Nouns & Verbs Read online

  Publisher’s Note

  Rendering poetry in a digital format presents several challenges, just as its many forms continue to challenge the conventions of print. In print, however, a poem takes place within the static confines of a page, hewing as close as possible to the poet’s intent, whether it’s Walt Whitman’s lines stretching to the margin like Route 66, or Robert Creeley’s lines descending the page like a string tie. The printed poem has a physical shape, one defined by the negative space that surrounds it—a space that is crafted by the broken lines of the poem. The line, as vital a formal and critical component of the form of a poem as metaphor, creates rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, tension, and so on.

  Reading poetry on a small device will not always deliver line breaks as the poet intended—with the pressure the horizontal line brings to a poem, rather than the completion of the grammatical unit. The line, intended as a formal and critical component of the form of the poem, has been corrupted by breaking it where it was not meant to break, interrupting a number of important elements of the poetic structure—rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, and so on. It’s a little like a tightrope walker running out of rope before reaching the other side.

  There are limits to what can be done with long lines on digital screens. At some point, a line must break. If it has to break more than once or twice, it is no longer a poetic line, with the integrity that lineation demands. On smaller devices with enlarged type, a line break may not appear where its author intended, interrupting the unit of the line and its importance in the poem’s structure.

  We attempt to accommodate long lines with a hanging indent—similar in fashion to the way Whitman’s lines were treated in books whose margins could not honor his discursive length. On your screen, a long line will break according to the space available, with the remainder of the line wrapping at an indent. This allows readers to retain control over the appearance of text on any device, while also indicating where the author intended the line to break.

  This may not be a perfect solution, as some readers initially may be confused. We have to accept, however, that we are creating poetry e-books in a world that is imperfect for them—and we understand that to some degree the line may be compromised. Despite this, we’ve attempted to protect the integrity of the line, thus allowing readers of poetry to travel fully stocked with the poetry that needs to be with them.

  —Dan Halpern, Publisher

  Dedication

  To Daniel Halpern

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Publisher’s Note

  Dedication

  Preface

  1. New Poems

  Saying No

  Pentatina for Five Vowels

  A Greeting on the Trail

  My Music

  Birds and Trees

  Four Love Poems

  Andromeda

  My Sadness

  Patrimony

  Reading Emily Dickinson at Jiffy Lube

  Saying Goodbye to Paul Walker

  Cryptozoology

  Another Night at Lester’s

  Sleepwork

  The Red Dragonfly: After Shiki

  Four Elegies

  My Moods

  Tools

  Words

  Two Nocturnes

  My Estate

  Releasing the Sherpas

  2. Poems

  The Human Heart

  The Golden Angel Pancake House

  The Orange

  Sugar or Blood

  Capitalist Poem #5

  Sunrise and Moonfall, Rosarito Beach

  Night Travelers

  Sleep

  Where the Water Runs Down

  Books

  Late Spring

  Spicer

  Invitations

  Emily and Walt

  Florida

  California Love Song

  Angels and the Bars of Manhattan

  Ode to a Can of Schaefer Beer

  Poetry and the World

  Girl with Blue Plastic Radio

  Wheel of Fire, the Mojave

  Consciousness

  Smokestacks, Chicago

  The Burning Ship

  The Future

  The Zebra Longwing

  Nights on Planet Earth

  3. Prose Poems

  Sunset, Route 90, Brewster County, Texas

  Plums

  Rifle, Colorado

  West Virginia

  Langdon, North Dakota

  Delphos, Ohio

  A Dove

  The Leatherback

  Squid

  Praia dos Orixás

  Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys

  Philadelphia

  Tabernacle, New Jersey

  Memphis

  Baker, California

  North Carolina

  Manitoba

  Rice & Beans

  American Noise

  Capitalist Poem #25

  Krome Avenue (January 17)

