Lauren Camp
—
Getting to What I Know
I am desperate to praise the pleached yuccas
on that corner. A red bench and beetles, a labyrinth
moving a thousand arounds. Love, I’ve never looked
at our village this way: past the economics of consoling
low orbit, the strata embroidered, breathless
crevices. I’m so often simply porched beneath mountains
of light. We’ve earned a trip to Lisbon or Chennai
but can’t make ourselves crosscheck the boxes
to get there, can’t quite exit this marbling sun with its languid
pinks and migrations of cranes. Here, everything ghosts
into terrifying lusts and gutting wind; everyone’s
rattled. Juniper pollen, absence. We workhorse for hours
and flippant exhaustion. Pull meat from the grill
then scrub tines till our arms ache. Rinse off the cactus
when rain won’t give its crystals. But four years ago
we flew to the southern stone of the Americas.
Beneath clouds, we said little but folded your mother’s ash
to weather-carved ruins, to a constant that smelled
of elaborate monkeys. The moon was sipping
moist air. We sat with our empty cupped hands. Looked
at salvaged maps to find a next path. Walls, castles,
city buildings, beaches. Crucial rips down the center
showed us direction long as a wing.
Whatever Minus I was Getting Used To
Of course I had reason to come here.
Home had its synonyms of burial.
I was either in cold or in footprint.
These magnified postures help me recall
what it is to be scent-strung in a flirtation of green.
All winter, you were the clockmaker, you were whittling
chair edges and wine bowls as the land opened its seams.
The winds grabbed a hunk of our bed
and gradually spread into long vowels. We fit together,
fended away. Across our three acres, inert
sooty ravens, plucked light.
I got into focus by hauling ecology:
sand, rock, race, grief, dirt. Any weight.
When not that, all I could do was measure
value by fossil, always recruiting a storm.
Remind me to tell you how seeing the first half-moon
glisten over fat mosses when I was exhausted
was such necessary welcome. And the deliberate permission
for raspberries in their ripe excitable segments.
We were walking, five of us, up in the hills.
One told us woodpeckers wrap their tongues
around their brains when they bang on trees.
It was beautiful—innocent and shining,
the slight creek keeping us company.
And we all started imagining… what did we want?
I said, the truest reason, the sun to still love me.
Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press), winner of the American Fiction Award in Poetry. Other honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and The Los Angeles Review, and has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian, and Arabic.
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