Rick Barot


Pine


I think of the man lying on a bed of nails. I think of the mare just before giving birth, carrying the hundred pounds of a foal within. I think of the woman on the news who had just turned 116 years old. I think of the man who spent a dozen years making a scale model of London in his basement, a city he had never visited. I think of the bristlecone pine twisted into a fierce bend by four thousand years of wind. What does each of them know about love? What is the extremity I must go to to show you who I am?

I-84


Late on the nine-hour drive, we go through places of such dense fog it is like a material substance we have entered, not merely an opacity of air. Just as quickly, the fog is behind us and we are again in the ordinary evening, its stars and taillights, the lights of modest towns. It is the first day of the new year, but with the old grievances carried over, as in math. You, too, are clear and then unclear—one moment beside me, explaining the point made in some podcast, another moment asleep, or thumbs tapping their pining as you text someone else. I keep wanting you back, to tell you: this is such a beautiful country. The hills deeply green. The river slotted through a broad canyon. Even the prairies routed by electrical towers as tall as rockets. Somehow we will stop. Somehow we will arrive, the car with its litter and silence, like the day after an armistice.

Past Lives


Much later, believing that time had dissipated emotion, I returned to certain things lodged in my mind like faded starfish clinging to rocks. That reunion scene in Past Lives, with Nora calling his name across the summertime park. The song by Big Thief suddenly filling the bookstore. The red phone and its cracked glass face. Sitting on the low wall beside the Pantheon and the afternoon of people passing by. The guitar playing outside under a silver hunter moon. But time, it had dissipated nothing. You were still there, the light of each remembered thing. As in the movie, I called to you. As in the bookstore, I looked for your face, to see if you had also heard the song. Recognition, love, then a turning away. I too had a summer and burned myself in its name.

 

See also an interview with Rick Barot about The Galleons

Rick Barot's most recent book of poems, The Galleons, was published by Milkweed Editions and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, The Adroit Journal, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. His new collection of poems, Moving the Bones, will be published by Milkweed Editions in Fall 2024.

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