  The Prose Poem

  Dahlias

  The Custodian

  The Gulf

  The Wreck

  Silt, Colorado

  Dawn

  4. An Odyssey of Appetite

  The Genius of Industry

  Almond Blossoms, Rock and Roll, the Past Seen as Burning Fields

  Commodity Fetishism in the White City

  Benediction for the Savior of Orlando

  Nagasaki, Uncle Walt, the Eschatology of America’s Century

  Guns N’ Roses

  September 11

  Shopping for Pomegranates at Wal-Mart on New Year’s Day

  5. Poems

  Woe

  The Key Lime

  Vice President of Pants

  Wild Thing

  Poem That Needs No Introduction

  Poetry and Fiction

  Hemingway Dines on Boiled Shrimp and Beer

  Maizel at Shorty’s in Kendall

  What They Ate

  Capitalist Poem #36

  Ode to Bureaucrats

  Because This Is Florida

  Villanelle

  James Wright, Richard Hugo, the Vanishing Forests of the Pacific Northwest

  Allen Ginsberg

  Pax Atomica Triptych

  Capitalist Poem #57

  The Manatee

  Storm Valediction

  Rock Falls, Illinois

  The Fly

  Zeugma

  Egyptology

  The Toad

  Shrimp Boats, Biloxi

  Then

  Luxury

  Campbell McGrath

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Campbell McGrath

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  Poets may inhabit a realm of words, but they remain closet numerologists. Perhaps it’s a vestigial memory of counting syllables in all those lines of iambic pentameter, but ten seems like a significant number, and so ten books feels like a milepost worth pausing beside, a place to assess, examine, parse, and reassemble. Thus this book, which surveys thirty-five years of writing (the most recent poems were written in 2016, the oldest in 1981), though only eight of my ten previous collections are actually represented here. Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition is a book-length poem that feels complete unto itself, while XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century is too recently published to need revisiting. Longer poems are simply harder to accommodate, and so “The Bob Hope Poem” is represented by only a single section, while works such as “The Florida Poem” and “Dawn Notebook” are absent altogether.

  The mandate of such a collection, as I see it, is to offer a hint of where you are going while charting the territory already e
xplored. Accordingly, the first of this book’s five sections is composed of new poems, written over the past six or seven years, in a variety of shapes and sizes. In the hopes of creating a book that harmonizes with, but does not echo, the originals, I have organized older poems by form rather than chronology: there are two sections of lyric poems, a lengthy set of prose poems, and a sequence of longer poems reconstituted as an episodic personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite,” which explores America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers. If anything has obsessed my creative impulse to date, surely it is this. There is also a scattering of uncollected poems, happy to have found a home at last. Nouns & Verbs is just that, I hope—not a greatest-hits collection but a new house sheltering some familiar residents, a book that stands on its own solid foundation, unbothered by a few termites in its beams or a little rain seeping in around the windows.

  Part One

  New Poems

  Saying No

  No sir, absolutely not, sorry, but no.

  Not sorry, actually—just no.

  Keep it simple, plain vanilla: nope.

  Not happening. Big en, big oh.

  No way, no how.

  Negative, nuh-uh, ixnay, nyet.

  No no, no no.

  No-no-no-no-no-no-no.

  Not likely, not likely. Maybe,

  but I doubt it.

  Possibly, conceivably, in theory.

  Un-huh, mm-hmm. . . .

  Well yeah, sure, okay, why not,

  oh definitely, yes,

  wow, I mean anything,

  anything at all, when can we begin?

  Pentatina for Five Vowels

  Today is a trumpet to set the hounds baying.

  The past is a fox the hunters are flaying.

  Nothing unspoken goes without saying.

  Love’s a casino where lovers risk playing.

  The future’s a marker our hearts are prepaying.

  The future’s a promise there’s no guaranteeing.

  Today is a fire the field mice are fleeing.

  Love is a marriage of feeling and being.

  The past is a mirror for wishful sightseeing.

  Nothing goes missing without absenteeing.

  Nothing gets cloven except by dividing.

  The future is chosen by atoms colliding.

  The past’s an elision forever eliding.

  Today is a fog bank in which I am hiding.

  Love is a burn forever debriding.

  Love’s an ascent forever plateauing.

  Nothing is granted except by bestowing.

  Today is an anthem the cuckoos are crowing.

  The future’s a convolute river onflowing.

  The past is a lawn the neighbor is mowing.

  The past is an answer not worth pursuing.

  Love is only won by wooing.

  The future’s a climax forever ensuing.

  Nothing gets done except by the doing.

  Today is a truce between reaping and ruing.

  A Greeting on the Trail

  Turning fifty, at last I come to understand,

  belatedly, unexpectedly, and quite suddenly,

  that poetry is not going to save anybody’s life,

  least of all my own. Nonetheless I choose to believe

  the journey is not a descent but a climb,

  as when, in a forest of golden-green morning sunlight,

  one sees another hiker on the trail, who calls out,

  Where are you bound, friend, to the valley or the mountaintop?

  Many things—seaweed, pollen, attention—drift.

  News of the universe’s origin infiltrates atom by atom

  the oxygenated envelope of the atmosphere.

  My sense of purpose vectors away on rash currents

  like the buoys I find tossed on the beach after a storm,

  cork bobbers torn from old crab traps.

  And what befalls the woebegotten crabs,

  caged and forgotten at the bottom of the sea?

  Are the labors to which we are summoned by dreams

  so different from the tasks to which sunlight

  enslaves us? One tires of niceties. We sleep now

  surrounded by books, books piled in heaps

  by the bedside, stacked along the walls of the room.

  Let dust accrue on their spines and colophons.

