Cascades 501 by Rick Barot

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend January 19, 2015   Cascades 501   Rick Barot

The man sitting behind me is telling the man sitting next to him about his heart bypass.   Outside the train’s window, the landscapes smear by— the earnest, haphazard distillations of America. The backyards   and back sides of houses. The back lots of shops and factories. The undersides of bridges. And then the stretches   of actual land, which is not so much land but the kinds of water courses and greenery that register   like luck in the mind. Dense walls of trees. Punky little woods. The living continually out-growing   the fallen and decaying. The vines and ivies taking over everything, proving that the force of disorder is also the force   of plenty. Then the eye dilating to the sudden clearings—fields, meadows. The bogs that must have been left   by retreating glaciers. The creeks, the algae broth of ponds. Then the broad silver of rivers, shiny   as turnstiles. Attrition, dispersal, growth—a system unfastened to story, as though the green sight itself   was beyond story, was peacefully beyond any clear meaning. But why the gust of alertness that comes   to me every time any indication of the human passes into sight—like a mirror, like to like, even though I am not   the summer backyard with the orange soccer ball resting there, even though I am not the pick-up truck   parked in the back lot, its two doors opened wide, and no one around to show whether it is funny   or an emergency that the truck is like that. Each thing looks new even when it is old and broken down.   They had to open me up—the man is now telling the other man. I wasn’t there to see it, but they opened me up.            Copyright © 2015 by Rick Barot. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Traveling the few hours from Tacoma to Portland, what I really wanted to do was read. But between the visual novelty from outside and the fragments of conversations I overheard inside, reading wasn’t going to happen. Instead, like any writer who realizes he or she is being given something, I started writing it all down.” —Rick Barot   Rick Barot is the author of Chord (Sarabande Books, 2015). He teaches at Pacific Lutheran University and lives in Tacoma, Washington. Most Recent Book by Barot   Chord (Sarabande Books, 2015) "Go Greyhound" by Bob Hicok "Passing Through Albuquerque" by John Balaban "Flying" by Sarah Arvio Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038