Nouns & Verbs

by Campbell McGrath

  to witness, to taste . . . . From the uranium cradle to hear

  hosannas ascend from the ashes of rung bells . . . .

  Adam and Eve: 1969

  “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” is everywhere that year,

  humming from the radio of the old blue Chevy

  at the brand-new drive-thru bank off Metzerott Road where

  you’d get a purple lollipop from the lady if you were lucky.

  And then Otis Redding died in the plane wreck,

  or he already had, and that knowledge is bared to a child’s scrutiny,

  and the keen of it enhances the soundtrack,

  grief and joy, each a movement, each a groove, each

  a tone to be borne and abided, rueful and honey-struck

  as the untroubled melancholy of his voice.

  And then the assassination of Martin Luther King,

  first glimmer of the ways in which

  the melody’s ampersand ensnares us, first inkling

  of the intertwined harmony of self and society,

  call and response, part and counterpart sung

  in the choral grandiloquence of the common polity

  while the grave-robbers torching oblivion

  comment more eloquently than any thin-tied anchor on TV,

  my father’s commute to the city dogged by the contagion

  of Georgia Avenue storefronts looted to cinders.

  And then my best friend’s father sent off to Vietnam—

  we were still, marginally, military; Sunday dinner

  at the Officers’ Club—and the inverse celebration

  when my uncle Billy pulled a lucky draft number.

  He was my favorite babysitter, ballplayer, the one

  who took me to the drive-in to see

  the double feature that poured a mythological foundation

  for my adolescence—The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,

  followed by One Million Years B.C.

  Clint Eastwood and Raquel Welch as Adam and Eve,

  ideal gender models, everything we desired and desired to be.

  How could I have known the years it takes to unlearn

  certain lessons, singing “Sugar, Sugar” with the Archies

  in the backseat while the honeycomb of our innocence burned

  in the streets, everything we would inherit

  cast and scorified in the crucible of those years?

  How could I tell what was real from what was not?

  When Raquel pawed her caveman I smiled,

  when Clint said draw I shot.

  Iowa: 1983

  First trip alone across the country: a dream of driving

  through driving rain in Iowa, sodden Iowa,

  miles of drenched earth passed through in the gloaming,

  roads of pickup trucks, hogpens, corn bins, silos,

  a grocery where I stop for apples and white bread,

  streetlights reflected on asphalt and dented iron,

  on a bright orange Subaru I acknowledge with a nod

  as I acknowledge myself, behind the wheel,

  Woody Guthrie and the Ramones, the open road,

  all that, the scope of the world, its gravity and zeal

  beyond rain-wet windows, its diverse

  and circumstantial passage, even the familiar become unreal

  in light of that unscrolling: taste of liverwurst

  and sweet-pickle sandwiches; tears of a woman

  on a pay phone beside a piebald horse

  in some city flashing past, gone,

  perhaps Cedar Rapids; atavistic vision of deepest greenness,

  the summoning sheen and wavelength of the corn,

  as if the kernels radiated an oceanic luminescence

  the husks worked to cocoon and sequester

  back into the dark. Of course it was

  all much stranger than that, richer and sadder

  in its unique and particular word-defying actuality

  than my familiar penciled grid of sequential semesters.

  Different how, in what way? I can’t say.

  I mean that it is unsayable, a string of precious shells

  or trading beads—cow, brook, hay—

  not the coinage of names but the things themselves,

  their totality, their scale and dimension,

  the knowledge that there are spheres and levels

  one has never conceived: so this is what the rain

  feels like in Iowa, in California; this is another way,

  another state, another life, another vision.

  And then what? What to equal that revelatory awe?

  Elizabeth’s beauty like an exhibition

  of blown-glass roses, her heart’s raw glory,

  the birth of our children,

  that great awakening, leaving the hospital

  our first morning together like a vestal procession

  passing from the lobby into the lightfall

  of a pure blue Chicago spring

  as if crossing some threshold of universal

  import, powered by mysterious agency, a door opening

  silently as the future opens its automatic portal

  before us, second by second, invisible and astonishing.

  My son is born and I am no longer immortal.

  The ring shall be closed, the cycle fulfilled.

  I am bound over, as in a fairy tale,

  to the will of time, pledged to this world

  by an oath of fearful enchantment.

  Pledged. Promised. Bound over. Beguiled.

  Everybody Knows John Lennon Is Dead: 2004

  Seated on the avenue eating almond ice cream beneath the orange trees

  the Andalusian heat seems at last to have lessened, or

  at least there is a breeze to squall the dusty citrus leaves

  along the cobbled alleyways as a mélange of ambient music emerges

  from the barrio—Eurodisco, Hendrix and the Beatles,

  flamenco guitar. A kid on a Vespa hops the curb to deliver

  a serrano ham to the bar across the street,

  joint of a pig wrapped in muslin carried crosstown

  on his shoulder. Nice to know they still resist our microbial foibles,

  our fetish with sterility, though there are clearly some

  exotic new strains of growth in Sevilla’s petri dish.

