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Greed

By Lauren Camp
Poetry•Vol. XXXII No. 1 (Spring 2019)

The world is sharp:
at the bay, a cluster of sandpipers, barefoot.

Down the road, the old church holds
its fluid divine
phenomena and yellow sphere of wallpaper.

Water reaches the dock and suspends for a time
before losing that same fascination.

Oyster shells are stacked in flamboyant white
frilled piles beside a ramp.

Rusty walls and delicate grasses, salt-sprinkled.

In the store, glass jars
with a series of small careful labels.

As usual, it is all salient and there is nothing
quite memorable.

Neglected, and slightly abundant.

***

I care to let go attention.
There’s a quality to disconsolate permission that I dare not

speak: whether we need to amass
what we’ve been introduced to. Unmoored,

a risk, and with kinship. When does want fill
as much as the more narrow need?

Around me overflows green.
I walk to the ferns. See the blackberries fattening up
toward eminence.

Everything I breathe thrown together, acute, co-existing.

***

After days of inchoate gray, days of inveterate windows,
sunlight begins trawling for more places to land.

The bottom of hierarchy. I go looking
for innocence on the coastal
dune prairie. All I know is sanderlings
clipping their beaks
to the water. Down, down.

I envy more traces. In my cottage, I watch many videos.
Want to start over, untangle.
The artist Richard Tuttle sits in a wide room of his lines.
Visible, invisible. Renewal. It is time to make a world.

***

Along cove lines, the mudflats
and channels, a black-
bellied plover is foraging food. Birds on the wharf,
birds at the cloth of the ocean, birds on docked
boats. There is a constant
distance, the hunt, a slight clamoring.

All of this happens.

The bay donates its reverence
to the tall eager grasses and gentles it back out

without thinking, opening bare the inevitable sand.
A thousand times temporary,
a scar, the exact necessity to brim and to empty.
 

Lauren Camp
Lauren Camp is the author of four books. Her poems have been featured in Slice, Poet Lore, The Los Angeles Review and The Cortland Review, among other journals. Her honors include the Dorset Prize and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, and a Black Earth Institute fellowship. She lives and teaches in New Mexico.

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