The Creation of Altruism
The garden has become overrun already
with feverfew caught with rosemary
planted from a scoop off a woman’s garden: medicinals
plot next to yucca, an altar sits in the midst
of trampled grasses, healing spooned
to violence. My friend Colleen, the one
with cancer quietly occupying her body
while she puts in the last teaching terms
at the college, loves yucca, the way light shifts
insistent against it. Cavalier, pointed. The needles
on our plants are constantly
expanding; volunteers press in and jut up. Colleen never smiles
anymore. Not at the garden she’s toiled—dividing,
unearthing. The house she dug
to foundation and under. She hacked out
a wall and put in new windows. That home is not
luxury, but she made the curtains
and satisfactions and roasts. For years
she has wrestled the extraneous
branches, a concrete path. She won’t die
there. Hates that corner she sees
over the twice stolen
television. The series of shootings and desperate
drug deals. She craves
a new home—safe
and pretty, she says, sheepish. She is often lost
inside the pulse of death,
even when we are together eating good cheese. Why
do we resist what we want?
The end comes forward but doesn’t ask
for her yet. Fall is here in the russets and each ache
of wind. How like a blur
what’s about to be missing.
Commonplace Redemption
We are always just east of the breeze
with its lush rash of pollen, its sheaves again pitched
to the latest dead rabbit’s girding
and the landscape where we keep burying
our sorrows in out-of-the-way destinations
while summer spits its siren of heat
on stones that lay in and collar the path.
We curse when the sun guns past the coyote fence
and accents our fair selves. Sky corners list and cast
on greened-up elms, and already I’m busking
for winter, its wandering chill
instead of this flammable self. To be fair, I try
to remember the benefit. At the edge of my calf
a ribbon of bees takes juice
from the throne of some blossoms.
Hummingbirds skin by, mischievous, merry
and am I not joyous watching them close in,
zip around? I am! The holy rhythm of this multiplicity.
Lauren Camp is the author of One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), which won the Dorset Prize and was named a finalist for the Arab American Book Award and the Housatonic Book Award; Turquoise Door (3: A Taos Press, 2018) and two previous collections. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Terrain.org, North American Review and The Account. She lives and teaches in New Mexico. www.laurencamp.com
