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The World I Can’t Remember is Now by Lauren Camp

September 18, 2022
Reading Time: 2 Minutes

My friend has disappeared though he lives

down the road between sweetgrass, updraft and evergreen

in a made house I’ve never seen.

We’re living in a puny monsoon season drenched

with waiting and in starlight totems of sky.

My friend has hunkered down with his four

little dogs’ ceaseless fur.

He tells me by text he discovered “will have left”

is future, present, and past all at once.

Which means I will never be through with the eyeholes

of my top floor West Coast apartment

where the fog whipped limpid and filled with azaleas.

In such atmosphere, my shadow learned

to burrow in disorder. I’ve also left and am likewise

still bent to the fat filthy resin

and liturgy of Manhattan, and the runes and disbound fields

of Montana, those weeks without heroes,

those wrecked weeks I gladly

went no place but the pond, and yes,

I also lean in now and then to the orbit and habit

of Boston where I hung in hounding heat, broken up, shivering.

We are suspended in places

entire and different and home.

What I left was the restless growing, the slippery

wages, each white tread of evening. Left witches,

sieges, drafts and domes. What I left

was my tender body that wanted to punish.

Look how we adjust to such up and leaving.

Though I remember porcelain, soil, less flesh,

I have to reach backward to do so.

I trust my friend who is absent, my friend

who gives me his eye every two years:

making photos of my face like a meadow, tilling my body

for abundant light. I tell him last summer I climbed

the surface of a small mottling in the Organ Mountains but left

all the bones in their places, pressured to earth.

My friend down the road texts many times. Today

is the same as before, and we quick

question nothing and that’s what happens.

I find a book on a shelf and now the rain has begun

and is tilted with promise

but this is the desert which means

by the time I say I felt a drop, it will have left.


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Poetry  / The Weekly

Camp, Lauren
Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press). Honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, Housatonic Book Award and New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Witness, The Common, and Poet Lore, and her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian and Arabic.

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