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    Moving the Bones
    Moving the Bones
    Moving the Bones
    Ebook86 pages34 minutes

    Moving the Bones

    By Rick Barot

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    About this ebook

    A vulnerable and honest collection of poems exploring lineage, love, and the pandemic, from one of the most acclaimed poets of his generation.

    “You are told to believe in one paradise / and then there is the paradise you come to know,” begins Rick Barot. What follows is an account of the rich and thorny valley between those poles. Moving the Bones dwells in liminal spaces—of love and memory, the pandemic’s singular domesticity, a serene cemetery of ancestral plots, dawn. In precise and tender verse, Barot captures the particularities of being in the middle of one’s life, reflecting on the joys and sorrows of the past and confronting the inevitabilities that lie ahead.

    For Barot, this presence of mind is an art of being lost in thought. “My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow / to understand what anything means,” he confides, “but understands that if you look at something / long enough, it will have something / to say to you.” Appreciating a Rembrandt, standing in a Goodwill, watching a boy with a flower behind his ear—we encounter ephemeral murmurs of meaning everywhere, but only by slowing down, listening. If we take time to notice the enduring insights of daily moments, if we praise cherry blossoms, lungs, and crying, we might find it easier to bear the loss of a loved one, the sting of solitude, the body’s decline.

    By laying bare his own experiences, Barot brings us close enough to witness the lyrical work of consciousness. Patient and attentive, this collection illuminates the everyday and invites us to find pleasure in doing the same, at every stage of life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMilkweed Editions
    Release dateOct 8, 2024
    ISBN9781571317889
    Moving the Bones
    Author

    Rick Barot

    Born in the Philippines, Rick Barot grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. His previous books are The Darker Fall, which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Want, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and Chord, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and received the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. His fourth book of poems The Galleons was published by Milkweed Editions in 2020. It was listed on the top ten poetry books for 2020 by the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Awards, and was on the longlist for the National Book Award. Barot has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. In 2020, Barot received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches at Pacific Lutheran University and lives in Tacoma, Washington.

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      Book preview

      Moving the Bones - Rick Barot

      PLEASURE

      You are told to believe in one paradise

      and then there is the paradise you come to know.

      The shoes lined up in pairs by the door

      and the herd moving with its mysterious intent

      across a dark plain. The blue of the sky

      which is the zenith of all colors

      and the love of the man in the next room,

      strong and rough as a hog’s back.

      My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow

      to understand what anything means,

      but it understands that if you look at something

      long enough, it will have something

      to say to you. The sun that is strangely bright

      on some days, a poisoned canary,

      and the crop of winter rocks in a meadow

      in April. Learning decades later

      the name of the hospital where you were born

      and watching the child eat a mango

      as though it is time he is eating, time shining

      on his lips. On fewer days I agree

      with the poet’s dread of being

      the wrong person in the right world, and believe

      in adhesion, in never showing up

      empty-handed, even if the pleasure I know best

      is fused with the abject. There is always

      the other side of the heart, its coaxing:

      You are here. You can begin again. You can rise.

      THE LOVERS

      One of them is still there in the smell of burnt toast

      and dirty clothes that was my twenties, always waiting

      to be picked up outside some station, that tenderness

      set against each building’s law of metal and stone.

      One of them is still on a slope of the Sandias,

      jeans pushed down to his knees

      so I can pick out the cactus needles from his thigh.

      The sky is late, the color of grape soda. In weeks he will go

      to a war, write letters that now sleep in a box

      in the basement, next to a box of Christmas ornaments.

      I open a book I read in college

      and one of them is in the margins, his handwriting

      an enthusiastic vine, like the vines at the edges

      of medieval texts, each o of his cursive a tiny horse chestnut,

      the paperback’s pages yellow as a smoker’s fingers.

      Another one is still on his motorcycle

      between Connecticut and Manhattan, driving a cab on weekends

      for his tuition. On the nights I rode behind him,

      my head against the black leather of his back, I knew

      I would die many times before my death.

      One death for the one walking down Iowa Avenue,

      brooding on the problem of wearing a jacket

      over a Halloween costume. One death

      for the one scorned by his parents and brothers.

      One death for the one locked for days in his room, drawing lines

      in a notebook, over and over and over.

      Standing in front of a glass case

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