Two Poems by Lauren Camp

Equidistant

On the road to the bay a deer charges head down to the fragment of shoulder through scrub. The water fails in its austerity every six hours and has the cheek to return to converse with the grasses and spoor that go on in other seasons whether or not we drag by. The sky unstuffs from earlier versions of gray. I don’t notice it moving, its weight guiding us. The woman I’m with, a novelist, keeps track of our miles. The scene hides what it can’t tell, she says as we catch a path nearly cupped by the many moist weeks before. Grudged fog. Around us, the tufts of eager shrubs. We arc along a trail hardly wide as a waist, close to the hawks. Everything’s fine. I am barely touching the barren and no matter where I am I can see far to the center.

At the Mayo Clinic

Even where people claw to an edge, there is a way to watch distance and witness a foothold. I’m a lucky one. Not sick. Over polished linoleum I’m taken through hallways to a monitor that shows one corner of what lives high on this building: a mama falcon fountained by wind on its scrape with her clutch. Spiraling pines. The next morning I watch only a scant smear of nest and unhooked dust. Around me, diagnosis and unsturdy last moments, wounds and trouble. Day after day patients fold round to watch the screen for fledglings’ throats. Shy feathers or even not much but winnow. The sky is a stark hole to a home with mouthfuls of reaching need. To be not alone, we continue to look, to be not only bodies of cords and tubes. A slight flap, some moving black matter, and all lives are a test, unknowable, the hope of a flight.

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Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020), which Publishers Weekly calls a “stirring, original collection.” Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Witness, Poet Lore, and other journals. Honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic.