In the five years since his first, prize-winning collection The Darker Fall, Rick Barot's work has both deepened and expanded. His remarkable second book, Want, is concerned with the way seeing creates desire, and desire creates the world, and somehow, destroys it too: "By my attention the tired / hospital seemed to go down, the wrecking / ball round and avid as an eye." An elegiac gravity suffuses, but luckily does not sink, the poems. Indeed, we watch the continuous creation, by human hand, of connections between worlds: "the white clothes / spinning in another dryer, like a magnolia / opening and destroying itself…" What we witness becomes us, in ways so intimate they might as well be physical: "There are things the body will / take into itself, things harbored and lost at once, / like water changed from ice to liquid to lost air. / He was lost into my mind. The story began there." The restless eye of Want has a great deal to show us. Barot sees with justice, sobriety, and more often than not, pure ecstasy.

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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.


THEORIES OF THE VISIBLE

1.

Marble nipple that no tongue or fingertip
can make come alive: I love the deliberate
chiseling accorded even to the brailled
texture surrounding the stiff eraser-like tip,

one Greek's careful attention poured hand
and eye into the torso's unharmed white,
standing now for what was there, what must
have breathed and warmed just beyond

the sculptor's touch, the prerogative no
of the youth something I can only imagine,
no worked into the cold sinew, the utterly
soft cock. Like a Hermes on winged

2.

feet, the boy of one summer is rollerblading
naked in the house, all summer singing
with the stereo's rutting synthetic thumps,
the two neighbors glaring at our door

greeted by the boy who was wearing nothing.
Every night, one of us always left without
sleep, amphetamine-strung, opening
books, doors, and drawers whose cool air

was awake in their dark. I'd watch his eyes
in their sleep, crimped like a poppy's
petals, reeling from their own black seeds.
In the codes of passion the Florentines

3.

held during the Renaissance, it was nothing
for a man and his friends to raid another
man's house and take his wife, the deaths
acceptable enough a price for that one love.

In that city of architecture, of strict theories
of the visible, perspective made a science,
I love how emotion unraveled matter
into metaphor, the mouth a star, the elbow

a kingdom. Writing of his mistress's pale
beauty, Lorenzo de Medici likened it
to the delicate white fat condensed around
an animal's kidneys, as though seeing had

4.

to pierce that far, with its pen or its scalpel,
to know itself. That summer, we'd walk
to the nearby park and look at the acres being
restored back to prairie, their blaze of dried

grasses and reeds, the mice running out
from the edges, and then back. A mile away,
the baseball stadium at dusk would roar
with people and light, a spaceship landed

on the prairie's ghost expanse. I knew
to steal against what would be lost: the sugar
dispenser from a diner's table, his fingers'
taste of dirt, the bats separating from the tree,

5.

each a manic franchise of the gloaming black.
For the painters of Lorenzo's time, flesh
was a lie. Trusting the improbable alchemy
of things, they first applied the layer of green

on the drawn body, then the thin layers
of red. In the end, the blossoming flesh
of a face would appear there, lit like a pear.
In the oldest paintings, you can see the green

and blue in their cracked faces, the cold
origin just beneath. What little they needed
to make the miraculous: red clay, sulfur,
gold powder, egg yolk, mercury, marble dust,

6.

and salt, each thing ground down for another
purpose. It was a rented summer's house.
We were going to walk away from each other.
For a week he had a fever, and what I knew

was his sleep, a body and its breathing.
And already I understood the blue current
that would extend from where I was to where
I would be, ignited with that life. Days after

his fever, we saw a crow slowly take apart
a greasy paper bag on the grass, holding
down the bag with a foot as it ate each ripped
dirty piece. What is it to be here but to want?

Blurbs

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Stunning new poetry collection from the winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize

Rick Barot's exquisite and subtle sensibility, like Keats's, is led in equal measure by a tough intellect and an open heart. He follows his own prescription to "Tell each story cold," and with a magician's verve and aplomb, he makes language perform its most convincing tricks by pulling the handkerchief from what is otherwise "an empty fist," by finding the "white nouns of the moon." Barot's Want is dexterous and thrilling, and his capacious and generous vision shows us how the eye survives "to correct the heart."

-Michael Collier

After my first reading, I believed the image of a "marble nipple" embodied the sculpted intensity of Want. After a second reading, I decided the book's defining image was the carnality of a "puggish, miniature barbell pierced into a nipple." By the fourth and fifth readings, I realized Barot was gliding easily between classic and romantic, formal and organic in his explorations of desire. But frankly, I've grown too intoxicated, too gripped by this wonderful collection to reduce it to a single idea. In Rick Barot's hands every poem casts at least two luminous shadows. Want is masterfully merciless and merciful at the same time.

-Terrance Hayes

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