Audio: Read by the author.
Everything is alive, everything is shimmering
with vitality—the tomato rootlings
in their fragile sheaths
of soil, oil-colored worms in leaf mulch,
pollen from the burst-open, canoe-shaped pods
of the royal palms caught in the first
imperious shafts of sunlight
rising from the sea.
One flower resembles a puff of red lint,
another resembles a pig’s ear,
every petal, in this light, painted with deep lucid
particularity. Seconds flare like fireflies
in a summer meadow
though they are illusory, time is
not a meadow but an ocean to be swum
endlessly by starlight. Days die
and so do we,
banal, tedious, futile to protest
yet still we argue, as if
death were a rental-car agreement
whose stipulations might be recalculated
by a helpful service representative.
Most days this silvery half-light is enough
to nourish the fledglings skyward,
to charge the battery
of the heart. And later
night will whisper
encouragements in a language
nobody really understands,
no drama or falsity, just the moon above
the Mercy Supermarket
and the city beating its heart for the numberless,
the unknowable, the unnamed.
Who’s with me on Biscayne Boulevard tonight?
Who else is in the market for a pint
of papaya juice, a scruple of compassion?
Would it help if we could itemize
every lost or misbegotten soul,
enter every name in a vellum registry?
Would it summarize my life
to list every object
I have touched with these two hands?
Yesterday I held for the first time
an infant born two months ago in Chicago
with a tiny glitch
in the long arm of chromosome 17,
the slightest of clerical errors,
one skewed letter in an ever-cascading text,
so how useful
can any catalogue of particulars be?
Why do we even have them—
hands, thumbs,
a heart,
this jawbone I hear click
as the rusty joints
swing open and closed,
like a drawbridge.
I hear the thunk, thunk, thunk
of ideas rebounding like rubber balls
against the sturdy armor
of my skull, ideas tasting of iron
and childhood, like water from a garden hose.
We want so much before it’s taken from us,
objects cry out, the things
of this world, they are magnificent,
they glow—the radiance archive,
everything that shines is in it.
Still, the lemon tree levies a tax upon my soul.
Flowers strike their tiny hammer blows.
The city makes its thousand demands,
the city is a honeycomb
of needs. Stepping over a man
curled like a fetus at the base of a light post
with a sign—i have aids
i am dying
i am hungry please help—
but the man, even if you wanted to help, is asleep,
or unconscious—not dead, surely?—
splayed amidst the overspill from a trash can
of filth and doughnut sacks,
entirely oblivious to the flood
of kids still pouring from the high school
around the corner
on 16th Street, the mind recoils
from their sizzling aura
of sass and young-ram bravado,
their cell phones and cartoon umbrellas and eyes
fixed on a future
that does not contain
this broken man, or you, or anyone
like you. But the man is
real, he is
here
right now,
wrapped in rain, and you
tuck a five-dollar bill beneath his arm
hoping for a measure of mercy
no larger, perhaps, than a coffee cup,
and though he does not move
he begins, as you turn away, to speak—
Thank you, you are a good person,
may God bless you forever.
Dearest god, I thank you
for this blessing,
though I cannot believe in it, or you.
Nonetheless I honor your name
for allowing me tenancy on this, your firmament,
and I accept its provision as my lot.
If sorrow is the sentence
I will serve it.
If pain is your message I receive it.
Leaves are trembling
in an otherwise imperceptible breeze,
I watch their dance of accommodation and delight,
moved by invisible forces.
So, too, do I tremble, so am I moved.
Right now, I tell you
I am listening to something that says
let it go, fear not, rise
along with me
into a sky the color of amethyst and copper dust.
It is not a voice, it is not even a bird,
but I am listening.
I believe it may be the light
itself speaking to me,
because the sun has arrived, robed in gold,
as the sun is continuously arriving
at one horizon only to depart from another—
it is perpetual daybreak, do you see,
it is time’s corolla,
time’s counterweight
to the pendulum of our grief, it is
that all-consuming journey into radiance, the dawn.
Campbell McGrath published the poetry collection “Nouns & Verbs” in 2019. His work also appears in the anthology “What Is Research?,” edited by Peter N. Miller.
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