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In the Night Field
Poetry. Cameron McGill's debut collection of poetry; IN THE NIGHT FIELD; spotlights the effects of its startling artistry; varied discontents; and casual fallibility. These poems chart the complex relationship between mental health and place; the difficult paths home can be lonely and circuitous; the emotional coordinates we map along the way a reminder of those intimate regions that hold and haunt us. These can be isolating passages; but are just as often "I walk further each day toward the strange / austerity my heart makes of reason." Between the attentive; persistent self and the longed-for; absent other arises a fragmented conversation; an exchange that's in a constant state of arrival. As McGill shows us; memories are a corrective; carrying back to us occasions for instruction; reconciliation; or in those astonishing flashes of clarity; what again hopes to be loved.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2021
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April 30, 2021To Boneyard Creek
A sky blue as corpses follows you—
thin ribbon of rock and shoe, beer can and needle.
In Urbana, you’re no more than a tangled skein
at Goodwin and Green. A wet dark belt
threading the waist of my town. Crossing Third
at Healey, limping toward my old high school.
You were always something decrepit in me.
On smokers’ hill, breath spirits ivy through the chain-link fence,
crows in the oak like cold Mission figs,
limbs bending over Lynn, outstretching fingertips.
I keep you around my chest, close to the darkest blood.
I want to say enough. Memory, enough.
~
Would you raise me like fat balloons of summer—
hot-air over Hessel in the eye of a cloud shouting fire?
That seventh birthday, the unfilled piñata.
My friends, their thin bodies
swinging at the gangly dusk. Blindfolded
blank faces,
anonymous reservoirs. Several now
are dead. Their bodies
willows. Their names
petrichor. Their eyes your water in stages
of thaw. I forget what I meant
to say for the ends of their lives.
At school, I could only joke
at the terrible way priests sang in monotone,
remembering every fit held in—my fourth-grade friend
St. Mark, turning red as he laughed silently,
tears streaming his face, upturned to the clean
light of the stained glass. The Stations.
No small divinities, the past.
The bulk of our coverage fell away.
I want everything that has already
gone to return to me,
so I can tell what it meant.
I might be wrong.
~
Let me remember my address, my landline,
the names of my friends’ dead mothers.
My uncles staggering the Boneyard
as scarecrow-clothed wretches.
My mother, sister, and I in the car, father
skulking the miles home on foot after Christmas.
His nights long as drags from discontinued brands.
He moves in the sheet-cake silence,
teeters in snow on the edge of no greatness.
Let me remember subtraction—
the qualities I strike from what is not man in me.
The heart forever saying yes,
floods and moves on.
Floods and moves on. Against the world
I hold a light. We are thin together.
Sit still, it says. Wait, it means.
There is sun on your face;
you haven’t done so wrong.
~
Stucco-white in ecru open fields,
west Champaign, the longwide breaths of avenue.
My room at the south corner of the house,
small wooden desk with drawers
where I kept my moon-foolish notes.
In the yard, spine-straight cypresses
fixed their green hair for school.
My mother on the phone in the kitchen,
her banquets of laughter I ate on the stairs.
There was a fire when I was young,
started by painters in the attic above my room.
We stood on the lawn, long-faced.
Ralph Stanley’s twang through the crumbs of AM.
At the intersection of two dead presidents,
tires whispering onto wet brick. The air
a black-licorice tang of fennel on my tongue.
Dogwoods cotton-white and pink shot hot.
The house looking east from McKinley in the rain,
a blur of streetlamps in place of my birth.
~
Nothing’s good enough.
I return my body to the Boneyard:
Past the drunk’s house where a French horn struggles
with a waltz. The man trying to dissolve
into the old parts of his skill, playing what his ear remembers
the wind makes beautiful again.
Past dogs biting at bees in a construction site
where Burnham Hospital used to stand.
How my grandfather died there shortly after I was born,
and we floated miles together along the creek,
spirits sluiced blue to the sky’s wet culverts.
