Chord - Rick Barot

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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

      travelling 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

      placed on a plane of raked gravel,

      the stray leaves cleared away every hour.

      If you look at the word garden

      deep enough, you see it blossoming

      in an enclosure meant to keep out history

      and disorder. Like the neighbors wanting

      to keep the cypress out. Like the monks

      arranging the stones into an image

      of serenity. 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.

      in the museum, the heavy marble busts

      on their white plinths, I recognize one likeness

      as my uncle, the retired accountant

      whose mind, like a conquered country, is turning

      into desert, into the dust of forgotten things.

      The white head of an old man, big as a god,

      its short curled hair still rich

      as matted grass, is my grandmother,

      a Roman on her deathbed, surrounded

      by a citizenry of keening, her breaths rising out

      of the dark of a well, the orange medicine bottles

      massed like an emergency on the table.

      The delicate face of the serious young man

      is another uncle, the one who lost

      his friends when a plane hit their aircraft carrier,

      the one who dropped pomegranate fires

      on the scattering villagers, on the small

      brown people who looked like him.

      One bust is of a noblewoman, the pleats

      of her toga articulated into silky marble folds,

      her hair carved into singular strands:

      she is the aunt who sends all her money home,

      to lazy sons and dying neighbors.

      Another marble woman is my other aunt,

      the one who grows guavas and persimmons,

      the one who dries salted fish on her garage roof,

      as though she were still mourning

      the provinces. Here is the cousin who is a priest.

      Here is the cousin who sells drugs.

      Here is the other grandmother, her heart still

      skilled at keeping time. Here is my mother

      in the clear pale face of a Roman’s wife,

      a figure moving softly, among flowers and slaves.

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