Chord

That art should once have been marked

with this delicacy: always only one

of each thing made, so that your poem

has its one life on the sheet

you have chosen for it, or the snapshot

of the birthday party, everything

in the room upended by the children's

jubilation, survives only

in the single defended piece of glass.

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, and received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of The Darker Fall and Want and teaches at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.