Lia Purpura, Parasol Mushroom (detail), featured in AGNI 102
Consciousness
An obsessive compulsion, a ring of keys,
a sequence of numerals to roll the tumblers
and open the golden vault, a web, a blizzard,
a stochastic equation to generate song.
It goes on. There is no satiety mechanism
in the market system, in the agora of thought.
We cannot bloom, cannot flower,
cannot crystallize into coal or diamond
or disassemble ourselves into pure melody.
Alone in the ruined observatory we stand
surrounded by astral bodies, glittering
milk-folds of star creation we stutter to name
but still we cannot burn our fingerprints
into the void. Into. The. Saints of it, myths of it,
cloister, waterwheel, winged lion, myrrh.
Knots of olive wood in a beached rowboat
over which to roast the tiny silver fish
delicious with salt and lemon. Marooned, then,
but well fed on the substance of this world.
And still forsaken. And still hungry.
Campbell McGrath
Campbell McGrath is the author of twelve books of poetry, among them Fever of Unknown Origin (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023) and XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century (Ecco Press, 2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, the op-ed page of The New York Times, and over seventy-five anthologies. McGrath has received the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a USA Knight Fellowship, and a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. He teaches at Florida International University, where he is the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing and a Distinguished University Professor of English. (updated 4/2026)