Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | |
| Foreword | |
| Reading Plato | 3 |
| Eight Elegies | 5 |
| Chroma | 10 |
| Bird Notes | 12 |
| Bonnard's Garden | 16 |
| Botanicals | 18 |
| Study | 21 |
| Blue Hours | 23 |
| Riffing | 29 |
| Passagework | 31 |
| Sublet, Pitt Street | 35 |
| Three Amoretti | 37 |
| Nearing Rome | 40 |
| Ocean Park Notebook | 42 |
| The Gecko | 45 |
| Portishead Notebook | 47 |
| Aubade | 53 |
| Phantasmal Cities | 55 |
| Montale | 60 |
| Wittgenstein | 62 |
| Interior with Extension Cord | 66 |
| Photographing the Snow | 68 |
| At Point Reyes | 70 |
| Miro's Notebook | 72 |
| The Author | 77 |
| Previous Winners, The Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry | 79 |
Forewords & Introductions
"Barot's first collection, The Darker Fall, is a brilliant example of language as means, as an art nearly flawless in its transformation of emotional and actual sources. . . . Barot's mature linguistic skills really come down to a metaphorical and musical intelligence that refuses to value one element over another, that will not let the language or the longing take over. Thus the ease, the warmth, the inclusiveness, the confidence of his writing, and thus the impression of wholeness of its purpose."
—From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly
Read an Excerpt
Sublet, Pitt Street The graininess of humid heat, steady to her windowbox, parsley gone riot. And each marigold a ruched density caught in nettings of dill. The window, immovably half-closed. Though cries from the park pool, a cool depth smelling of acetone at dark. Though the upswept gingko leaves, pestered into notice just before a storm's hard collapse. This month, I sleep and wake to objects assigned someone else's manners. Given winters, the face of fear among her three African masks, its white eyes, cage-bar teeth. In a box, spring's silk scarves. Year-round Christmas lights on the bed's canopy. And in the photographs room after room, her mother fading into approximateness, older, then even older, the face bones overexpressed by age. Exhausted by heat some nights, I have marked that difference frame to frame, wished a means of telling what occupied her living in between, and arrived only at my afternoon radio's melancholy, some onions on a plate, a sunset left in the sky like eyeshadow on a lid. What she knew of need imagined now as our own need, continuing, the way our grocer's plantains, our street's boombox merengue, stand for what the tenement museum, blocks from here, remembers: A yellowed letter's Send word. The man cross-armed, posed before his new store. And the glance of light from the camera's flash, touching on each sleeper on the floor.
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