Nouns & Verbs

by Campbell McGrath

  who must repopulate the planet, a vaccine in the sacristy,

  a red sea he might have parted against Pharaoh

  in a more familiar role, but it isn’t that easy this time, Moses,

  I mean Chuck, for we have met the enemy and they

  seem more than a little familiar. Surprise! It’s us.

  You and me and Charlton Heston. As climaxes go,

  this is a serviceable, if moralistic, warhorse,

  an invocation of divine reckoning gaveled from on high

  by the supreme arbiter of truth and justice who remains,

  for contractual reasons, off camera. For our purposes

  such traditional iconography is entirely unsuited.

  We must don the body armor of secular materialism

  to probe the minefields of the Age of Relativity,

  though still our animist soul peeks through

  in the totem bulls and bears of Wall Street,

  the buffalo at Fermilab, the mustangs at Las Colinas,

  the way water draws us from the parched interior

  to cluster in postmetropolitan conurbations

  gridlocked at the edge of the Great Lakes and oceans.

  Isn’t this another possible ending, a slam-bang finale

  for the movie our search for existential meaning has become,

  the gathering-together-of-the-folk-on-the-beach,

  a millennial hootenanny of ludic glee, a redemptive conclave

  where the blinds and baffles that divide us wash away

  while the mother ship announces its queenly ascension

  from its secret UFO base beneath the Bermuda Triangle

  with the sis-boom-bah anthem of universal kinship?

  But does anyone remember the words to that chestnut?

  And if we take the sea as our symbol for spiritual longing

  have we reduced the human comedy to a beach party flick,

  spring break in Fort Lauderdale with Frankie and Annette,

  Elvis on board for the making of Fun in Acapulco?

  Is the theme of salvation even faithful to the script?

  Is today’s viewing audience likely to credit the trope

  of an unseen Canaan on a Hollywood backlot

  toward which Chuck Heston would lead us?

  We could close with a medley of our greatest hits,

  Hula-Hoops to Indian bingo, pinball machines and mechanical hearts,

  protest rallies, rocket launches, traffic jams, swap meets.

  But montage is a throwback to the golden age of Tinseltown,

  and we’ve seen those cheesy newsreels a thousand times.

  Our final act should be caged in a more contemporary idiom,

  sure, postmodern, postindustrial, post-Ford, Post Toasties,

  a mise-en-scène more in keeping with the zeitgeist,

  the end-of-the-millennium implication of closure

  which could lead us on a journey to the great hereafter,

  the wild blue yonder, the sweet by-and-by,

  heaven and hell rolled into one brazenly illumined limbo,

  the collective purgatorio of America’s Century,

  where the spirits of the departed compose a fluid societal matrix

  embracing freedom of expression and laissez-faire economics,

  democratic, nonsectarian, centrally air-conditioned,

  lacking only a sense of higher purpose—altruism, civitas,

  the numinous, the sacred—an eternal Las Vegas of the soul,

  complete with keno parlors and fast-food franchises,

  laundromats and mobile homes and glassy office parks,

  a necropolis populated with lonely souls of all descriptions

  drinking 7-Eleven coffee on the way to work,

  a mosaic we could tile with the pearl and ebony tesserae

  of our favorite cultural icons, JFK and LBJ,

  Lucy Ricardo and Charlie Parker, Malcolm X

  teaching self-empowerment at the local community college,

  Speed Racer hunkered down in the grease pit at Jiffy Lube,

  John Belushi playing the slots, Sylvia Plath perambulating Wal-Mart

  for jumbo packs of Pampers, the self-destroying angels,

  we could make a suburb of their deaths: the Blue Deuce Lounge,

  where Hank Williams and Janis Joplin torch a plaintive duet

  while Marilyn and James Dean slow dance in the dark;

  Kerouac’s Bar & Grill; Anne Sexton’s Brake & Muffler;

  Jarrell & O’Hara’s Body Shop and Custom Re-

  Finishing—Jackson Pollock is out back right now

  airbrushing Chinese dragons on a baby-blue conversion van.

  We could borrow that van and cruise the Strip at twilight

  with all the beautiful, lost, 27-year-old rock and rollers,

  Morrison and Hendrix, Buddy Holly and the rest,

  the vomit-choked, the chopper-spavined, the shot-down-in-flames.

  We could drive the linear palm-lined boulevards

  among the immaculate golf courses and planned communities’

  manicured lawns, pastel intaglio wavering at poolside,

  TVs dreaming of snow in the darkened living rooms.

  We could enter the arc-lit freeway slipstream

  and climb the desolate escarpments to the higher desert.

  We could travel for miles before stopping by the side of the road,

  to stretch our legs, and walk out among the Joshua trees

  the suicides are lucky enough to become. At the edge

  of the plateau, before looking down at the city

  sprawled like a uranium nebula in its inhospitable cradle,

  we could pause. We could wait there, hands in pockets,

  engine running, with the veiled fire flooding over the rise to etch,

  among the creosote and sage, a kind of frenzied hieroglyphic,

  the projection of a vast, untranslatable energy

  against the furrows of dust as pale and frangible as ash.

