Lauren Camp
It all happens in slow motion.
Every person eats and belongs
in their minutes of song and blood and the naked
wind. If there is a welter
of doubt, we figure to keep
to the screen. If one
rants about dirt, another makes an issue
of the dark sign of leaves. The air porched
or frozen. We throw back
concerns about what we’ll do next
until something notches up as it always does
and margin to margin, we repeat
some part of any routine. We prop up our grammar
to ask questions that turn the dark home.
It’s not that I mind kneeling
into each bend of the future
for a theory of how to adapt,
it’s that now we talk
only of the center
of doors. A century ago
there were twenty-three
unsolvable problems
and men who cinched in and studied
obedient until they knew
with deliberate skill what needed
to be known. Look at us today. We feel only
the smallest logic. My god,
we can’t figure anything but what to exclude.
Lauren Camp is the poet laureate of New Mexico. Her most recent book is Took House. Read more about her at her website.