  You can tell how much has changed by the Germans begowned

  in halter tops and spandex shorts milling in fiendish

  prolixity around a cathedral that resembles a reticulated spider

  escaped from some dank cage of the Iberian Dark Age. As if

  every least rain droplet of the future were not equally and altogether

  new, alike as minted coins or the waters of the fountain before La Giralda

  toward which even now the carriage horses stare in mute desire.

  Strange the way one’s life comes to seem a historical diorama,

  looking back as from rocky peaks across golden valleys

  where regiments of moonlit sunflowers lay siege to the Alhambra.

  Sometimes, in the childhood of a now past century,

  my family would forgo dinner to banquet on banana splits

  at the old Gifford’s ice cream parlor out the parkway,

  with the ornate water fountain and marble tabletops,

  cloth napkins and fluted silver spoons and formal glassware,

  as here, though this, however reminiscent, is not

  American ice cream. You can tell by the intensity of flavor,

  the almondness of the almond, as you can tell from the woven rubber

  chairs that this is not my long-gone suburbia, or any American anywhere,

  though it could perhaps be Rome, thirty years ago, when the street vendors

  hawked necklaces of hammered iron nails wired to leather thongs

  and those clickety-clackety plastic bolas in the floodlights along the Tiber,


  a city of bridges and diesel fumes and casual decay, like this one,

  though you can tell it isn’t Rome by the scent of rotten citrus in the air,

  and the muzzled shadows of Moorish arches, and the wine is wrong,

  and though it is always childhood for somebody, somewhere,

  it certainly isn’t mine—you can tell because the boys

  are drawing aliens on the place mats with sugar-crystal hair,

  still moving forward, not yet dreaming in reverse,

  trafficking in a brotherhood that promises never to end,

  and when “Strawberry Fields” fades down to street noise,

  Jackson asks, Which Beatle sings that one, Dad?

  And Sam says, John Lennon.

  And Jackson says, Idiot—everybody knows John Lennon is dead.

  Capitalist Poem #57

  Like a sailor practicing knots in the darkness,

  like a warrior sharpening his blade in the lull of battle,

  like a blind man searching out the figure of a sleeping lover

  the mind surges and eddies

  through the concourses of the terminal

  with its way stations and concessions

  of bottled water sandwiches,

  dot.com billboards trumpeting instant riches,

  another gourmet coffee at the cappuccino bar,

  grande decaf half-skim latte,

  seeking to delimit its appetites and hungers,

  as even Money magazine wonders

  how much is enough?

  Like one returned home after years of hard travel

  I call out in greeting to my familiars—

  Avarice, trusted and faithful retainer,

  Extravagance, mi compañero,

  Greed, my old friend, my bodyguard, my brother.

  The Manatee

  Deep sunk in the dreamtime of his terminal coma,

  the manatee persists like a vegetative outpatient,

  victim of the whirling propellers of impatience

  and a buoyantly bovine quiescence gone nova.

  Dream deep, brother. Dream long and deep, sister sea cow.

  May millennia of soft tides and sea grass sustain thy sleep

  across the dark ages of extinction. May your memory keep

  heavy the hearts and hulls of your inheritors. Us, for now.

  Storm Valediction

  That sound is the thrashing of paper lanterns against the eaves.

  Vessels frail as bodies lit with incandescent blood,

  what else but that to survive the storm? What else could there be

  to hold back the darkening rain of the city, empathy

  like an opal, sorrow like a shriveled raisin

  in the dust beneath the stove

  but still a raisin. Pockets of odd coins, lint

  to speak for transience and the rusted metal of fallen leaves,

  paper cups with pastel scrimshaw elephants or diamonds, whatever

  yolk the dawn subscribes for our delectation,

  whatever throne the night sees fit to claim from the angels.

  Difficult, difficult. All of it, any of it—

  schoolgirls, vendors of sunglasses, businessmen

  trembling their woes toward destiny and sleep—to feel it

  or perish in the wicks of unlit candles,

  to begin again within the inked shells of Easter eggs.

  Steam is rising from grates, a child

  pedals a bicycle through the alleyway of ghosts unafraid.

  Purity, the maw of it, blackbirds and kestrels

  against a sky the color of antique mahjong tiles, color of aspirin

  dissolving in seawater as the sun bursts its amnion

  of tattered clouds like the raw carcass of the heart revealed.

  That sound is the ticking of paper lanterns in the storm.

  Just that. It is hard

  in the radiance of this world to live

  but we live.

  Rock Falls, Illinois

  Now the clouds are pleasure craft and tugboats towing strings of empties across the mighty Mississippi.

  Now we’re singing “Ring of Fire” as we slough past scrap-wood shacks strung high along the levee,

  regiments of willow shoots, phalanxes of cottonwood among the islets and sandy channels,

  backwater mudflats papered in drowned Nilotic reeds with seedpods rattling in empty sockets

  like Babylonian baby toys, like the stork and ibis amulets of ancient Sumerian funerary wands.

  Now the palisades are waving kindled branches in warning. Now the local flocks: crow, duck, grackle.

