The Verge
The lake has never been what we thought it was or what we have named it. Instead, it’s a tidal wetland, its interstitiality a holding place for things coming and going, things growing, emerging, and flying into other states of themselves. It’s a vast mudflat, beholden to the moon and the tides, to other vast things. With the tide withdrawn on a sharp fall morning, the smells of a ripe saline body rise, seaweed and mist. It’s an estuary: marine and fluvial, a brackish essence. It’s a slough: a backwater freshened and made complex by creeks. If I belong anywhere, it is here. A place that is more than one thing, so that, looking in the mirror one day, I know myself to be, despite my apparent placidity, in my lust and dread and anger and pain, a verge of beings and names.
Rembrandt
The empty pot of coffee on a folded kitchen towel on the table. The marigold patch of yolk left on one plate. On another, like the point of an elbow, the uneaten edge of a loaf. The dish with a cube of butter. The stain on the tablecloth from a spill of coffee. Three stacks of books slid to the side, with pens and pencils rolled against them, kept from rolling off the table. The jar of purple jam with its lid off. The post-it note with an address. The sounds from the other part of the house, where he has gone, returned to the ongoing day. And so, clear the cups. Clear the spoons that held our faces. Brush off the grains by the sugar bowl. On the pile of mail, a postcard with the painter’s self-portrait of himself at eighteen. The light slanted on his neck and cheek is an archive of an hour’s attention. But the mouth, nose, and eyes—in centuries of shadow.
Rick Barot’s most recent book of poems is Moving the Bones, published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. His previous collection, The Galleons, was longlisted for the National Book Award. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.
Header photo by TRphotos, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Rick Barot by Rachel McCauley
