Campbell McGrath

Jane Street

The mind, when it flowers, flowers as strangely 
as the meat markets once blossomed 
with carcasses at sunrise by piers along the Hudson 
before change transformed forever 
that impious parish for which the mind still hungers. 

The heart, when it hungers, hungers for sustenance 
raw as the sinews the meat hooks sliced through 
to hang their carrion flowers in a world 
of golden hours vanishing like the fugitive precincts 
of youth, the Hundred Years War of youth. 

Estuary tides among pilings at dawn, animal blood 
between the cobblestones, time pours itself 
everywhere around us, refracting through clouds 
of pollen, dust and steam until we are 
immersed in the familiar silver of civil twilight. 

So this is the city, these 
its byzantine veils and velocities.
So this is mercy, a river of sirens, one face 
in the window on Jane Street 
yours.

Night and Day

Day is as simple as the body, 
night is like the mind. 
Day is water, night is wine.

Day is a flock of sparrows, 
night is an owl.
Day is a consonant, night is a vowel. 

Night is the sacred cat of the Egyptians,
day is a dog, any old dog.
Night is salt in the day’s wide ocean.
Day is bread, night is fog.

Campbell McGrath is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Nouns & Verbs, Florida Poems, and XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, a Finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. He has received many of America’s major literary prizes for his work, including the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a USA Knight Fellowship, and a Witter-Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. His poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic and on the op-ed page of the New York Times, as well as in scores of literary reviews and quarterlies. He lives with his family in Miami Beach and teaches at Florida International University, where he is the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing and a Distinguished University Professor of English.