“Tarp,” a poem by faculty member Rick Barot, appears online at Poetry Magazine.

I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets

under the trees, catching the rain

of  olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness

of   the one covering the bad roof

of  a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color

inside the winter’s weeks. Another one

took the shape of   the pile of   bricks underneath.

Another flew off the back of a truck,

black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air.

I have seen the ones under bridges,

the forms they make of sleep. I could go on

this way until the end of the page, even though

what I have in my mind isn’t the thing

itself, but the category of   belief that sees the thing

as a shelter for what is beneath it.

There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over …[Keep Reading]…

Rick is the author of the poetry collection Want (2008, Sarabande Books).