Читать книгу Chord - Rick Barot - Страница 9

TARP

I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets

under the trees, catching the rain

of olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness

of the one covering the bad roof

of a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color

inside the winter’s weeks. Another one

took the shape of the pile of bricks underneath.

Another flew off the back of a truck,

black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air.

I have seen the ones under bridges,

the forms they make of sleep. I could go on

this way until the end of the page, even though

what I have in my mind isn’t the thing

itself, but the category of belief that sees the thing

as a shelter for what is beneath it.

There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over

a wave. You cannot put a tarp

over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken

oil well miles under the ocean.

There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind

that sits in a corner and shreds receipts

and newspapers. There is no tarp for dread,

whose only recourse is language

so approximate it hardly means what it means:

He is not here. She is sick. She cannot remember

her name. He is old. He is ashamed.