Brown Refrigerator Poem by Rick Barot

You don't have to understand it
but you will carry it anyway.
A couple whose baby died,
when they had to move
to another state, took the baby
from the years-long ground
and brought her with them.
They did this again a second
time, their memory always
tied to its embodiment,
new burials for an old grief.
In a short film I once saw,
ants lifted away the silver
and gold confetti from a party,
making a trail of suns
and moons on the floor.
The filmmaker must have put
something sweet on the circles,
like a painter dabbing
little points of white paint
to give highlights to an eyeball.
Some of the recipes that
a friend keeps making
go so far back in her family
the recipes are like snapshots
of villages and forests,
mountains and falling snow.
Apples and trout rise up
into the night's constellations,
a dark without yellow stars.
What I remember of childhood
sometimes comes down
to the brown refrigerator
in our house. Its chrome
handle was always angry
with static, so that now when
I reach for the doorknob
or the gas pump, the sharp
charge on my fingers is
childhood calling its child back.