Praise Up a Storm in a landscape not dead we stand with the dead fermenting the sky many syllables of despair the heart follows horizontal in the wet new grass in the low moss where stones slant up and we are doing with or without a man spoke when he spoke it was a first image spreading before rain and after I wasn’t hollow the breath fast his coffin is a door a hall a soft smudge of my father some whispers the rest of my life bending sideways because silence will thick chipped and sleep there but right now rain with its impatient entrance soaks us all goes on down and nowhere arrow and frame we are standing the slope in our black garments soaked from the half-shut sky just those minutes after the trumpet crackles and every sentence is full of shoes and sludge as the box lowers to the long hole someone dug an inward hole down and the rain slaps and heaps its straight lines and pink mouth of tears umbrellas flip to tines in the wind shovels lift and we concentrate on packing him into his room of corners and sky it licks us silver the wild gristle of rain we don’t talk rung rain reams in me wringing its remarkable way down like a knife
I Was Young Once, the Clock Constant and Rousing Loudly its Rapture Winter has chiseled to a small crowing. The air, the leaves, are busy departing. I drove here beside three dead deer, along a small river and over a ratcheted bridge. I wasn’t lonely then or for a brief while, furrowed. I had driven off to make good use of the sky’s great parlor, to revalue my definition of self. They were repairing the bridge, tarring the road which had wrinkled from many weighty shadows. The place twists below the galaxies’ antechambers. How nightly I stand and study that shiny movement. A dog stays on the porch and appreciates my presence. I can confirm the past didn’t vanish. Birds remain in ceaseless flight. It is a comfort: the hours after the hours mixing into a new sense of seeing. Tonight, as I watch the particular light, I look at how it first strikes everywhere, then shifts to a glinted straying. It bodies a path then quick looses to pink. This is not a halt. The hour uproots in a last enchantment. This is not repetition. The light gives of itself final soft feathers. What I want to tell you is that the ghosts are small and beautiful. They are meant to alter.
Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press). She is the recipient of the Dorset Prize and was a finalist for the Arab American Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Blackbird, Beloit Poetry Journal and elsewhere, and have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com
