What is available to us?
Simple routines: fault and moments.
Between building and building, dark fogs
drizzle. The world is enormous. Unfathomable salt.
A slug on the path posits its feelers to figure which way
to turn. Some slow work to go forward.
Agnes Martin teetered and retreated.
I’m tracking down less.
The line resting right there.
Again and again. And below it.
After talking death with a friend all morning, what I need
is this truth
that runs through the hiatus, the measured task
the mind makes to move off either side.
Copyright © 2023 by Lauren Camp. This poem appeared in An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023). Used with permission of the author.