Matthew Cariello
The Window
(Union City, NJ, 1961)
1
Then I knew one word,
birthright’s rudiment
uttered in hunger’s warm room.
The sense of me without sense
in total dark, alone.
I would have finished life then,
perfectly happy, but
the room collapsed
and by morning I saw
I lay among the trees
beyond the open frame —
before that
there was no window.
And my word was gone.
Something came creeping
through the burnished leaves —
not me, not hunger, not milk,
not sleep, not warmth.
And I named the thing
the name it gave itself,
the sound it made
just being there,
heard it first time
clear as another’s word.
Deep in the branches of morning,
the memory of birds calling.
2
When she found me clinging
to the screen two stories up,
my mother would swallow her panic,
hold my shoulders tight,
and ask me to say what I saw.
If I knew no names, she pointed
and named for me. And so articulation
was folded in words my mother
first spoke near my face.
Hedge ivy bricks chestnut
alleyway gate trees bucket.
That was them that was the word.
The word was that that was them.
Yet an invisible counterlife
chattered in my ear as she spoke.
Car yes, but car running,
clothesline’s cry, dog’s cough,
sparrows dancing in the ivy.
I heard in rain the downspout’s talk,
traffic lights were trading colors,
birds held up the shining wires,
the hedge was a broken green wall,
cats crept down the alley singing . . .
3
Late afternoons
when the backyard cement
was half in shadow, half
in sun, and broken puddles
of water below were etched
with contradictory houses,
when there were more bricks in a wall
than were possible to count,
when the iron gate’s squeal spoke,
and the sky hid between buildings,
when an airplane’s drone far above
wanted to be something inside me,
I’d sit in the window and sob
until the resonance ebbed,
cradled by my mother
as the large world surged past.
Foundation
Clutter in the vestibule
where steps buckled
and mortar cracked.
I watched my father
crawl into the dark
beneath the stoop
to prop up a failure
in the foundation
with a moment of faith
across the gap —
steel pipe, chicken
wire and cement.
I peered within the space
between holding-up and
breakthrough, learned
the way he’d brace
himself to the tasks
at hand. A muttered
phrase or sigh or
whistle, the tapping
foot, crossed arms,
the sharp echo
and flash and smoke
of a match struck
before his face to meet
the cigarette’s judgment.
At times his patience
cracked, for this work
wasn’t his job of life.
The reluctant hammer slipped,
the trowel gouged when
it should have smoothed,
underpinnings he’d
constructed slipped
and tore. I watched
and learned to watch,
and wait, and rebuild
what had been razed
and razed again.
After three days among
the dust and chiseling,
coughs and scuffs and scrapes
of wet cement,
he emerged white as ash.
Beating dust from
his body, shielding his
eyes against the light,
my father laughed
as he left the dark.
Talk
At times my mother’s tongue
would fix itself.
Away from family,
she’d lose the glottal stop
she’d gotten from the street,
dropped Rs began to rise,
syllables drawn
in sharp spoken clicks.
As if diction marked
sophistication,
she’d make the impression,
and by that fiction shield herself
from other people’s opinion.
It just happened. It wasn’t subtle.
Among half-strangers
or those for whom the language
of protocol is essential,
she’d speak correctly, clearly,
carefully. Sometimes,
she’d surprise herself
with what she said
under such pretensions.
“I think I have to disagree.”
“The sky is certainly
inspirational tonight,
isn’t it?” “What a lovely table.”
This might seem funny.
But when her speech was clipped,
cut-up by antagonists,
those close-cropped consonants
broke new ground. Listeners stopped,
cocked their heads, attention caught.
Birch
I was just out of the city,
not yet in school, the kind of boy
whose knees were always muddy,
who disappeared for hours just
at dusk, who brought home
small things: acorns, stones,
seedpods, feathers, the odd
amphibian. The patch of woods
near the school was my home,
and the meadow beside it too,
filled with high grass that toppled
in autumn like yellow hair
that had been parted by wind.
Once, beside the black-bottomed
drainage ditch that circled
the field, I found a birch.
It was late in the year.
First frost had mown the grass.
No leaf clung to the branch-tips,
or a few that gripped with
desperate yellow devotion.
It was nothing I had ever seen before,
an inadvertent fullness, a moment
of certainty — I wanted to be
that slip of birch at the ditch’s
edge. I knew I could live there near
the lip of flat water that took
leaves back down. I climbed the tree
and as I climbed it bent and kept
bending down the water’s scaffold.
Broken with ripples, my own face
shone in blackish water.
It seemed like rising,
but everything to root must go.
How long I spent on that bent
trunk, I don’t know. But even
now in every birch I see
my initials hacked, the gnarled
stretch of bark that droops
along the cusp of a C,
the heavy bend that caught
my weight and held it
above the deep black ditch
sown with dead leaves.
Matthew Cariello’s book of poems, A Boat That Can Carry Two/Una barca per due, won the 2010 Bordighera Poetry Prize and was published in a bilingual edition in 2011. His stories, poems and reviews have appeared in the following journals (among others): Voices in Italian Americana (VIA), Poet Lore, Artful Dodge, The Evening Street Review, Modern Haiku, The Long Story, The Indiana Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and The Journal. Matthew is currently a senior lecturer in the English department at The Ohio State University in Columbus.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 