Past the wing-flutter of someone shaking
out a rug against a wrought iron railing
on the porch of a clapboard house on Green.
The apartment on First Street
where I’d held you from behind in a small room
white with morning sun, and the whole of Illinois
floated like a moth in the light
as you asked me to fill you up, and I wanted to
with everything.
Past men with laudanum tongues
pressed to the deaf wind,
confessing the necessity of flasks.
Shoulders that shrug the runoff from reservoirs.
Pinch of happiness I send to the world,
hoping it returns hungry. I still run against
the question mark of your body.
Whatever prescience comes, I say Okay,
and trace my fingers along its stone.
My slumped Leviathan,
this is where I mistake the cruise ship for the tub.
I spit in the sinew of the city,
drink beer from a paper bag,
piss on the trunk of the tree I felled
whose ribs are stacked against the night.
Whose magnets of greenfire charge the grass.
The slingshot moon. My own voice—
a red twist in the wind,
a thread pulled through sparrow-air.
I name it after myself: Cameron Read, Dreamless,
Church Street, Midnight West Side Park.
I might be wrong.
~
If domum is Latin for home, Champaign is domum
for nothing waits for me. You are ten dreams away,
my only argument, beauty…
and the self… and the father… and the pilot light.
I am the son calving. No matter.
~
Don’t you know memory is the mansion—
I stand alone in its ballroom,
darkness twirls. On the wall, a painting of a field,
and in the field, a woman gathering her dress
by a well. Stones tower into ground.
A basket of wash at her feet.
She is looking towards a river,
eyes wide like the eyes of fish.
~
Where are you, my little light?
On the ripple, on the bridge,
in my dagger-eye of that corner room?
Boneyard, I’ve become the shadow
of all the colors inside you. On the days
I tremble your name behind me, tucked in the folds
of my shirt, beneath the linings of my shoes—
I place you between myself and the world. I am learning
I cannot paint sadness on everything,
it is simply not the truth.
I count the days I’ve been alive—
the days I followed you back home
until you ended, and the days you lit my leaving.
I am from whatever you are.
Dare I say you were enough.
A sky blue as corpses follows you—
thin ribbon of rock and shoe, beer can and needle.
In Urbana, you’re no more than a tangled skein
at Goodwin and Green. A wet dark belt
threading the waist of my town. Crossing Third
at Healey, limping toward my old high school.
You were always something decrepit in me.
On smokers’ hill, breath spirits ivy through the chain-link fence,
crows in the oak like cold Mission figs,
limbs bending over Lynn, outstretching fingertips.
I keep you around my chest, close to the darkest blood.
I want to say enough. Memory, enough.
~
Would you raise me like fat balloons of summer—
hot-air over Hessel in the eye of a cloud shouting fire?
That seventh birthday, the unfilled piñata.
My friends, their thin bodies
swinging at the gangly dusk. Blindfolded
blank faces,
anonymous reservoirs. Several now
are dead. Their bodies
willows. Their names
petrichor. Their eyes your water in stages
of thaw. I forget what I meant
to say for the ends of their lives.
At school, I could only joke
at the terrible way priests sang in monotone,
remembering every fit held in—my fourth-grade friend
St. Mark, turning red as he laughed silently,
tears streaming his face, upturned to the clean
light of the stained glass. The Stations.
No small divinities, the past.
The bulk of our coverage fell away.
I want everything that has already
gone to return to me,
so I can tell what it meant.
I might be wrong.
~
Let me remember my address, my landline,
the names of my friends’ dead mothers.
My uncles staggering the Boneyard
as scarecrow-clothed wretches.
My mother, sister, and I in the car, father
skulking the miles home on foot after Christmas.
His nights long as drags from discontinued brands.
He moves in the sheet-cake silence,
teeters in snow on the edge of no greatness.
Let me remember subtraction—
the qualities I strike from what is not man in me.
The heart forever saying yes,
floods and moves on.
Floods and moves on. Against the world
I hold a light. We are thin together.
