Warren Wilson faculty member Rick Barot’s new poem “The Wooden Overcoat” appears in the April 2012 issue of Poetry
The Wooden Overcoat
By Rick Barot
It turns out there’s a difference between a detail
and an image. If the dandelion on the sidewalk is
mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicep
is an image because it moves when her body does,
even when a shirt covers the little thorny black sun
on a thin stalk. The same way that the bar code
on the back of another friend’s neck is just a detail,
until you hear that the row of numbers underneath
are the numbers his grandfather got on his arm
in a camp in Poland. Then it’s an image, something
activated in the reader’s senses beyond mere fact.
I know the difference doesn’t matter, except in poetry, ….[Keep Reading]…
Rick is the author of the poetry collections Want
