2 Poems by Lauren Camp
Prognosis
In my end is my beginning.
— T.S. Eliot
My father is all
at once. It is noon and widens
further into another
landscape of feet.
The words he uses are a measure
of the half-point
to silence. We listen
to the mirror on the wall
and my father is bent
down with
grizzle and returning
spaces. My father reminds me
of my father. Father
as conveyance, as legal
document, as night flight, lost
pitch. Next question. For something
to do, we name the body
by streaming daylight:
knee, nerve, stomach. Reason
the tender sound of sun. Name hope
as a pleasantry. We are spending
our time folded
into it, finding
ourselves. We are not
doing nothing. We are planning
the task of letting go
of all thought and my father is root
and tree. I put my hand
on his hand
and build a small
mountain. I haven’t described
his voice. An hour passes again.
A sound not said. A negative
ghost. A rain
unbuckles the leaves.
Perhaps we’ll look
in the mirror and see
what just happened—
what I mean
is, the future.
Stay Into
Not the absence of sky but the sudden
work of life: lance or ash, shovel,
notch or wince, I begin
inside myself to sing a prayer
for nourishment a feat
of the spirits I was taught one summer
at a wooden table, a knot
of bread, the euphony
of childhood I memorized
those unwrapped syllables rolling
immersion over years the words
have gone
I take to rhapsodic humming it was
never bounty
but simplicity
a time spun to habit ordinary
inclination a sort of fantasy
god I adored that childhood
those colors I made from my breathing
even the dimly, the stubborn farthest pitches
all this time I’ve kept
on the lip that ancient song map the divine
worn smooth between devourings.
Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press), which Publishers Weekly calls a “stirring, original collection.” 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
[…] This was originally posted on The Los Angeles Review. […]