TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Today’s poem rejoices in something at the heart of this podcast: the pleasure of sharing our favorite poems with others, rather than reading them alone.

Abundance
by Rick Barot

It must say something wonderful about my life
that my first meal in America was a bucket

of chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I was ten. Hours before, the arrival at the airport

to the cacophony of relatives, then the drive
to my uncle’s house in the new winter cold,

where the bucket waited, like America itself.
For once, that one memory is not like the tattered

band t-shirt you only wear to bed, but like
the crisp task the teacher gives to her students.

She hands each of us a mason jar full of black, 
white, red, and brown rice. She tells us

to pour the rice on the table and sort it
by color, however long it will take. In this way

the counting and accounting, like the work
of memory, is its own abundance, along with that 

of the gorgeous rice. All my life I have been
drawn to exercises in patience because so many

of the things I love don’t love me back, a claim
that, to borrow an aching line from Miłosz,

I make not out of sorrow but in wonder. 
The patience of bending over a table, counting. 

The patience of hunger. The patience of love
clinging to an image of sunlight on a hazel eye.

That day, we lay on the summer time grass
of the park and looked up at the maples

the sun ruffled through. He told me about
the stern way his grandmother had taught him

how to play the violin when he was a child.
I told him about my childhood newspaper route,

walking the neighborhood’s sleeping streets
at dawn, my hands black from newsprint,

stung by the rubber bands that always snapped.
When we weren’t talking about those things 

we were talking about poetry, beside ourselves
when reading out loud the Larkin poem 

about how parents fuck you up, whisperingly
amazed reading Dickinson’s poem about

how things fall apart in an exact, organized 
decay. Reading the poems with someone else,

I had the thought that it was best to always 
read poems this way, like the trains in Europe

where you have to sit facing each other.
I had the thought that the space between

the lines in a poem was like the space between
two people facing each other on a bed,

the space of breath. In the park, the maples
we lay under were Norway maples, a species

considered invasive because it out-shades
everything around it. I didn’t know this

when I fell in love with the geometry of each
astral leaf, or fell in love with the chorus

the leaves made when the breezes conducted
them. Often I am moved by all the information

I’ve gathered but don’t know what to do with.
That the needles used for upholstery are curved

like parentheses. That there’s a star somewhere
two hundred times bigger than our sun.

That far back in its etymology the closet 
actually meant a space of intimate privacy

where you might welcome others, not a place
of shame you’re supposed to leave behind.

The abundance of that closet, crowded now
with my fierce friends. The abundance

of having a new truth in the mind, the bloom 
in your senses like biting into a fennel seed.

The abundance of America, its orchards
and its libraries, its cemeteries and its airports,

the circle of people praying in the basement
of a church and the muddy field after a festival,

the boy counting the sixty-seven rings
of the fresh-cut log washed up on the beach

and the girl wearing red sunglasses on the train
in the morning, startled awake at her stop,

then, like all of us, walking into the day,
into the one thing there’s plenty of: the future.

“Abundance" by Rick Barot from MOVING THE BONES © 2024 Rick Barot. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Milkweed Editions.