Campbell McGrath

Trigger Warning

This cultural artifact is composed of language,

a ductile material known to work

dramatic effects upon human behavior.

Hazardous devices herein include

hyperbole, alliteration, and direct address.

The wraith of metaphor haunts these lines.

Similes, like toxic run-off,

have leached into its groundwater.

This is a poem.

Prolonged exposure is certainly dangerous

and potentially lethal: symptoms may include

(but are not limited to) grief and wonder,

ruinous desire, soul-shaking bewilderment,

fine cracks in the foundation of your being

like spring’s fracturing handiwork

at the frozen fringes of a reed-edged lake

or the first, long-awaited signs of rupture

in the chrysalis from which you have struggled,

for so long now, to emerge.

Florida Farewell

1.

If I were a rich and patient man

I would buy up territory

in the Poconos and Blue Ridge Mountains

and wait, as the coastline drowns,

for the people to arrive.

Instead, I’m going down with the ship.

Do not mourn our passing—

Florida has always preferred

panegyric to elegy.

Celebration is among our given names.

Enjoy our little sensualist’s Eden

before it slips away.

Come touch the elephant, come

to ogle, come to gawk,

but try, behind your mirrored smile,

to profit from our demise.

Build on stilts, learn to ski,

find your solace

elsewhere than the sea.

2.

Into the ocean: one step, a dive,

and then:

impact—and then: transition.

What could resemble that

unsanctified baptism? 

Going under

I scream into its otherness,

a howl of relinquishment, pure balm.

Encountering the incommensurable,

swallowed and swaddled,

resisted, reimagined, remade.

Nothing else in my distinctly secular life

ever whispered in my ear

that I was born for any earthly purpose,

nothing else instructs me

that we are destined for communion

with whatever it is the ocean is

or recalls in deepest memory.

3.

Still, there are those days,

the Gulf Stream

strewing its bounty upon the shore,

the color of the Atlantic in that gradient of light,

celadon and bottle glass and amber,

a perfect tincture I will cherish to the end.

Yes, Miami has ruined me

for any place less wastefully sublime,

a future of ecru and muted blues,

but do not weep

for what will be lost, do not add

a single teardrop to the flood.

Don’t bury me in the swamp

as the water table rises

or scatter my ashes across the sea—

let the ocean come to me.