Five poems by Lauren Camp
Lauren Camp is the author of five books of poetry, including most recently Took House (Tupelo Press). Two new collections — An Eye in Each Square (River River Books) and Worn Smooth between Devourings (NYQ Books) will be published this year. Her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. She is the Poet Laureate of New Mexico. www.laurencamp.com
Made of Glass
I exist in this space between nothing and a loudspeaker
pressing its clacking squalls every quarter hour.
Suddenly, our bodies are tasked to line up and we do
with our bags scarlet or black and other
uncomfortable objects. The plane will tremble us
impatient from chipped mountain
to farm. Perhaps we are not
even here. We flee within, yield to the gaze of
land weighed down. All year I have lived
between one unfurled sleep and the next.
Now we stand, line up to leave. People
are going home or toward
some other potential.
Aposiopesis
whether or not we go past the main fact he hasn’t yet
been able to whether we almost
unpack that eternal fallacy the slope
of an end and we hear the morning bitter
history the back
of opinion the almost
said aloud and the
barely or intercessions whether
stark unsure
we’re bruised to listen
and follow the distance and another
pause and almost alert
curse the meager then in the wake of it
a word bent and awkward the audible
mistakes and several
almosts these days the word acquired never
time for the mind we return
to the skin of an incident
when we’re in it the conversation beaten
we chorus the spindly
answers
he’s removed and we want
almost to talk things
to build a hole of the infinite
drop anything in
Unseeable Vault
The earth revolves. I drive miles up to see
the miles and slabs of ground
that hold fragility. To notice what isn’t
with extreme clarity. Long minutes
raging wind. I watch the stone
longing to fall, longing to stand
upright. Small exercise.
Does it think of existing as a burden?
The day goes on and surrounds me.
A little bridge made of matter tugs across.
The mountains remember spare curves, the sky
blue like a scrape. I stay alone
until the moon gives its familiar and cold
descends. Wide pine for rooftops.
The drive down the same road
biting hard on the past.
Every day desperate stuck seconds,
and landscapes of shelter, and me softly
saying any sound I can make.
Putting my breath into the air which is
anything but sweet now, anything but soft.
A Smaller Share of Wisdom Than the Bees
In the gathering of self, I can’t remember what you know.
I was a daughter of thrift and churning.
Bad habits, misremembered origins.
My mind found this pleasing at various heights.
We had fragments and domestic spit,
acorns and adjacent points of light.
I was never forgiven.
Full as I was of the purpose of now,
I would current downstairs
to life’s pulsing or last removal.
My father kept his sentences in photographs, unopened.
My mother sat within that tornado.
I was a weed holding on to a fable. Was it all honey?
Prayers shaped a binocular I couldn’t see through.
Centuries of begats—and sorries wound tight.
The overall condition I want to describe
is sating, even the desolate morsels
of memory. Suburbs unpicked
with their consecutive days, and we took them
as geometry. I wanted to enter
the witch museum. I grew up
at subways, between God and consent
to resistance; my whole life continued. Just so much
and not more and I saw this as losing
what was greater. Now I’m writing long emails
to the dead beside a window that snores.
I could feel a room in our laughter.
I’m not telling you about love
though that’s what I taste in the dark.
The Day Before
Less was the direction to need.
I had to believe there was light, and I had to be willing
to drive toward it. All want
was to shut up my heart, to rotate to a fresh
absence. How jagged I’d become
since ache could be claimed everywhere
and everywhere. Three days I traveled
to a desolation, a geologic depression, going the limit
toward the rush of rust
and shadow. To leave the world
as I saw it at my back.
So much of the known was a wound.
I went through a plain over five bridges, desire
taking a line to the barren. Because geography is scripture
and blanket, I drove it.
The more remote I went, the more I saw:
an arch of trees calligraphed
with leftover heat, the sky lathering copses,
a said-so shack listing left, left to its lack, the next
plaid plowed field. I rode away from memory
to a vanished place where ravens rehearse hunger
from a precipice and cows survey
fence undulations. The night trailed its stages:
from heavy to nothing,
then strung to a new gush of light.
I wasn’t home and couldn’t
be and didn’t have to be.