![The Galleons](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
![The Galleons](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Don’t be fooled by this slim volume of poetry. Its 88 pages are full of beautiful poems that get to the heart of the world—from heritage (where we came from) to destiny (how we got to our ultimate destination). Also included are poems on the world of nature and the nature of the world. "The Girl Carrying a Ladder" and "The Blink Reflex" may take you aback. Give the 88 pages here your full attention and you are sure to find your favorites as well.
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Award
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2020
For almost twenty years, Rick Barot has been writing some of the most stunningly crafted lyric poems in America, paying careful, Rilkean attention to the layered world that surrounds us. In The Galleons, he widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American family in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism.
These poems are engaged in the work of recovery, making visible what is often intentionally erased: the movement of domestic workers on a weekday morning in Brooklyn; a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, fondly sharing photos of his dog; the departure and destination points of dozens of galleons between 1564 and 1815, these ships evoking both the vast movements of history and the individual journeys of those borne along by their tides. “Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part / of history,” Barot writes of his grandmother. “No, her story is an illumination // of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time.”
With nods toward Barot’s poetic predecessors—from Frank O’Hara to John Donne—The Galleons represents an exciting extension and expansion of this virtuosic poet’s work, marrying “reckless” ambition and crafted “composure,” in which we repeatedly find the speaker standing and breathing before the world, “incredible and true.”
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781571317278 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Milkweed Editions |
Publication date: | 02/11/2020 |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 88 |
File size: | 697 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE GALLEONS 1
Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part
of history. No, her story is an illumination
of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time.
Or, no, her story is separate
from the whole, as distinct as each person is distinct
from the stream of people that led
to the one and leads past the one. Or, her story
is surrounded by history, the ambient spaciousness
of which she is the momentary foreground.
Maybe history is a net through which
just about everything passes, and the pieces of her
story are particles caught in the interstices.
Or, her story is a contradiction, something ordinary
that has no part in history at all, if history is
about what is included, what is made important.
History is the galleon in the middle
of the Pacific Ocean, in the middle of the sixteenth
century, swaying like a drunk who will take
six months to finally reach his house.
She is on another ship, centuries later, on a journey
eastward that will take weeks across the same ocean.
The war is over, though her husband
is still in his officer’s uniform, small but confident
among the tall white officers. Her hair
is marcelled like a movie star’s waves,
though she has been too sick with the water’s motion
to know that anyone sees her. Her daughter is two,
the blur of need at the center of each day’s
incessant rocking. Here is a ship, an ocean.
Here is a figure, her story a few words in the blue void.
***
THE GALLEONS 5
We didn’t want to be noticed, so we put charcoal on our faces.
I listen to the hours of tape, of the two of us at the dining table.
All the girls, looking like dirt. / My father was always drinking
Questions about the town, her parents, the names of people
or with women, my mother had to take care of the business. /
that only she could now remember. The images, I imagined,
My sister broke her back when she was a child, she grew up
scrolling in her mind, and translated into the answers she gave.
into a hunchback. She died very young. / They set up a dance
Sometimes pausing, not because she couldn’t recall, but didn’t
at the municipal tennis courts to celebrate the end of the war,
want to recall badly, the pause a kind of gap between what she
and he was there, in his US uniform. / He always insisted that
knew and what the words could do. The two things a voice
we sit at the front, but when I was by myself on the bus I sat
can say when it is saying one thing, the things that suddenly
somewhere in the middle. I didn’t want trouble. / I was around
return when you are speaking, like pockets of color coming to
fifty-five when I had my first real job, working as the security
life in your mind: I listen to her with my skin and my eyes,
at Macy’s. / I always liked to read. I wanted to go to college
my ears. I had had the notion that asking her about her life
like my sisters, but I got married. / You know that wedding
might add something to what I thought of as my art, as though
dress in the picture, we had to borrow it from our neighbor. /
her past and her love could be vectors of use. But I started to
I liked Japan when he was stationed there. It was so clean.
realize that what I actually needed to know, I would have
Then Norfolk. Richmond. / I was so sick on the ship, I can’t
to conjure for myself, because what we know most deeply
remember much. Your mama just kept running all around.
we guard best, even as she spoke, laughed, passed the glow
It was a navy ship. / My mother’s name is Canuta Sacay and
of each story to me, like a document I could have in hand
my father’s name is Enrique Omega. My grandparents were
but could not understand. I put the tape away, felt for years
farmers outside Ormoc. / I was born in Ormoc, December 8,
that it was enough, the responsibility done. Our conversation
1924 or 25. / This was the apartment we lived in in Maryland.
stopped when my aunt came to take her out for some errands.