  Now the night has shed its skin and taken root, alluvial soil two hundred feet deep, black earth overturned

  as the ungainly reapers ratcheting dry stalks to husk-mulch and grain clip through the dusty acres of sheaves.

  Now Patty Loveless is on the radio. Now the annual interstate game with the ritual rival across the river.

  Now squadrons of geese settle to the stubble field, bushels of apples and butternut squash,

  hay bales, clover honey, scarecrows bearing pumpkins and cider to scavenge the empty miles of silos.

  Now the country music station from De Kalb or Clinton begins to falter as we come to the first sure sign of the city,

  road deconstruction, cigarettes and lotto tickets, two-lanes of jackhammered arterial funnel

  to choke the reek of mini-marts and muffler shops back to the long-corrupted aorta.

  Now the mills like skeletons of prehistoric whales in the distance.

  Now the familiar planetary gloom of a pancake house orbiting against ectopic eclipse,

  waiters trundling gurneys of blueberry syrup like doctors delivering a miracle serum

  to the lone patient left alive inside the Belgian waffle ward. Now the old neighborhoods of the millworkers,

  blue-domed churches and backyard shrines, shuttered taverns and Union Halls,

  blocks of wooden bungalows with old-world flags and used car dealers flying patriotic bunting.

  Now the upturned cobbles are cast against the ice machine behind the liquor store.

  Now the country music is lost altogether. Now we too are lost among the mills and foundries collapsing in decay,

  brickyards and crucibles, husks the size of aircraft hangars full of desolate machinery

  like the ruins of ancient siege engines or prized displays at a trade show or ghostly exhibition,

  the Great Hall of Abandoned Dreams. Now the road expires in barbed wire and tangled thickets,

  the bridge a ruin of joists and wishbones in the weeds and broken cinder blocks below,

  the Rock River rife with trash and spoil like an animal slit open by hunters to spill the foam and spoor of its entrails.

  Now the forsaken freight tracks lead nowhere. Now grocery carts are wheeled across the empty lots

  by the hands of invisible shoppers gloved in fallen leaves. Now the clouds are barges full of salt.

  The Fly

  As for the fly I chased around the bathroom with a towel that night, swatting, slapping, thrashing, pounding,

  kicking with one foot the toothbrush cup onto its side, dislodging the tea curtain with a misplaced elbow,

  unable for all my efforts to terminate his gallant loops and arabesques, his beeline dives and fighter-pilot vectorings,

  his stalls and silences, his crafty retreats, his increasingly erratic bursts toward any open corner or avenue of escape,

  behind the toilet, above the shower rod, inside the light wells, disappearing like a magician only to reappear again and again—

  as for the fly, our struggle went on a long time. Too long. It was already after midnight when it began, the house calm,

  everything dark beyond our gladiatorial arena, crazy to bother, ridiculous to carry on, but I was determined to finish it.

  And when he stopped at last, gone for good, the body unseen but certainly dead, pulverized at a blow, squashed and unrecoverable
,

  when that silence was assured I felt certain of a conquest too small to call a triumph but a victory nonetheless.

  And when, the next day, lifting a fresh towel from the bar, he fell to the floor, not dead but irreparably damaged,

  lurching, toppling, lopsided, wing-still, no longer jittering with defiance, no longer challenging fate with desperate brio,

  when I discovered him then everything had changed, and we were no longer fated to deadly opposition,

  no longer entranced by the simplicity of our struggle, and I no longer understood the antagonism of the night before,

  felt entirely alien from it, felt now that it was a perturbing frenzy, a kind of madness that had possessed me.

  Which did not mean that he did not have to die, only that it was not, or not anymore, an act of murder but a cost of war,

  or so I told myself, adorned in the common skin of my kind, naked before the mirror in the exalted light of morning.

  Zeugma

  Zeugma. From the Greek, zeugnynai, to join together; from

  a pair of animals linked at labor;

  yoked oxen. The Greeks, of course, for whom beginnings signified

  better than endings, alpha & omega, for whom

  x was just another letter: xiphoid, xerophagy, xenophobia, xoanon.

  Civilization, perforce, is abecedarian.

  When Xenophon’s hoplites charged the Persians at Cunaxa he

  denied the agency of local gods, mistaking

  vox populi for vox angelica, voice of a suffering populace

  entirely freed of fleshly yoke,

  uplifted in exquisite agony. Such are the costs of transmigration.

  Fish demand ladders, wooden horses

  transhumance, referring to reindeer but apropos in Ilium,

  green-fingered Lydia or Mesopotamia,

  stage for the tidal clash of cultures & languages, ebbs & floods

  hardly unique to Persians & Greeks.

  Recall the illiterate Pizarro against the hummingbird-feathered

  Inca Atahualpa, sun-god & moon-

  queen trampled into Andean dust by a few dozen Spaniards

  jointly with their horses, gunpowder, &

  priestly blessing to sanctify such slaughter in the name of the king of

  kings. Back to Xenophon & the Ten Thousand:

  on the retreat now, following the Tigris, they come to a ruined city,

  Larissa, inhabited by Medes, thought to be

  none other than Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, hippogriffs become