Rick Barot's 'Moving the Bones' - lyrical, compassionate, patient poetry

  • by Mark William Norby
  • Monday December 23, 2024
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Poet Rick Barot
Poet Rick Barot

Combining melodic rhythms and personal reflections, Rick Barot's "Moving the Bones" (Milkweed Editions, October 2024) triumphantly penetrates the heart with such gentle consideration that readers will be left with new understanding of what it means to be alive at this moment in time.

Covering huge topics like ekphrastic poetry, Barot's poems stand as creative odes to ekphrasis wherein our emotions become his emotions and vice versa: "The ekphrastic act is a catalyst for observation, association, and dream. / It is like the flaneur's arc of walking, seeing, and reverie. / I see you / move down the busy block before you have seen me and I look away, / to make another image in my mind, to have it take the force of the blow."

Ekphrastic poetry is simply defined as poems written about other works of art; or one mode of artistic creation writing about another—a reflection of art back onto itself. In this style of creation, Barot sees a thing in its totality. In "Crosshatch 1," he writes, "The ocean is so large it doesn't have to know what it is." And later: "I am a mud man. I am made of mud. I think of mud the way a lightbulb / is preoccupied with light, the way water is preoccupied with the shore."

Poet Rick Barot  

In "Crosshatch 2," he writes beyond ekphrasis and into interpretations of states of aliveness or even lack of life: "Sontag. The books were as different as the seasons. It was winter, naked, / like what Sontag said on page 33: 'Death is the opposite of everything.'"

Indeed, death is the opposite of right now. Barot displays the methods in which we see ourselves from one age to the next, a progression through life that bears witness to our mental capacity to wait for the self to feel. "My pants hems are heavy with dew. Am I a child again, am I old? / Or am I only who I am now, astounded at the transport of the body / from one end of time to another."

Barot is a poet of great importance, his work is non-trifling, his self-attitude earnest. He tackles the simple yet complex consciousness of being queer and alone that we have each lived through. He gains traction in being middle-aged and seeing down both sides of the mountain, from youth to becoming older, not yet knowing what it fully means and what is beyond nowness.

In "The Mussel," he writes: "One way of being hidden / is to be in plain sight, looking like a black rock / among other rocks in a streambed. Another way is to be small." Who hasn't known what it's like to be queer and made small, to hide in plain sight, and (hopefully) to have stepped into the roar of coming out free and fully queer; even queerer.

Paradise you know
Even queerer like Barot's poem "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 heard moving with its mysterious intent / across a dark plain. The blue 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."

Slightly beyond midway through the book, we feel the poet "Riding the BART train from Richmond to Freemont." He is riding the COVID pandemic over the course of twenty-five pages. I had to stop, consider what I had taken on in the reading, and to reread in order to dig into the incredible value of his dedication to time in isolation—again, something we can relate to having survived the pandemic—and this itself is the subject: time.

And observation. "During the pandemic, I learned the half hour of sun that slanted / into one side of my room, the light like a giant wing. I would / lie on the floor and read heavy books, surprised by the legs of / furniture. The stumpy legs of a stool, the giraffe legs of a table. / On days when there was no sun, I sat there and looked up at / the window, at the sky that was the color of a sidewalk."

Barot touches on the gentleness of his mother recovering from illness; he dedicated "Moving the Bones" to the memory of his father Edgar Alvarez Barot; he lives in his life—we see the poet's life as we understand our own; and in "Goodwill," all of it comes together in these lines: "Then the sound / of children, the neighbor's children, leading me / to that ladder within the self, with the boy / on a low rung, the man on the middle rungs, and the old man / above us, touching the leaves of the tree." Poetry doesn't get any better than this.

In many areas it reminded me of the work of Frank Bidart. But my first thought reading Barot's pages brought the work of Saint Augustine's "Confessions" to mind—the personal emotions and feelings, the examination of the soul. I think what will reach you clearly in the book is a sense of life in its beginning, middle, and end though we may have far to go.

Check out more books from Milkweed Editions, a publishing house stirring the rich ocean of literature. I know Barot is grateful to have found them.

www.milkweed.or
www.rickbarot.com

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