//Poetry

Matilde Urrutia

by cari | January, 2010

It isn’t simply that you are loved gloriously, or loved beautifully.
But rather that a pitch perfect expression of love for you sounds and sounds,
Rises into the very air.

Though the love itself may fade, I do not know,
The poetry you inspire ascends, ascending
Becomes stars and you, who are so loved,
Look quite infinite up there.

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The Color of Possibility

by cari | December, 2006

The color of dawn is hopeful.
Its bright clarity comes ringing its bell.
With whole universes nested inside,
it sings with promise.  It says, “Anything.”

Then afternoon shambles in, its sun shading into night.
Its heavy golden egg yolk over-medium,
clings to building faces.  The color of days gone by,
days leaving us now as we speak, mourned before their demise,
pre-emptively missed, a longed-for bittersweet taste in our mouths.

The color of afternoon makes me want to call the day back,
relive my whole life, try again for Gatsby’s green light.
Possibility dwindles, unrealized universes close up shop saying,
“We did not happen today.  Choices were made around us.  We remain unlived.
Get home safely.”

Possibility grows one day older and one day older after that.
Changed by the day before and the day before that.
Choices are built up on the shale of prior choices.
A foundation of disposition, genes, history, and the
hopes and fears patinaed with the grime of our passing days.

The color of night rings the closing bell,
a muted dusty sound as though muffled by gauze or fog or great distance.
A cocoon spinning itself out of fresh history,
swaddled in the paths that were preferred over other paths.
The sound and color of doors closing behind you
for the last time turn the lights off.
Every dawn brings new houses with new doors and new lightswitches.

When morning comes, I pause with my hand on that shiny new doorknob,
I fermata on the threshold, eyeing those universes waiting to become.
Expectant, nervous in the wings.  I ring out with possibility, I say
I say, “Anything.”

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Prufrock Meets the Strenuous Briefness

by cari | March, 2005

Yes T S

With your peaches and newspapers, briny
Smoke and dust, billow and roll down city blocks.
You are a sensual one, pertaining to the senses.
Almost every word has its own smell.

Raising dingy shades on a vast continent,
Horses, old women, hypocrisy, anguish
Cigarettes and vacant lots. Smoke and dust
Fill our mouths and

hurry up please

I have learned to care and not to care.
I have learned to sit still.

*

O e e

You’ve written your muscular love poem to a muscular painter
Of angles and eyes.
Of anger and creamy thighs.

I have woken up inside your hair-thin tints of yellow dawn,
I have also drowned in buttery sun poured through
a kitchen window
I have strolled through your women-coloured twilights.
I have also stumbled blindly through pregnant air

You have your flash, your bag of trick y tricks
But when I conjure you, I think not of busy monsters, nor
Of large together coloured instances.
Or even of

tic snow toc.

Instead I think of a little church At peace with nature, a brittle swoon, Then (of solongs and,ashes)

*

You both liked roses and female smells in shuttered rooms.
You both loved Spring best and she loved you back.

hurry up please

Fierce and fragile, angular curves,
You both wrote of churches and rain,
Prayers. Dust alighting like

it’s time

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Love Sung

by cari | September, 2003

This subway is crossing the Williamsburg bridge. I love going above ground, an amusement park ride in space, around the city and the not city. I want to see your face.

Thick sunlight is a hollow gold nostalgia color all over glass steel stone.

I savor you, broken windows, decrepit warehouses, icy blue bursts in rectangular windows bisected over and over.
a fluorescent spew that makes my heart pound with its singular beauty.

Your lights crystallized in a night sky, framed by soft, black air.

I love you light. I love you building. I love you broken down ness. I love you age. I love you dust. I love you life.

I love you electric Brooklyn sky.

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NOM De Plume

by cari | August, 2001

Darling,

Now that you’re Dead they
have their way
with y/our name! so earnestly cor(rupt/rect)
with Words are they

 

(unfaithful revisionist historians 

peek inside
“(y)our” books that are out now.)

All of that fool
ishness? Tolerable while you live(d),
now heaven knows Its Time

up
grow
& be proper. They say they
love y/our work

(but men do lie about love)

andthemonster is so tired of
your Stupid Names and now p
ity them we should, so busy and
unkind.

 

(just conform and we 

won’t speak of it again.
it never happened.)

Some
might say you were made of

(what never happened?
exactly!)

Some
pseudonym you are
no longer (all)owed:

(and as if you haven’t already guessed)

my e.e.everything

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