Scenes                              

Today, I walk the arroyo

with a friend in suede shoes, each turn contingent on sticks.

Stubborn, stubborn, jutting tree limb.

I’m traveling with a jar of moss.

We don’t talk,

the absolute performance of compassion.

Walking through a wreck

of cantankerous

space, proximity, preserved hints, day-old color.

Heavy wind pushes its lack in our faces.

All my life and yet such a long way

to the place I want to be.

But here is this trail and this pace and we’re nearly ghosted

under strict dust, equipped with ourselves

and the past. We will come back

to our logical lives before the light fades.

Lauren Camp is the author of four books, most recently Turquoise Door. Her poems have appeared in Poem-a-Day (from the Academy of American Poets), Nashville Review, The Adroit Journal, Cave Wall, and elsewhere. Camp is the recipient of the Dorset Prize, a Black Earth Institute fellowship, and a finalist citation for the Arab American Book Award. www.laurencamp.com