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 t…