Magnapoets Free Verse and Form: The Faith of the Poetby David Matthews

This night is a darkness, a ruin,
A boneyard of projects and possibility
Come to nothing, a wreck of years
That claws at my impoverished spirit.
The dawn is but a rumor,
And I have little inclination to go on.

I have taken refuge in beauty
And found solace there —
In a coffee joint or a tavern
Where the air is thick with
A poetry of hope,
Rich with the dregs of despair
And the ashes of love betrayed,
Witness to desire

Fierce enough to haunt the dream
Of the lovely María Carlotta
Who with a bottle of decent red wine,
A thin blue shawl,
And a cigarette to warm her
Inhabits a café table
In the hip district of Reykjavík
Through days of winter night,

While I wait for the sun
To shine in my head again.
I have known beauty,
And while I know too little of beauty now
At this particular moment of things,
I trust in the memory of what has been
And the rhetoric of what may yet come to pass,
This carousel of verses flung
Across the tender night
Punctuated by cups of espresso
Dark and bitter
As the women who find
Their way into my heart.

The snow falls with a flavor of tears
That sweep across the boulevards and avenues
That lead to museums
Whose cellos and violins haunt us in our despair
While our own tears sink into the black earth
Outside the window where I sit
With my pen and my paper
And of course my drink
In a glory of wasted time and goofing off
Truly at the heart of a poet’s occupation,
Awaiting the lovely María Carlotta
Who will reward this foolish abundance of hope
I cherish in my heart,
The lovely María Carlotta,
Who when she brings me a book
Of poems by Pablo Neruda,
Offers without reservation
An eroticism of grace
Born in the deeps of her eyes
And softness of her breasts.