Poem of the Week, by Rick Barot

Brown Refrigerator

- Rick Barot

You don’t have to understand it

but you will carry it anyway.

A couple whose baby died,

when they had to move

to another state, took the baby

from the years-long ground

and brought her with them.

They did this again a second

time, their memory always

tied to its embodiment,

new burials for an old grief.

In a short film I once saw,

ants lifted away the silver

and gold confetti from a party,

making a trail of suns

and moons on the floor.

The filmmaker must have put

something sweet on the circles,

like a painter dabbing

little points of white paint

to give highlights to an eyeball.

Some of the recipes that

a friend keeps making

go so far back in her family

the recipes are like snapshots

of villages and forests,

mountains and falling snow.

Apples and trout rise up

into the night’s constellations,

a dark without yellow stars.

What I remember of childhood

sometimes comes down

to the brown refrigerator

in our house. Its chrome

handle was always angry

with static, so that now when

I reach for the doorknob

or the gas pump, the sharp

charge on my fingers is

childhood calling its child back.

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For more information about Rick Barot, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/rick-barot

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