  Guns N’ Roses

  i.m. Tim Dwight, 1958–1994

  Not a mea culpa, not an apology, but an admission:

  there are three minutes in the middle of “Sweet Child O’ Mine”

  that still, for all the chopped cotton of the passing years,

  for all the muddled victories and defeats of a lifetime,

  for all the grief and madness and idiocy of our days,

  slay me, just slay me. They sound like how it felt to be alive

  at that instant, how it was to walk the streets of Manhattan

  in that era of caviar and kill-hungry feedback,

  the Big Apple so candy-coated with moral slush and easy money

  even the corporate heavyweights could fashion no defense

  against decay, all the homeless encamped over cold coffee

  at Dunkin’ Donuts on upper Broadway, even McDonald’s

  become a refugee camp for victims of the unacknowledged war

  fought beneath the giddy banners of corporatization

  as the decade spun down its drain of self-delusion. Where

  do we go, where do we go, where do we go

  now? What a glorious passage, a shimmering bridge

  embodying everything rock and roll aspires to be,

  heroic and violent and joyous and juvenile

  and throbbing with self-importance and percolating

  with melodrama and thrilled and scared by

  its own anthemic power, by the kid-on-a-scooter freedom

  and the hill a lot steeper than it seemed at first glance,

  what the hell, rust never sleeps, live and let die, etc., etc.

  And whenever I hear that song, become, now,

  a classic of the genre, even as it suffuses me with nostalgia

  for those days of malt liquor and BBQ chips,

  it gives me cause to think of Axl Rose in his purgatory

  self-assembled from paranoia and Malibu chaparral
,

  wrestling exotic demons, kickboxing with Jesus,

  binding and gagging his women with duct tape in the closet,

  much the way the heavy metal mentality of the times

  seized and militarized his music, sonic warriors

  blasting “Paradise City” at the Panamanian dictator,

  “Welcome to the Jungle” for the Waco cultists,

  Slash and Axl circling the globe, leveling ancient civilizations

  with power chords and teenage emotions,

  from the Halls of Mentholyptus to the Shores of MTV.

  And if Axl appears almost Nixonian in his anguish,

  at least he is not Kurt Cobain, forsaken and baby-faced

  as J. Michael Pollard in the episode of Lost in Space

  where Penny goes through the mirror to a realm

  of demoniacal toys and that metaphysical bear-monster,

  cousin to the troglodytes that chased Raquel Welch

  up the cavern tree in One Million Years B.C.,

  death in its many B-movie guises, so much gaudier

  than the killers that walked the streets among us,

  the needle and the dollar, the gun and the rose,

  and the last time we saw Tim, at Bruce’s place

  in the Hollywood hills, he recalled the first time

  we’d all hung out together in New York, Halloween, 1985,

  provincial immigrants tossing back bourbon and tequila,

  Tim holding a bundle of Ecstasy for some dealer—

  a drug I’d never even heard of—which instead of trying to market

  he handed around with cavalier generosity,

  packets of powder doused in the tall cans of Colt 45

  we drank as we walked the streets of the Village

  amid the disintegrating drifts and dregs of the parade,

  and finally a midnight show at the Ritz, some L.A. bands

  the girls adored done up in black-light fluorescents,

  dancing and stage-diving, jubilant and hallucinatory,

  getting home somehow on a subway serviced

  by orange-vested trolls before waking to cold sweat

  and hangover candy and a day of recuperation and the desire

  to do it all again. Because there was plenty of time,

  we knew, or thought we knew, or were simply too stupid

  not to know we didn’t know at all, time to waste or kill

  before the crashes and commitments that would doom or save

  or cast us back into the tide pools of the westering continent.

  Tim was still laughing, hauntingly frail, but what I thought

  looking out across the canyon was how badly

  Los Angeles had aged, wanton and careworn,

  like a faded child star sickled with cosmetic surgery scars

  still dreaming of a comeback, still scheming and groveling,

  as if to prove that nothing really dies in America

  but is merely removed from the shelves for repackaging,

  coming back crisper and crunchier, cholesterol-free,

  as even Axl Rose is coming back with Tommy Stinson on bass

  and a sideman wearing a KFC bucket like a Spartan helmet,

  and I wish that I could lay the blame for Axl’s fucked-up life

  on the feral orphanhood of the Pax Atomica,

  the alienation of lives begun with no expectation of completion,

  it would be simpler that way, for all of us,

  but the world did not end in a vortex of toxic fire,

  the flying fortresses have returned from the stratosphere

  and the missiles endure their nightmares mutely in dark silos

  and we have no excuse but the arrogance of power for our narcissism

  and no solace but the merciless amplitude of our din.

  And that was it, the moment had passed,

  another gem or tear for the cut-glass diadem of passing years.

