New Mexico: Lauren Camp

Lauren Camp is the poet laureate of New Mexico, serving from 2022-2025

Photo: David Camp

Exercise in Heart

We’ve had to stop trying and we’ve had to go on.
The path seemed only soft stems, then a landscape—
spacious, partly vandalized. Birds paddled in
with their voluptuous chanting, slashing
our impudent truths. We were moving along
a ridge. Tender, the sun began to embroider
the meager shrubs which were not flaming with petals.
They seemed to have fallen asleep, nodded off
in the fields but hadn’t lain down. A chubby trail
propelled us through the final damp thought
of autumn. Into a quest without speaking
ugly world tensions. No need, after all;
the path sauntered with its geographies
and stony slopes. At one hurried curve,
horses swelled by, faces lined to the prow.
Clop and clop, their purpose; we slid
to the side. The sky in an hour would be
descending in a watermelon lace, quickly wrapping
to a matter of recess, each mountain devouring
the next. Then we’d squint through binoculars at planets.
A quick tilt would show us a halo, a future, a silvery pulse.
Imagine that: whatever we see we can call evidence.

Published in Worn Smooth between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023)

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New Mexico: Lauren Camp

Exercise in Heart

Matt Hoisch