Rick Barot
Marimar
One of the things I know
is that the most beautiful church in the world
is in the Philippines, in the province of Bohol,
in the town of Baclayon. Built in 1727
by Jesuits who must have believed
its jewel-box interior would subdue the natives
into belief, the church still strikes
each of us, jaded and tired from having seen
too much already, with the solemn hunger
that the place is supposed to stir.
The altar’s enormous tableau of saints
is a rococo fantasy now chipping to gold dust,
the walls painted in the pastels
of leaf and shell are now velvety with mildew,
earthquake-cracked into craquelure.
But the floor’s patterned marble is still hard
as faith, and the high clerestory stained glass
still filters light in the primary colors
that might organize a city’s subway lines:
green, blue, yellow, red. Small in this elaborate
radiance, I think of the poor of the parish,
which would have been the whole
parish, in the candlelight of a dawn mass,
in the light before electricity,
before the end of awe. I think of my own
childhood mornings, serious in altar-boy robes,
the smoke from the censer feathering
into my eyes. And, later, the crooked desires
that would smash the devout in me
to filth. Just down the road from the church,
at the tourist-trap zoo that is really
just someone’s grotesque backyard menagerie,
the true attraction is Marimar,
the Jungle Diva advertised on the roadside
billboard. In a bustier not meant
to cover her bits of chest hair, a red mini-skirt,
and a beehive wig stiff as a top hat,
Marimar guides us past the cages of monkeys,
parrots, and snakes, giving us bright facts,
crisp as a flight attendant announcing
safety information. When one of the pythons
died, Marimar tells us, she turned him
into stew. And I can see it: how Marimar looks
at the world each morning and knows
she was meant to eat all of it. I can see
the life within her mirror as she puts it all on:
the primer, the foundation, the concealer,
the powder, the contouring on nose and jawline,
the highlighting on the cheeks and cupid’s
bow, the brow pencil making its
wings, the doe-foot brush of the eyeshadow
applying the light-green shade
that rhymes with the church’s crumbling
paint, the long lashes and the Nefertiti eyeliner,
the camellia-red lipstick, the face
that even the strongest key lighting or tropical
heat cannot mar. I’m a good cook, she says,
finishing the joke, flicking open her black lace fan.
Rick Barot directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2020.