Rick Barot

Satellite

I look up from the book I am reading.

How many times in my life

have I felt the hard and painful love

I am feeling now? I don’t know where he is

but I can see him. Helping his uncle

clear the disorder from a part

of their land, strumming his guitar

with the handle of a worn paintbrush.

On a wall near me is a photograph

of the young monk, his back to us, looking

over a temple’s balcony to the parched

valley below. His robes are red,

like a cardinal. The mountains

in the background are half in clouds,

a border between realms. In the book

I am reading, the old artist

is at her own border: seeing her grandsons

walk through the exhibit of her

work, the column of each saturated

sculpture like an abstract totem pole,

and thinking of her ancestor,

an 18-year-old who captained a cargo boat

up and down the coast, dashing

in her imagination and mine. How many

men have I lost my life to,

each bit of losing a kind of willed spite

towards my own weakness? Days ago

we stood at the dark coast

and listened to the low waves

meeting the shore. In the dark, how near

he was felt like a small force

at my shoulder, as though we were held

in the scoop of a nest. To the left

was the half-moon, casting a gold track

on the ocean. To the right, higher

above, the stars that made the Big Dipper,

the only thing we knew

to recognize, unclear on what was star,

what was planet, what was satellite.