  Let their ragged towers rise and wobble.

  Of course the Chinese poets were familiar with all this,

  T’ao Ch’ien, Hsieh Ling-yün, Po Chü-i,

  masterful sophisticates adopting common accents

  for their nostalgic drinking songs, their laments

  to age and temple ruins and imperial avarice,

  autumn leaves caught in a tumbling stream.

  As the river flows at the urging of gravity, as a flower

  blooms after April rain, we are implements

  of the unseen, always working for someone else.

  The boss is a tall woman in a sky-blue shirt

  or a man with one thumb lost to a crosscut saw

  or science or art or the Emperor, what matter?

  We scrabble within the skin of time

  like mice in the belly of a boa constrictor,

  Jonah within Leviathan, pacing the keel, rib to rib,

  surrounded by the pulse of that enormous, compassionate heart.

  Later we dance in orchards of guava and lychee nuts

  to the shifting registers of distant music,

  a clattering of plates as great fish are lifted from the grill,

  seared black with bitter orange and lemongrass.

  Orchid trees bloom here, Tulip trees and Flame trees,

  but no Idea trees, no trees of Mercy,

  for these are human capacities, human occasions.

  Because it has about it something of the old village magic,

  the crop made to rise by seed of words,

  by spell or incantation—

  because it frightens and humbles us to recall

  our submission to such protocols—

  for this do we fear poetry, for the unresolved darkness

  of the past. Where are you bound, friend,

  on this bright and fruitful morning—to the valley

  or the mountaintop? To the mountaintop.

  My Music

  My music belongs to me and it is awesome.

  My music is way better than your music,

  your music is trash, garbage stench

  of a hot summer night behind the dumpsters at Taco Bell,

  rancid, but I’m there, too, drinking beers

  in the parking lot with the windows down

  and the radio tuned to a baseball game

  we are following as casually

  as the stars’ erratic flight plan—that music

  is my music, all of it, ball game, laughter of friends

  and the crack of frosty six-packs,

  asphalt returning the day’s heat to the sky.

  My music is so much better than your music

  I pity you—almost I would pity you

  if I were not disgusted by your chump-change music.

  My music will beat your music to a pulp.

  My music will turn your music into a car wash

  run by infants—their tiny hands

  can’t even hold the sponges!

  They will never, ever degrease those tire rims!

  Get out of my business with that nightmare

  you call music, with your tears

  and pleading, the whining of excuses—oh, sorry,

  that is your music,

  that crybaby boohoo-ery,

  that blurt, that diminuendo, that waaah,

  that large-ass mess,

  that chicken potpie all pocked with freezer burn,

  that coyote hung from a fence post as a trophy and a caution.

  My music cannot be muted or dimmed,

  it cannot be labeled, disciplined, contained

  by
manicured hedges, my music

  is the untamed wilderness of the soul,

  the rebar that holds up the skyscrapers of your city is my music,

  watch out, your city will crumble to rubble without it,

  but don’t worry, it wasn’t much to begin with,

  that place you called home

  with its measling river, its rusty bridges,

  there’s a carnival in the meadow of the old floodplain,

  cotton candy and whirligig lights and the racket

  rising up from the carousel

  is my music,

  old guys fishing along the breakwater,

  coffee can half-full of fat, wriggling night crawlers—

  that worm-thrum,

  that earth-mouth-echo is my music.

  The trinket in the bottom of the Cracker Jack box is mine,

  the Employee of the Month parking space is mine,

  I am the little golden man on your bowling trophy,

  I am the nickels collected in your old pickle jars,

  I am the U-Haul pulling out of the driveway, leaving

  your town forever—goodbye, Loserville,

  hello, New Hampshire, Alabama, Montana, Texas,

  I am all those places, everywhere

  you ever dreamed of going

  I have been there and pissed on the phone poles already,

  I am the names of all fifty states on your tongue,

  their Olde English nostalgia and Amerindian prolixity

  and majuscule Latinate transliterations rolled together,

  I own the alphabet and the stars in the sky,

  I own the pigeons sleeping beneath the overpasses

  and the shadows of pine trees

  and the corn husks in a paper bag on the porch

  and the ants on the bottle of barbecue sauce,

  ants all over the cupcakes and watermelon wedges,

  huge black carpenter ants and raspberry crazy ants

  and the almost invisible warp-speed ants

  like cartoon swashbucklers of the microsphere,

  the footfall of the ants is my music, oh yes,

  cacophonous, euphonious, that tumult, that mad march,

  louder than circus elephants

  and softer than flowers opening, gentler

  than apple blossoms descending into creek water,

  petals falling—one,

  two,

  three, four.

  Birds and Trees

  I’m tired of not being a great blue whale.

  I’m sick of frills and gossamer ostinatos.