Nouns & Verbs

by Campbell McGrath

  Medean in the wake of serial conquest,

  median point on their march from Babylon toward the hills of Armenia,

  none cheered by that barren vision, dire

  Larissa, omen of defeat, citadel of political impermanence.

  On the next day, great Nineveh, abandoned:

  kings, seneschals, satraps, jesters, fletchers, peltasts, potters,

  priestly & noble classes—vanished con-

  jointly into equitable oblivion, weaver & wool, smith & tool,

  queen & fool. So much for the Assyrians.

  Ink, a luxury, so no texts but wind-scoured stone remain to help us

  recall them, our contemporary ignorance

  hardly less monumental than Xenophon’s self-serving chronicle,

  scene by scene inventing ancient history.

  Green no longer, that Fertile Crescent, mislabeled by an en-

  tranced human stab at metaphoric order.

  Fish into amphibians, logograms into syllabaries, seas into lands

  uplifted in autochthonic agons

  entirely unwitnessed, template free of cartographic correlatives,

  vox barbara or vox nihili, celestial music

  denied in our fury to claim an alphabet forged from the metals of chaos.

  When the ox moves, the plow moves.

  Civilization, perforce, is boustrophedonic: x-y-z; z-y-

  x. Better the blue mud of the Euphrates,

  better the raw ore of belief than these chains of syntax, this

  yoke of definitions. Xoanon:

  a primitive idol resembling the rough block from which it was carved.

  Zeugma: maker & vessel, master & slave.

  Egyptology

  Even in that hour the knowledge

  that our willful titanism cannot save us,

  such prescient constructs no more

  than ribbons time itself has braided

  in our hair, courses of the river in flood

  season after season rewritten

  while bedrock glistens unperturbed.

  Even chiseled, hawsered, sawn into blocks,

  stacked, girdered, engineered, blessed,

  it is no more than a division of spoils,

  partitions of a hive which may yet

  be thrown down from its perch

  and burned in coils of scented smoke,

  moonfall bitten blue and amoral

  across the marmoreal sky

  of a descent beyond reckoning,

  baubles, buried treasure, canopic jars,

  lost process by which we shall know

  no home but eternity, no balm

  but sweet water in the shade of date palms,

  a ringing of earthenware bells,

  small foundries forging ingots of tin,

  oil lamps along the water where

  boys on donkeys proffer cinnamon and figs

  beside the granary of the Pharaoh.

  Because it lives here, within us, has burned

  its fingerprints into the fabric of stars

  unspooled from the spinnerets of time

  the spider, time the jackal, the ass,

  time the healer, the embalmer, the annealer,

  the anointer, the vain and destructive,

  the intransigent, the incorporeal, the just,

  the praiseworthy, the bereaving and bereft—

  always the same, witness and vanishing,

  ransacked, laid bare, scoured, thirsty,

  incorruptible and transformed and always

  the same.

  We cannot touch it, halt it, name it.

  It sails past, wind upon the Nile,

  rowed by whom and bound for what shore?

  The Toad

  In the courtyard of our house there is a fountain

  in the form of a whitewashed dolphin

  leaping from a scalloped, algae-ridden bowl

  in which a rag-eared antler of stag coral sits bleaching.

  The sun here is fierce enough to burn away the water

  in three or four days, and this morning

  I am tasked to fill it again, and to clear the small pump

  of fallen leaves and allamanda blossoms,

  feeling weary, hollowed out, frayed and startled

  enough to drop the watering can with a jolt

  at the tingling signal of an animal presence,

  the sudden awareness of another living creature at hand,

  that sensory aura or electrical field felt

  and recognized by some nerve-kernel of the brain

  undiscarded through all our baroque evolution.

  It is a toad. Big as my fist, cloud-gray,

  its rubbery head emerging from the fountain’s murk

  like a weird, grinning, operatic goblin mask.

  When it blinks the camera lenses of its uncanny eyes

  I can see that they are gold, brilliant and metallic,

  like moon-lander foil hammered over robotic orbs.

  My heart is pounding like a piston,

  like the fine hammer of that goldsmith. It aches

  profoundly as a torn bicep. All week I have been lashed

  and scoured by an ocean of phantoms

  and I am worn smooth as beach glass,

  deeply exhausted, and more

  than a little bit lost.

  Faster and faster our children are disappearing

  into the mist of the future

  even as we shout into our parents’ ears

  to remind them of the past. Do you remember it,

  father? Do you?

  More than ever I lean upon Elizabeth,

  like the clothes of a scarecrow upon its staff.

  My cloak to ward the rain from her skin.

  My hat to fend the sun from her brow.

  My crooked smile to scatter the grackles.

  Do you remember, father?

  Do you remember any of it—

  the steep slate roof on which the trees

  rained down their hoard of summer acorns—

  a green station wagon skating an exit ramp

  into the icy meadow of a clover leaf

  in slow motion, unstoppable, unharmed—

  a picnic by a ruined mill

  where three mountain streams converged—

  where was that place, can you tell me,

  do you remember?

