streets. The neon like candy.
Brake lights blooming in rain. Rain.
Concrete. Long live the concrete of cities.
...
to burn at least one thing they once owned: she tears
the page from his book and sets light to whatever
she said to him there, words to smoke, paper
...
Light glossing on the breakers, then disappearing.
You say it is mortal that way: silver, then gone.
On the phone, it becomes the distance I listen for,
the waves talking just behind you. Here, it is quietly
...
When any word is called for, say that I am of.
When the tornado forms, that is the ruinous
kiss. When the bamboo-green field sways,
...
Rick Barot Biography
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry and later a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. Barot’s first collection of poetry, The Darker Fall (2002), received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. His second collection, Want (2008), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. His poems and essays have appeared in the New Republic, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review,and others. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Barot has taught at numerous universities including Stanford, California College of the Arts, George Washington University, and Lynchburg College. He currently resides in Tacoma, Washington, and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University and Warren Wilson College.)
The Best Poem Of Rick Barot
Echo
And what part of his reflection will tell me who I am,
that I am standing a little away, wanting in on his story?
Days I am cup, slice, gray, need, therapy. The headache
of the repetition of his voice, telling himself some story.
I am in the city looking for him, forcibly drawn to
the square glass eyes. A light is on in the hundredth story.
The street black as an eel, the wavering look of him
inside a puddle. I play lamp-post to the dark of this story.
The one who sets fire to half the state while setting fire
to letters in the forest. Let her be part of this story.
I am myself in lace, rubber things, oil on every bit of
my body, whip-talk. He loves only the mirror's story.
A pistol, a knife, plastic tubing, plastic trash bags, spray
gun, a wig, a brick of cash. These are the start of a story.
The one who wrote the letters to begin with, his flawed
love like violets in her hand. Let him be in the story.
Later, the weasels and the otters coming to the stream
to pull up the roots, husked like onions. Eating his story.
Staring into his winter face, lips blue as Krishna because
of his winter face. No one ever got this piece of the story.
I get to be the woods, quiet just under the tongue-tied
lightning, the ever-responding thunder. Bleak with story.
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4/25/2024 4:05:36 PM # 1.0.0.1119
Just discovering your poetry here, and enjoying it greatly!