Lauren Camp
You make a list of everything around you for 12 days
and have no solution. Truck fumes
prance by. The trees are
pleasant. Nobody
is insisting on anything. Being here is like being a ship
hidden in mist bound for regardless.
You were beside the harbor. It was autumn, the leaves turning,
the leaves falling, the leaves gathered
and dumped in large bins, into a truck. You had enough time
to think about your own lurking. You lurked in something like sadness
or exhaustion though you had no need,
even twice in the full moon beside the closed gate.
Once you meditated, passive. What she said, the woman—
the voice—was easy to follow. You were calm
within the day and the day’s defeat. You thought of the calm
as an edge, then you stopped thinking of it this way
because all consciousness can be edges. The hydrangeas
flapped a little in the wind, dried to a pale pinkish brown
at the building’s corner. You studied
at an upstairs room that looked out
over lawn, then were moved to a basement, a sliver of brick
at the window and a thin-skinned must about it.
One day you were delighted by the bells, the sound
of the heating ducts, the next
you could barely stand the long surgery of time.
Lauren Camp has authored nine books, including Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026) and In Old Sky, which grew from her role as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. She served as New Mexico Poet Laureate. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com
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