  Yes, I remember—it was long ago, in Italy.

  You were a child and I carried you up the mountain

  and you swam with your brother in the pools

  of melted snow run down from the Alps to the millpond

  past dark hill towns like the dwellings of trolls,

  older than the Romans, much older,

  and I swam beside you in the ice-green water,

  and rested on hot boulders in the sunshine,

  the muscles of my back grew warm as the ropes of a sailboat,

  I was strong, your mother was beautiful,

  we ate bread and cheese where a fig tree

  burdened the soil with its wild, discarded seeds,

  we walked up the stream, collecting stones,

  floating sticks over tiny cataracts,

  we startled a toad from a rock and watched it

  struggle to swim away, paddling its elastic arms

  and bowing its webbed legs against the current

  to hold its place exactly,

  neither moving forward nor slipping back,

  a strange, knobbed, ancient creature,

  like the unlucky prince transformed by an ogre,

  like the king of the mountain in disguise,

  and when we rescued him, exhausted, to the grassy bank,

  what was it he whispered to me alone?

  I am neither prince nor troll

  nor toad

  but time itself.

  Every instant of your existence

  belongs to me

  but I give you this moment as my gift.

  Rem
ember this day, this hour, this very second.

  Guard it well.

  Keep it as I would keep it.

  For when next you see me

  know that I have come to reclaim

  what you have failed to treasure sufficiently.

  Know that my realm is eternal and inhuman.

  Know that I am merciless.

  Know me by my golden eyes.

  Shrimp Boats, Biloxi

  These wings, these lights, this shoal of angels

  sieved against the gulf, gull-bent

  arks of the high dusk

  waters, arm in arm, rippled and linked

  in their slow patrol

  and orbit, the fleet, the nets,

  the numerals

  from which our days evolve,

  wave-battered, moon-betrayed, fluid

  as silk. Still

  the moment

  impends. A father and son

  are trolling the shallows

  for mullet, knee-deep beneath the pillared

  dream of the interstate engineers

  at neap tide. The black-

  jacketed Baptists down from the convention

  center for coffee and fried

  oysters preach amazing

  grace the gospel of life hereafter

  as they distribute

  refrigerator

  magnets, but those who attend

  the keening dorsals

  are none so

  certain, I mean the dolphins’

  jeremiad, milky tiger

  lilies speaking in tongues, wind-shuck

  of the exhausted flocks, oil

  rigs and pelicans and harbor-craft

  on Mobile Bay, shiver

  and rock

  of the voyage out,

  the journey

  in, I mean

  the rage of faith,

  I mean the light-storm, blind

  drunk on the oceanic

  surge, I mean

  the jerks, the shakes, the waves’

  lupercalia,

  the blue seizures

  of noon. Sweet

  sugar of life

  deliver me the means

  to fix, grant me the music,

  the salt, the song. Vast rapture of this world

  bear me with the wings and candles

  of your chosen

  vessels, number me

  among that company,

  raise me high upon your darkening

  harmony. Tide, wind, spirit

  take me up

  in these rags of twilight.

  Then

  What happens then, after the stars explode, after the universe expands to the limits of possibility,

  after the bones of the last animals disappear into the plains, and melt into the dirt, and rise up as corn,

  rise up as grass blowing in the autumn winds that carry the soil back to the sea as the oceans boil away

  and the galaxies recoil into swirling matter, and the earth becomes a single ripple, a single integer in that equation?

  What happens then, how does the story turn out, the social narratives in many languages, the striving cultures,

  new definitions of justice, new plans for a rebuilt city, leaders and followers, a championship season,

  plots and dramas we each have played our small part in, our domestic sentence, our phrase or motif,

  our single character—& or q—whichever shape our being has pressed into the ledger of time?

  What happens after our works have all been forgotten, the paintings lost, the architecture collapsed,

  when the last books have fallen into the sea to be consumed by whales, digested by shrimp and minnows,

  when our music no longer echoes, and lampreys alone read the poetry of humanity in the dim library of the deep?

  What happens after the body fails, after the noise of the blood falls still, the lungs grow stiff,

  after the white bird ascends from the marsh at dawn to escort the soul to the borders of this realm,

  the day, the hour, the moment after—what happens then, what happens then?

  Luxury

  Word-skeins,

  ropes of language, flaxen cordage,

  what luxury to coil its supple circumference

  in spools, rolls, bobbins, reels,

  weaving and looping, knotting, untangling,

  slipping a blade to its fibers—

  instead of history this entitlement,

  this private wonder,

  this poem.

  Campbell McGrath

  Thumbing the road atlas, I imagine that ultimate voyage,

  transcontinental, multinational, taken the long way on the diagonal,

  Florida to Alaska, because there are many Campbells

  but only one McGrath, and it is there, arrow in the heart of the wilderness

  beyond Denali, beyond the cold waters of the Kuskokwim where

  the last and farthest roads give way to ruts and tracks

  across the tundra, snow and distance, a vastness, an emptiness, never-ending.

