Five Poems by Matthew Rettino

 

Stupid Movies

 

 

Watching the four-poster curtains of the beach huts 

fluttering in the lens-flared, Miami breeze 

was the last time I sat with my grandfather. 

 

He complained about 15-minute commercial breaks, 

A bony gnome sitting on his EZ chair. 

Now whenever I walk that beach, the lens flare cuts my shades 

and I weep for a mystery no Horatio can solve. 

 

The feeling passes beneath my ennui like a blade. 

Laughter can only dyke the waters so long. 

 

Was watching Pirates the last memory you had 

of your grandmother, lost soul, repeating herself? 

 

Or maybe it was your dad and The Fast & The Furious 

and you always tear up at the barbecue scene. 

 

We may wish for Dawn Treader’s wistful notion 

of a talking rodent ferrying across the ocean, 

but with our luck, in my opinion, 

we’ll die after watching Jurassic World: Dominion.

 

 

The Ineffable Beta

 

 

From bucket to crimp glides the Climber; 

the deity carries the Universe on his biner, 

scaling the granite of Time and Salvation 

above a drop into Death and Oblivion. 

 

At the end of time, they say, he’ll top out 

or slip and fall, pumped out, 

sin building like acid in his fingers. 

Til then, let us take comfort, O passengers: 

 

in this communion of beef jerky and muesli, 

He is direction, order, and teleology. 

Whether our nylon fate grows tighter or slacker, 

a binding friction tethers us to our anchor. 

 

He scales over and under, alpha to omega. 

Trust the workout; don’t question the Beta.

 

 

Saint Francis of the Amazon

 

 

Mist obscures the banana  

palm windows 

and vine inlays 

feed off the fan vaults. 

Parrots judge from aloft gargoyles. 

 

We signed a pact too quickly 

with dice-rolling nature.  

Sombre hues beneath the canopy, 

hide carved apostles 

while capybaras 

drowse below the portal. 

Only the ark’s spire oversees 

the English hills of leaves. 

 

A humming bird  

suckling at a bellflower 

sips a sterile nectar. 

 

A colony of canaries 

in an upper loft. 

Volcanic stone drips guano. 

The nave whistles 

with the choir of Saint Francis. 

 

Moss carpets the altar. 

Dripstones measure the falling of years. 

One day we will we return.

 

 

 

Dendrochronology

 

 

From inception centre to edge of bark, 

they marked the progress of the science 

that led to its discovery, its unclothing: 

they sawed the stump of an elderly sequoia. 

 

A course of years leading to our understanding. 

 

Others traced the cycle of revolutions. 

Societies and artefacts grew more complex 

theories more verbose, as the circumference 

widened into our present consciousness. 

 

But the tree bears its own markings. 

 

A knot of rings like pressed strings 

show the cave that once housed a woodpecker: 

ecotopography, as if the tree could map

itself. Factories and rail, 

scorches that darken the outer layers. 

Earlier, a bucolic core. 

 

A tree does not lie 

unless it is felled. 

 

Thin slow years in the time of Darwin 

 

tell the story of a famine.

 

 

Back Home

 

 

Rain showers the bus stands, 

the cigarette smoke 

wafts from asphalt cracks.

Matthew Rettino is a poet and speculative fiction author from Montreal who reads at the Accent Open Mic. His poetry has appeared before in Lantern Magazine, Scrivener Creative Review, The Veg, and Steps Magazine. His fiction has appeared in NewMyths.com and 600 Second Saga.