5 poems
I Want to Remember Us Suspended
My mother died young and since then I’ve needed prodigious
candles. I’ve housed animals with wild eyes. Walked
cracks of pavement beside impatient spirits and returned home
to a wide window. My father consulted a sign on a bus for the date
of his death and then died years short of that. In my mind,
I keep a repository for all I could have said
before the first chip in his memory. I flew across the country
to watch the wrens. Then music stopped being
my vision. We posted on his wall a feeble atlas and saw states
stacked on top of each other. I yawned sleepy with rational
fear, with taking our time. Was it all our arguments
we were crossing? Yesterday’s sweat collects in corners.
After death there’s a thread that just hangs there. A torn seam
to a background. I believe my mother was a charioteer.
I wear the gold chain they both gave me
when I stand in front of an audience, developing fruit from my words.
What if this is a contract? It dangles, bewildered and reaching.
Moist Evidence and Urges
In my village, cows lay down, color-heavy and postured.
I give my love my mutable body—sometimes weak
to the carrying on, other times swelled to the appetite
of wounds. He begins uncovering, pulling
gentle apart the verbs of my center. What if tracing
the labyrinth from knee to suggestion
to rivered bone isn’t enough?
My village is only a church and a circular road.
The village leader is gathering donations.
All this adobe won’t quit crying its rain. Flailed valley
drags its debris. Many homes have gone to mold.
We live in this wilderness with accents.
The rain lays its behaviors to every inch
of ground. Nearby hills beggar to water and the surface
refuses to hold it. My body tucks up small jottings.
I want—but these days find nothing
with intensity. When I touch my love
with both hands, I can confirm the grindstone
of years. His face is a little bristly, his eyes
tired, but light as a lacemaker.
The Sum of the Divisors
We cannot vanish lonely lonely, rode along.
It’s useful to practice being happy. Find six views. A boy
at a mailbox. In red boots. In the story of the past we can be satisfied
with the first place the pace of that clattery town
where we murmured and ate bread with tottering rain atop it.
Tried new recipes for love which turned out to be each time
the syncopation of glasses or the reversing of stories.
In the morning we rolled over. We returned to each single gesture
and so forth, double
the intimate, all a sudden time. We improvised a future
and our wedding song now reappears
on our sheets. In this how long, in this ending of beginnings, we’ve come
to a land defined by drum by flying, flown, by labor seen
through canyon, by will or family wrong. Previous peak
and its palindrome.
Below this devouring sun, this warning sun, this sun
centered now in unsectioned sky above the dry sugar of cedar.
As if it will work, we needle, we no
one. We less, and we do so while we’re folding in
to air and the important rock
and wild clucks in the shrubs, a passing truck with its expansive long before
and the after. Those patterns. There is so much unnoticed dusk as it quick
zippers us in. The trees wear the land. Imagine
the shapes of the multiple normal and present tense. Raucous fences. Only a moon
chiseled to exist. It unpacks slowly.
When I go outside at night, I am alone
in sky’s canoe, and see one star trembling to find the peripheral ship,
the other side, the world,
see it practicing, getting better—
Must Learn Neither
I had plundered past nervous. A tense Walmart truck clanging the interstate. Smoke
gnawing the face of some mountain. America, aromatic
with ravages. In schism. Sacrificed. I stayed
woke most nights near the door. Occupied with every handle. Four years
my father had gone from corridor to quiver and I mustered my saddle
to get to him often. Four years of crinkled conversing.
Yes, and ginger. I shivered through rooms
of my home in the desert with its stoic astonishments
and took on some needles. I couldn’t settle the ache.
The curt country and my family. Every ache size, every shape.
To reset, I’ve come to the distance, to the ocean. To watch it repeat
how to unfinish. I brought with me a light jacket and a thick book
about Agnes Martin. I’m not sure
why I packed it, what it celebrates, but I know the artist
and her simple lines against excess. Know she made
sacred an emptiness. Maybe I’ll hear thin strands of refuge
apart from the chaos that circles. What I want
is nothing. No meaning, no matter, no more. I’ve run away
with the most fragile questions. Haggard
in a small room big enough for a bed
with its modest blanket. I let my watch doze on the sill.
Minor details hurtle over grasses. A windribbed fence.
The land around me tugs. I don’t know it. Fog covers.
Blank space consumes me. Thirsting, I swallow.
I figure every day I’ll navigate to the tail end of this small town,
unconfined. Full of its translucent leavings.
What I want to figure out
is what could be in the neithers. I am entering
a conversation with Agnes for no reason I yet understand. I am not looking
to rivet to her, but to be extracted
from the sharp cuff of politics, of dementia-tweaked
presence, of the gravity of a future that keeps rolling toward me. How do you recover
from a decisive wound? A line, a line, it never leaves you.
A shallow weight, a selfish wait, a clean house,
an undercut. I will claim it. The ocean keeps rising
to the hip of horizon—what does a line lift? What does it break?
Keep in Touch
These days you only have to hold a toothsome anger. Only have to
hold a shifting fence of people. To stand in the frantic wind
with a day boned to the long
tired lines of the morning. Trains rendezvous
with their stations and the trains
beast and rock to the absolute. You only have to be off them. The buses,
the bridges. Around you, others
and many signs at once. You have the vision
to realize all thresholds are doubled. You already know in one city
boys cut ears off dogs. And that’s how you learn to hunger
for nothing. A sleepy
liminal. You home with the man you adore who can
no longer habit these examples. You map for him shelter
in the winter-slow pace of your bed, then tell him to look away
from what is stimulating.
That man, you want him
to recapture the category of hopeful. My god, you watch
as he builds an inventory with the worst
while you pay your devotion to the unbraiding
sun. A moment clamors over each moment. He says a few words
that feel more like graveyards. (Each time you mean word
you write world
and these days you figure you only have to withhold
the world.) You’ve yelled already. You tell him, don’t disappear. All you need
is to hold to the horse
of a word that means landscape or homestead. A word deep
as a pot of stew on the stove. A word and another
to get to the future. You look onto
the snow which has stopped its messing
around with the sky and left sketchy shapes, a sort of orbit.
Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press), which Publishers Weekly calls a “stirring, original collection.” Her poems and interviews have appeared in Witness, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review and other journals in the US and abroad. Honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com