  Unfathomable road trip. Frigid, Stygian destination.

  And a beginning, here and now, raveled twine humid and umbilical,

  point of embarkation for the labyrinth of the nominal,

  here and now, in hot and floral Campbell, Florida,

  west of Kissimmee, south of Orlando, then north to encounter

  the next most proximal, cleaving the concave condo banana

  and the Marshes of Glynn across Georgia to Savannah,

  and through the piney woods of Caroline, 77 all the way to Wytheville,

  then into the deepest darkest of the wild and wonderful,

  West Virginia, country roads and toothless ancients, carry me home

  to Appalachia, and a trestle over the river to Campbell, Ohio,

  subsumed by Youngstown, cold-rolled corridor of steel and abandonment,

  now west and south, up, up and away, slag and ash supplanted

  by bluegrass, and across the Mississippi at Finley to Campbell, Missouri,

  earthworm spoonhandled in the arms of the flooded muddy,

  not far from Braggadocio, Current View, or Hayti,

  then southwest through Pocahontas, Campbell Station and Arkadelphia,

  Arkansas, bound for the land of Matador and Lone Star,

  asphalt beeline direct for Campbell, kin to Commerce,

  colossus astraddle Route 66, midway betwixt Dallas and Paris,

  then drive all day to get out of Texas, arid and blameless, enough said

  about that sadness, Roswell, Flagstaff, even Las Vegas,

  bitter coagulant blood from a stone, into the vale of borax and bone

  and up the west slope of the Sierra Nevada and down

  again through the ghost towns of gold country,

  north of Yosemite, down to the boundless oasis of the valley,

  silver aqueduct of dreams and fertility, south through Lodi,

  stemming the grapevine from Patterson to San Jose,

  shadow of the Bay and silicon suburbia, sweet, sweet Campbell, California,

  last of the first on that golden coast, that homonymic host,

  lest we forget a slew of sibling claimants, various and variant,

  Campbellsport, Wisconsin, Campbellsville and Campbellsburg, Kentucky,

  and Campbellsburg, Indiana, sister city settled by emigrants

  in a meadow of yarrow and horse-high hay,

  and fields of rusted cars outside Campbellstown, PA,

  and not just townships and municipalities but even the counties,

  as again in Kentucky, heart of the mighty Campbell country,

  and north again, farther north, across the border and all over Canada,

  Campbellton, Campbellford, Campbell’s Bay, the great Campbell River,

  on Vancouver Island, whence carted by orcas across the black waters

  and back to the mainland at Bella Coola, British Columbia,

/>   and up the oily scrim of the Alcan through Vanderhoof and Hazelton,

  Whitehorse where the boom once was, and into Alaska

  to complete the equation, cruising the blacktop on moosewatch to Fairbanks,

  a road of summer gravel through Chatanika to Eureka,

  along the Tanana, and the vast ice artery of the heartless Yukon,

  by ferry to a hardscrabble roadhead of washboard near Ruby,

  through Long Creek down to Poorman, wary animals in the alder scrub

  and smell of rancid chicken blood and vague directions south,

  into the emptiness, toward the headwaters of the primitive Nowitna,

  permafrost spun to mud along the last miles of navigable tirehold,

  thickets of brush and intractable scree, chill of dusk in the embers’ lees,

  constellated ashes, glacial till, light in the distance could be fox fire

  or sign of an early aurora, skirl of tundra and guessed-at ranges,

  snow dragging with it the whiteness of the interior,

  white quadrants of impersonal destiny, beyond any known boundary

  of the geological survey, where the atlas surrenders its horn of hooded inklings

  and mute words are limned in the halo-glimmer of the nameless,

  and the dogs howl in their traces, and the sled path disintegrates

  to chalk-track ellipses . . . . All maps are useless now.

  These final steps must be taken alone, like the ragged first footfalls

  of some yolk and caul hatchling along a wild river,

  in the woods, at the foot of the mountains, in a valley of stars,

  beyond vehicle of the familiar, language or skin,

  in the darkness without and the darkness within.

  There, where the road ends, the real journey begins.

  Acknowledgments

  Poems from American Noise, Spring Comes to Chicago, Road Atlas, Florida Poems, Pax Atomica, Seven Notebooks, and In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys reprinted by permission of the author and Ecco.

  Poems from Capitalism reprinted by permission of the author.

  The new poems in this volume have previously appeared in the following publications, whose editors I thank:

  5 a.m., Arts & Letters, The Atlantic, Colorado Review, Cortland Review, Floating Wolf Quarterly, Jai-Alai Magazine, Kenyon Review, La Presa, Miami Rail, Michigan Quarterly Review, Margie, New England Review, The New Yorker, Pivot, Ploughshares, Plume, Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Salmagundi, South Florida Poetry Journal, Utsanga, and Witness.

  “Saying No” was produced as a limited-edition broadside by Tom Virgin, and “Cryptozoology” was produced as a limited-edition broadside by Andrew Reid, both as part of the Sweat Broadside Collaboration in Miami.