  Someone cranked the music up, someone made a toast

  to the pool lights and glitter. And then the Pixies

  begin some riff-rife, fully surfable rifle shot of a theme song

  announcing the ironic revival of our childhood

  swaggering like Tony the Tiger atop a station wagon

  at an Esso station in 1964, Tony the Tiger

  back from the dead, eldritch and transcendent—

  rise, the immortals!—

  rise to grasp the silver handles

  of the casket in procession before us, Ultraman

  and Astroboy and Mr. Clean and the Man from Glad

  and Josie and the Pussycats

  on the Rose Bowl float with their God

  Bless America batons atwirl

  and then—

  huh—

  cue the horns,

  take it down, break it all apart

  and start from nothing to garb our nakedness

  with sheets of beaten gold,

  cozen us with grieving blossoms,

  anoint us with honey in the dry riverbed,

  and tell me,

  O great devourer,

  O master of thorns and ashes,

  where do we go

  now?

  September 11

  1.

  Morning, stretching sore muscles on the floor by the bed,

  sifting the night’s quota of thoughts, images, tasks,

  half-remembered insights, odd lines of poetry stranded

  by the ebb and flow of the mind. So it is an ocean,

  then, this Sea of Consciousness

  mitigating, filtering, accommodating everything?

  A child’s unfinished alphabet puzzle on the sunporch

  overlooking the reconfigured beach after the hurricane,

  the beyond-dazzling shimmer of light across water.

  Twenty-six letters, a to z, fingerable, adept.

  Is it possible to intuit from these simplistic characters

  Leaves of Grass, the Duino Elegies?

  Who, shown a hydrogen molecule, would envision the sun?

  As from leaf to rain forest, as from ant to biosphere,

  as from a single brick to imagine Manhattan,

  as from a human instant the totality of a life,

  of lives interwoven, families and affiliations,

  the time-trawled nets of societies and cultures.

  So the arc of creativity is an ungrounded rainbow,

  and cause for hope. Why distrust the universe?

  We are engines burning violently toward the silence.

  2.

  Frigate birds in high wind over the inlet, enormous chains

  of the construction cranes rattling like rusty wind chimes,

  current running hard out through the channel,

  schools of quick minnows along the rocks while midstream

  the big fish wait for a meal, silver-gray flashes

  of their torpedoing bodies—tarpon, bluefish, snook.

  Heaps of seaweed on the beach, rim of clouds on the horizon

  to mark the trailing edge of the storm pinwheeling

  north to ravage the Carolinas, while along the jetty

  Cuban fishermen with cruciform tattoos

  are hand-netting baitfish to dump in old roofing buckets

  like needling rain or schools of silver punctuation marks,

  liquid semicolons seething in paratactic contortions,

  prisoners seeking to deny a period to their sentence.

  Surfers by the dozen—this is what they live for,

  the cyclonic surge—waxing their boards,

  paddling out, rising and tumbling.

  Three fish on the sand, Jackson says they are cowfish,

  one still breathing, we throw it back.

  A few other families picking through the flotsam,

  eelgrass, purplish crenellated whelks,

  a brittle-shelled starfish,

  his little polyp feelers probing our palms,

  estrell
a de mar, estrellita,

  butterflies lit by chimerical sunlight on orange-fingered

  sea fern fronds, the smooth black coral trees

  we use as Halloween decorations,

  tubular mangrove seeds, coconuts and buoys,

  blue and yellow tops of soda bottles,

  pink cigarette lighters, a toothbrush, a headless doll.

  3.

  That they were called towers, the irony of that

  ancient fortress word, twin strongholds, twin keeps,

  that they fell and the day was consumed

  in smoke of their ruination, in dust and ashen iota.

  And the next day came and still the towers were fallen.

  That morning I went for a long, aimless walk

  along the beach, listening to Blonde on Blonde,

  watching the sunlight stroke and calibrate the waves

  like the silvery desire in Dylan’s voice

  as the skipped heartbeat cymbals declared closure.

  Later I met the gods emerging from a topaz-faceted sea,

  their long hair flashing in the wind,

  and the gods were beautiful, bold, and young,

  and one called out to me as they arose and came forth.

  Come and see the world we have created

  from your suffering. And I beheld a city

  where blood ran through streets the color of raw liver,

  stench of offal and kerosene and torched flesh,

  tongueless heads impaled on poles and severed limbs

  strung on barbed wire beneath unresting surveillance cameras,

  industrial elevators shuttling bodies to the furnace rooms,

  and speakers blaring incongruous slogans, the tinkle of a toy piano,

  maudlin and inane, and vast movie screens depicting

  the glittering eyeballs of iron-masked giants,

  and beyond the city hills of thorn trees and people in shanties

  talking softly, awaiting their time in the carnage below.

  No, no, laughed the god. That is your world,

  the world we created is here—.

  And I saw rolling hills carpeted in wildflowers,

  tall grasses swaying in the wind,

  no trees, no streams,

  just grass and wind and endless light.

  These fields are watered with human tears.

  4.

  Images of the aftermath: smoke and rubble,

  gothic spire of a wall still standing, ash-white paper

  blizzards of notary calculation like the clay tablets

  of the Sumerians smashed and abandoned.

  They seem, now, already, distant and historicized,

  like Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs—

  the dead sniper at Little Round Top, the Devil’s Den,