Campbell McGrath (born 1962) is an American poet. He is the author of nine full-length collections of poetry, including Seven Notebooks (Ecco Press, 2008), Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Ecco Press, 2009), and In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (Ecco Press, 2012).
What we’ve relinquished circles, and though we are rarely a center of
These orbits: they trace around us the unbroken figure. –Rilke
THE UNBROKEN FIGURE
Campbell McGrath
Why perpetuate myths about fig leaves and apples
when we ourselves are the garden—
and the serpent’s tongue and the unforgiving god
and the naked bodies we have no choice,
as with the knowledge that would clothe them
in reverent obscurity, but to desire?
What calls us here, what carries us across the threshold
into existence, what breathes life into a handful
of dirt and casts it staggering along the orbit of its fate?
Maybe the sun has a message for me after all,
a message written in silver intaglio
long after the molten gold of midday fades.
I stand abased before its annunciation, this light
that carries itself like a herald from the king,
acknowledging its command to waste nothing,
never to misstrike the chisel,
to make of each rough block some essential shape,
of each page a poem fateful as a star.
Make it beautiful and true, that’s all,
that’s all. I’ve done what I can—
take these words, plant them, and tell me
if an apple tree grows there.