The End or The Beginning?

Wow, this piece is chilling isn't it? And so beautiful...

 

 

Ocean Park Notebook

Ocean Park Notebook

By Rick Barot b. 1969

 

I.

The worker’s pants on a spider-filament line,

strung waist to waist to waist to dry.

The neat green wedge of park, always empty;

the length of concrete paced by convalescents.

The lead impastos of interesting weather,

though mostly the shadowless blue of long days.

The sprawl of water beyond the band of beach,

copper or tinfoil depending on

the sun coming down, the moon rising.

The storefront and the thumb of hydrant

in front of it, in all kinds of light

solidly composed and unspeculative.

The garage’s brick side facing a warehouse wall;

between them, the alley’s cold black aisle.

The swells of a scalloped awning;

the sheetlike descent of streetwise birds.

Tubercular with rust, the flue leaking steam.

And behind the blind-eye panes, the figure

who must have chosen to be here.

II.

At a window someone watches for daybreak,

which begins for him with a spar of sun

lighting a stringcourse on the opposite building,

its tendrils and blooms freshly chiseled

when mornings have an acidly clean brightness,

or mildewed, chalky with soot, when the overcast

will not pull back from the day.

Hobbled now, but still ardent, wandering,

he looks at the postcards showing the city

and its lit grids, touches mangoes going soft

in crates, and listens always for

the murmurings: An object, after all,

is what makes infinity private. Spare a dollar

for a lobotomy? Everything taken up, pocketed,

added to an accrual having less to do with weight

than with lightness: the plane of a wall,

say, with pink stucco rough as emery,

and the little fish, green as muscat grapes,

selling out at a dime a dozen.

III.

Fender-chrome, gravel molars, brittle sepals

holding up the dead rose, the bottle collecting

rain—a precise light found for each

like the faded brown for leaves,

ground-down crystal for frost. The formless

moil of paint, spread into surface, depicts

the day exact. So with the persimmons

almost forgotten into ordinariness, the moons

of candle-wax on the table—things clearer somehow

for entering the orange, brown, and white

I make use of. Rising, I am elated by the light

on cold red leaves and on successive clouds,

each one edge-lit, its heart incinerate.

And the light makes use of me in ways

only line, curve, and shadow can describe,

drawn toward what pity or love that the day,

emptied but unsubdued, gives in to:

Every day he poured himself into it,

as water might pour from a flask.

 

 

-from The Darker Fall

 

Lets Talk About #2  

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For some reason I feel like this piece is a bit post-apocalyptic. People seem to have completely disappeared - save one lone soul. Nature seems to have survived - as well as a few structures. I know that the poem never out comes out and says it, but I keep going back to that idea of the loneliness. It feels very heavy. I don't get the impression that the speaker was ostracized from society, and the way the figure in the window seems to be enamored with the weather - as if it a symbol of their older, more normal life.

I do feel like the figure in the window is the only person in the world. Or perhaps the speaker is the only person and they are imagining the figure in the window. We could also say that the figure and the speaker may be the same person.

Maybe the figure is imagining the speaker, narrating their life... However you put it, there is something about this poem that seems to communicate the way the speaker is living a new chapter of their life. The question that could be asked: what is this for the speaker? The beginning or the end?