Matthew Cariello
Matt Cariello’s most recent book, The Empty Field, was published in 2022 by Red Moon Press. His first two collections of poems, A Boat That Can Carry Two and Talk were published by Bordighera Press. He’s had stories, poems, haiku, and reviews published in Bennington Review, Voices in Italian Americana, Poet Lore, Ovunque Siamo, Evening Street Review, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, The Long Story, Indiana Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Italian Americana, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Typehouse, and The Journal. He’s currently a senior lecturer in the English department at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. https://www.matthewmcariello.com/
Smoke
Every thing is known by the red thread of being.
The leaves sing spring, already bending
in the breeze that won’t last, tempering
winter among the frozen roads home, expecting
the next season already, even while blooming.
What’s beyond the first love, or lust, or false love,
remembered in winter’s frame? That long
walk home in frozen stillness, tasting her lips,
the songs that played still playing – it hits you:
it never stopped starting, was always ending.
This is how Vincent left his life behind.
This is what I’ve been saying all along.
Imagine bees and blossoming wood smoke –
bees circling woodsmoke circling bees.
At the “Van Gogh in Arles” Exhibition, 1984
The crowds milled the labyrinth looking
for a sign or symbol of their decision to look.
And I wandered as if it were a revelation
which drew us together in a sense
of anticipation and helplessness.
See the imbrications of straw and grass
spun around the slenderest saffron twigs?
May those delicate broken branches bend
slowly to the ground beneath my weight, may
(the patchwork of corn and wheat, brush strokes
of a man in a hurry, a ruptured geometry,
stone walls punctuated with red dots (flowers?)
two low clouds fade left to right from white
to blue, so they never touch) may they lift me up.