That’s Junior there in the picture. And there’s your mama.
Chatter, chairs moved around, then noises that are just noises.
***
UDFJ-39546284
In bunraku, when you are watching bunraku,
there is that sweet moment in your mind
when you stop noticing the three puppeteers hovering
around each puppet like earnest ghosts
and begin to follow the story being told
by the puppets. The chanter sitting off to the side
voices the love, connivance, outrage,
and eventual reconciliation at the heart of each play,
though often what reconciliation actually meant
was everyone banished, broken, or dead.
The seeing and non-seeing that make humans
humans: I’m thinking now of the placid
English estates where the servants had to face the wall
whenever anyone of importance was near,
where workers had to cut the lawns with scissors
in candlelight at night, to save the master
the trouble of seeing and hearing all that effort.
What the mind does with this kind of information
is probably the knot within the post-
in what we call post-modernism, knowing all we know
now about the cruelty that made modernism
modernism. In the Philippines, growing up among
servants, I loved the servants the same way
I loved my parents, with helplessness and tyranny.
Walking in the exhibit of the black artist’s paintings
of young black men in brocaded tableaus,
I am absorbed by their beauty as much
as I am by finding out that the intricate backgrounds
were outsourced to painters in Beijing, taking part
in the functional ambiguity between
one kind of labor and another. I guess all this matters
only as much as you want it to matter,
the mind making its focal adjustments
between foreground and context, present and past,
as well as it can. For example, this morning
my sister sent me a photograph of my grandmother’s
hands. Sitting outside in her wheelchair, taking in
the gold sunshine, my grandmother
had her hands folded in her lap, and I looked at them
until I had to stop. This is foreground.
For context, today I learned that the farthest galaxy
we know of, located by scientists in 2011,
is 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away.
It goes by the name of UDFj-39546284,
for reasons that I haven’t yet looked up.
In the photograph you can see online, the galaxy looks
like the dusty stuff in the corner of a windowpane,
something you could look at sometimes,
something that is nothing, and has nothing
to do with what you know about distance and time.
***
THE BLINK REFLEX
I have this notion that if you live long enough,
there are three or four great stories that you will have in your life.
A story of a journey or a transformation.
A story of love, which will likely mean the loss of love, a story
of loss. And a story of spiritual illumination,
which, for many, will probably be the moment of death itself,
the story untellable, its beginning and middle
and end collapsing with its teller into a disappearing conclusion.
I have believed long enough in my notion
to know that it is a romantic notion, that it erodes each time
I realize that the shard and not the whole
comprises a life, the image and not the narrative. Otherwise,
there’s no reason why all I remember of the airplane
I took as a child from one country to another
is the moist towelette packet we were given with our meal,
the wonder and absurdity of it. Or that, in love,
high in a tree in the dark, and high, he and I sat in the rain-damp
branches and ate 7-11 donuts. Or this, this piece
of a story that isn’t even mine, that isn’t even a story
but a glance of an experience, of the friend who held the stray
dog after it was struck by a car. Not knowing whether the dog
was dead, my friend called a friend
who worked for a vet. Poke the dog in the eye, this friend said.
Because if the animal no longer has a blink reflex,
it probably means the animal is dead. Decades after
college, when you could do such a thing, I typed his name
into a search engine to find out what became of the 18-year-old
boy from the tree. Like dozens of old keys
in a drawer, so many of the wrong people with the right name.
The child dead from leukemia, with a school gym
named for him. The wrestler who had a perfectly square jaw,
like a cartoon police detective in a fedora.
When I arrived at a page that was certainly
about him, I no longer knew the face but I recognized the life
that he had had. He had transferred to
another college, gone to film school, and become a producer
of TV documentaries. A film about fishermen, the harsh fishing
season in Alaska. A film about Abraham Lincoln
and a film about the last days of Adolf Hitler.
A film about the Sherpas who go up and down the Himalayas.
Table of Contents
CONTENTSThe Grasshopper and the Cricket
The Galleons 1
UDFJ-39546284
The Flea
The Galleons 2
Still Life with Helicopters
The Girl Carrying a Ladder
The Galleons 3
The Blink Reflex
Virginia Woolf’s Walking Stick
Dragged Mass
The Galleons 4
Cascades 501
The Marrow
The Galleons 5
The Names
The Galleons 6
The Galleons 7
Adjacent, Against, Upon
Marimar
Wright Park
The Galleons 8
On Some Items in the Painting by Velázquez
The Galleons 9
Broken Mirror Against Tree Trunk
A Poem as Long as California
The Galleons 10
Ode with Interruptions
Acknowledgments