Chord. Rick Barot

like

      oil slicks or nights without stars. In faintly brushed

      arcs, white appears on the rough black,

      as though to show where the light continues

      to stay in the room: a glint on a ficus-leaf ’s edge,

      a smudge on a mirror. Art in its intention

      wants to be in the condition of poetry,

      but most art is in the condition of prose.

      This is not a slander to prose. Prose is what happens

      when we watched a backyard rat die

      during a hot Los Angeles afternoon, while

      inside, a party ignited for an uncle turning

      seventy-five. The rat had scurried across the yard,

      stopped midway, and didn’t move again

      except to drag towards a brick planter,

      where it finally stopped, its face to the brick side,

      its back pumping irregularly. At first

      the children toyed with it, until the dark import

      became clear: dying was the afternoon

      lesson. There were two tables of food, three

      birthday cakes, a whole suckling pig, an apple shiny

      in its mouth, its legs like a racehorse

      on the run, all feet off the ground.

      When my friend and I saw the black paintings

      in the gallery, he said that a trip

      to Home Depot and he could make what

      was in front of us. The point made me realize that

      what’s visible isn’t always superior

      to what can’t be seen, like ideas proven only

      by poor means, as though the invisible

      were a ventriloquist saying something important

      with his mouth shut. The dying of the rat required

      the rat to be there, its own illustration.

      The dying of the uncle required that he be

      at his birthday party, though certain cells, like ravens

      in a winter landscape, winged through

      his body, a slander to the man blowing out

      seventy-five candles on three birthday cakes.

      Because one condition of art is that it tries too hard,

      in his studio the painter mixes twigs and sand

      into the tub of black paint, a substance

      active as tar, spread on the canvas like a road.

      For the painter, there are stones, objects turned

      now to stone, all kinds of ruin to plant

      into the canvas. The things that don’t need any more

      light. Only more dark growing in the dark.

THE WOODEN OVERCOAT

      It turns out there’s a difference between a detail

      and an image. If a dandelion on the sidewalk is

      mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicep

      is an image because it moves when her body does,

      even when a shirt covers up the little black sun

      on a thin stalk. The same way that the barcode

      on the back of another friend’s neck is just a detail,

      until you hear that the row of numbers underneath

      are the numbers his grandfather got on his arm

      in a camp in Poland. Then it’s an image, something