Rick Barot
Summer 2024 | Poetry
Three Poems
KYOTO
For days I have thought about the small shop beside the shrine in Kyoto that has sold rice cakes for a thousand years. The mochi they make each day is the only thing the shop serves—to pilgrims and to those in the neighborhood, whose families have also been there for countless years. The owners are the 70th generation of the family that owns the shop. Eyes. Mouths. Hearts. Minds. So many bodies in time. Held, passing. Today, when you handed me your violin to carry for a while, I was startled by how light it was.
STILL LIFE
A half-hour before, we had stood in front of the still life, making a game of naming the things in it: green grapes, green drapes, peaches and oysters, bread and pitchers. Then, as we sat talking in the café, in the heat of something greater than art, the text came: your friend in an ambulance, their heart stumbling, stopping, stumbling back. In the drizzle of the monochrome afternoon, we walked to the wharf. I wanted to leave you to yourself and fold you into my coat, both. Under an overhang, in the dread of the day, we clutched each other. The enormous ferris wheel turned nearby, a circle of light and its cargo of elated people. When your breath got ragged I put my palm on your chest, making circles there, as if the heart could be calmed in this way. Far north, your friend woke. And in the museum, its doors now locked and its rooms dimmed, the lemon dangled its peel, the glasses gleamed.
THIRTEEN MOONS
The earth turns and we in the speed of it. Crocus, then forsythia, then lilac, then azalea, then rhododendron, then sunflower: the seasons’ conjugations. You climb a Douglas fir. You get a tattoo. You teach children how to keep time. On the day of each full moon, you write a letter to yourself. I hold still and you become a blur. Like a machine whose job is to make shadows. Like the moon that keeps changing names: wolf moon, snow moon, worm moon, pink moon, flower moon, strawberry moon, buck moon, sturgeon moon, blue moon, harvest moon, hunter’s moon, beaver moon, cold moon.
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.