Beset
by Lauren Camp
My mind knows wisdom is small
as the bird flying curtain to curtain.
Ordinary as the cruelty of the world.
People still dress in their privacies.
A chilled loose sun strews slight purples.
I am lodged in a place
insistent with its absence
of alignment and sometimes I feel good
peering into the gardens
that yield to tendrils.
After the year—so keen-bladed,
repeating disaster as practice—
I intend to loop into the long-layered sound
of an awning. An instant inconsistent
in its lucent ridiculous beauty. The difference
between pause and dismantle is that
I have turned away from that story
to glut my camera with this
passionate bursting. My incremental image
of love is not reshaped in the midst
of this pine-angled space,
but in the unfinished geologic and argument.
I think of everyone who has no idea
what they need.
as the bird flying curtain to curtain.
Ordinary as the cruelty of the world.
People still dress in their privacies.
A chilled loose sun strews slight purples.
I am lodged in a place
insistent with its absence
of alignment and sometimes I feel good
peering into the gardens
that yield to tendrils.
After the year—so keen-bladed,
repeating disaster as practice—
I intend to loop into the long-layered sound
of an awning. An instant inconsistent
in its lucent ridiculous beauty. The difference
between pause and dismantle is that
I have turned away from that story
to glut my camera with this
passionate bursting. My incremental image
of love is not reshaped in the midst
of this pine-angled space,
but in the unfinished geologic and argument.
I think of everyone who has no idea
what they need.
Lauren Camp serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight books, including In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024). Camp has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute, and was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. She is the recipient of a Dorset Prize and finalist for the Arab American Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic, and have appeared in New Ohio Review, Poem-a-Day and Kenyon Review. www.laurencamp.com