Sit still, it says. Wait, it means.
There is sun on your face;
you haven’t done so wrong.
~
Stucco-white in ecru open fields,
west Champaign, the longwide breaths of avenue.
My room at the south corner of the house,
small wooden desk with drawers
where I kept my moon-foolish notes.
In the yard, spine-straight cypresses
fixed their green hair for school.
My mother on the phone in the kitchen,
her banquets of laughter I ate on the stairs.
There was a fire when I was young,
started by painters in the attic above my room.
We stood on the lawn, long-faced.
Ralph Stanley’s twang through the crumbs of AM.
At the intersection of two dead presidents,
tires whispering onto wet brick. The air
a black-licorice tang of fennel on my tongue.
Dogwoods cotton-white and pink shot hot.
The house looking east from McKinley in the rain,
a blur of streetlamps in place of my birth.
~
Nothing’s good enough.
I return my body to the Boneyard:
Past the drunk’s house where a French horn struggles
with a waltz. The man trying to dissolve
into the old parts of his skill, playing what his ear remembers
the wind makes beautiful again.
Past dogs biting at bees in a construction site
where Burnham Hospital used to stand.
How my grandfather died there shortly after I was born,
and we floated miles together along the creek,
spirits sluiced blue to the sky’s wet culverts.
Past the wing-flutter of someone shaking
out a rug against a wrought iron railing
on the porch of a clapboard house on Green.
The apartment on First Street
where I’d held you from behind in a small room
white with morning sun, and the whole of Illinois
floated like a moth in the light
as you asked me to fill you up, and I wanted to
with everything.
Past men with laudanum tongues
pressed to the deaf wind,
confessing the necessity of flasks.
Shoulders that shrug the runoff from reservoirs.
Pinch of happiness I send to the world,
hoping it returns hungry. I still run against
the question mark of your body.
Whatever prescience comes, I say Okay,
and trace my fingers along its stone.
My slumped Leviathan,
this is where I mistake the cruise ship for the tub.
I spit in the sinew of the city,
drink beer from a paper bag,
piss on the trunk of the tree I felled
whose ribs are stacked against the night.
Whose magnets of greenfire charge the grass.
The slingshot moon. My own voice—
a red twist in the wind,
a thread pulled through sparrow-air.
I name it after myself: Cameron Read, Dreamless,
Church Street, Midnight West Side Park.
I might be wrong.
~
If domum is Latin for home, Champaign is domum
for nothing waits for me. You are ten dreams away,
my only argument, beauty…
and the self… and the father… and the pilot light.
I am the son calving. No matter.
~
Don’t you know memory is the mansion—
I stand alone in its ballroom,
darkness twirls. On the wall, a painting of a field,
and in the field, a woman gathering her dress
by a well. Stones tower into ground.
A basket of wash at her feet.
She is looking towards a river,
eyes wide like the eyes of fish.
~
Where are you, my little light?
On the ripple, on the bridge,
in my dagger-eye of that corner room?
Boneyard, I’ve become the shadow
of all the colors inside you. On the days
I tremble your name behind me, tucked in the folds
of my shirt, beneath the linings of my shoes—
I place you between myself and the world. I am learning
I cannot paint sadness on everything,
it is simply not the truth.
I count the days I’ve been alive—
the days I followed you back home
until you ended, and the days you lit my leaving.
I am from whatever you are.
Dare I say you were enough.
May 18, 2021
In this beautiful collection, it’s hard to tell where the body ends and everything else begins. The speaker situates themselves in both real and magical places and it all feels true. What a gorgeous and haunting book.
March 25, 2025
Standouts for me personally are "Meditation on Self and Sleeplessness", "What I Tell Myself", "I Didn't Disappear", "Cruelty Would Possess Me", "William Blake and the Eternals" and of course, "The Orphan".
May 19, 2021
He has such a beautiful way of inventing language.
April 21, 2025
really enjoyed. Sometimes lost. great imagrey and reflexivness of how imagrey relates to the personal
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews