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03-28-2018
Rick Barot
Two Video Installations
The elephant in the white room
is told to play dead, and she falls
to the gray floor, rocking a little
before going completely still,
only to wake again, rocking again
a few times to find momentum
and push herself onto a splayed
position on the floor, her legs
spread like a skirt, and then
the methodical lifting of each leg
so that each gains its footing,
each lifting her a little until she is
fully up, wholly still once more
until some voice in the room
tells her to die again, all of her
wrinkled bulk made blank canvas,
wet stone for an eye, the camera
moving around her as though
she were the center of a carousel
around which the other animals
galloped and leapt up and brayed.
On another screen, one man's
rapture of grief is told in a face
gone blurry as paint sliding
down a wall, a woman's crying is
an open mouth black with depth,
a woman prays, her hands knotted
into white roots, while another
man standing behind the others
cannot decide whether a howl or
a laugh is what's needed in this
moment after they have been told
to think the worst thing they can
remember, the moment then slowed
to sixteen minutes of quiet film,
so that even the thoughtless blink
of an eye takes a few minutes
to satisfy itself, the pixels changing
like cells under a lens, the last
woman an opera of disbelief about
what has come to pass for them
in the dim room, her face a metal
of rage, the voice somewhere
demanding every form of sorrow
from them, and, having been asked,
this is how they had to answer.
Magnoilia
A story gets told, begins to hold fast,
and like rain brings back a thing more
than just itself, one more small noise
appearing in the laundromat, small bird
or cell-phone ring suddenly chirping,
one more office for the eye and ear
to momentarily inhabit, the work of my
nearness that much more urgent, now
there is this story I can tell you about,
now I have you listening, the way
the radiator has kept us listening all of
these nights, the din of its dreaming
the noise of picks and axes deep inside
a mine, the steam in its pipes forcing
a drowsiness on the miners, listening
for some other dream it could have:
say, that two people are quiet within
the cold light of an all-night laundromat,
the only thing open this late, this dark,
one of them telling a story of the dead
president traveling days past the big
and small towns, his train a vivid grief
of flowers thrown by the townspeople
beside the tracks, one telling this
story while the other only half listens,
until the story gets to the part about
the summertime heat, the body traveling
for days, the flowers a necessary cover
for the smell the body is giving out,
there is this other way that flowers can
mean something, not just mourning, not
just beauty, but a necessity that keeps us
awake through the story, the radiator's
other dream, half of their clothes making
a psychedelic circle of colors spinning
in the glass of a dryer, the white clothes
spinning in another dryer, like a magnolia
opening and destroying itself over and
over, the image a nearness, my being
near, my being afraid that this is already
the past I will remember in the future,
this is the meat that the mind's mandibles
get to have, dying, because death gets
to have all it wants: say, the doctor's
funhouse reflection in the patent-leather
shoe of the dead president, the boy who
finally understands that the secret to
getting hit is knowing that you will be hit,
the flight attendant mis-speaking to us
as the plane glided toward the starry field
that we would be in the ground shortly,
and though I laughed at that, I knew
I would find the right word for you, place
it into her mouth, the flower of it in her
mouth, I would correct the world in this
manner, because you are listening, it is
raining outside the laundromat, the driest
part of your body is the small of your back.
Iowa
It is something to be thus saved,
a point on which the landscape
comes to a deep rest.
The ore of a death held
frozen, there in the gull so far
inland, embedded in the ice
at the river's edge. Its bulk
in the thick gloss is darker
than the ice, shoe-shaped,
only the spoon-curved head
telling you what it is, one eye
open though no longer sustaining.
The feet are ribbed, like sails
tight on a mast. And a thing,
you remember, obliges by lying
down, its back to sky. How long
it has been like this, this little
a question to the world.
How small of a happening, though
it happened because
there is witness of it. The width
of water utterly silent,
the distance a pencil-smudge
of Chinese hills. First its fall,
then immersion, every air discovered
out of each quill,
its feathers matted with grit.
The day is a white octave, breathing
its snow, and the bird
delicate, like a bone inside the ear.
-from Want, Sarabande Books (2008), selected by Guest Editor Ocean Vuong
BIO: Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has published three volumes of poetry: The Darker Fall (2002), Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize, and Chord (2015), all published by Sarabande Books. Chord received the UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. It was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and two editions of the Best American Poetry series. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. He is also the poetry editor for New England Review.
PROMPT: Rick Barot's "Magnolia," consists of a single sentence, divided into couplets, taking as its inspiration a seemingly simple setting: a laundromat. However, by partnering this innocuous location with vivid imaginative leaps, laundry in a dryer becomes a "magnolia / opening and destroying itself over and // over." Your challenge this week, is to write your own poem of a single sentence, grounding it in a specific place--a local dive bar, your home, or maybe a workplace--and see what develops when you pair a stable setting with an expansive sentence. -Amie Whittemore
