"Lincoln Road"
Click here to listen to Campbell McGrath read this poem.
Browsing, before dinner, at Books & Books, checking out the new poems in the new journals, the vast glass panes thrust against by shoppers and gawkers on Lincoln Road emit a particular cautionary hum as they insist upon delimiting inside from out, tongued and grimed by the fingerless gloves of the homeless, bodies gesturing and melding back into the pyroclastic flow, someone considering black lingerie next door, bedside lamps of Italian design, something sleek to refresh the kitchen—honey,
a silver pasta fork?—
tattooed dance clubbers and waitresses slaloming trays through the crowd, a woman selling jewelry knit from optical fibers lurid as stationary fireworks, pages of a Carioca newspaper turning, foil off a champagne bottle golden against the tile, pink straws, the splash of modest fountains in common space, a baby in green hip-harness staring back at me goggle-eyed, recording it all like the tourists with digital camcorders pre-editing their memories and the ringing of cellphones broadcasting a panegyric of need with whichever hooks and trembles we have chosen in the darkness to answer.
Campbell McGrath's most recent book is Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. A former Guggenheim and MacArthur fellow, he teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
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