Verge
by Lauren Camp
I’ll not go back to counting on shame to propel me
when there are ferries
to future reason. The vessel master knows how to push
to an island and tree limbs nimble green. I got on and pretended
I was not used to clarity. Waves blessed
the boat or they ruined it. Now the days start elsewhere
in parallel and have not been expressed
as a tourniquet of bleeding heat. The only stairs
trace to a loft which is rising not to terrible disaster. I lie
about starting on building
a universe when I’ve crept into
the blankness and only get closer. What a swishy riddle
if for a moment I’ve forgotten my origin, the October
one parent shaped passage
to enthralling America. And wasn’t he safe and aren’t we
history now? I’ve gone to that date for a decade
and congratulate myself each time
its entirety is less about mourning. Little bursts
of what I wanted to let go of
have gone from my mouth—I found them
under the chair, where I’ve also hidden my body.
Times I couldn’t move, couldn’t do more
than let the fan spin short language and chill. The birds
are afloat in a frenzy. Now there is the sun, an eternity.
I began “Verge” during a long spell of not writing. I was absorbed in the New Mexico Epic Poem Project (my Poet Laureate initiative), which meant frequent travel around my state to rural, arts-underserved areas to bring people to poetry and encourage them to trust their own voices. While exhilarated about this work and what resulted, I found it impossible to also compose my own poems.
I typically only start poems when I have something to puzzle or hold, and even though that seemed to be happening often during my journeys, I wasn’t writing any of it down. I was just hurtling from mile to mile, one small town or village to the next.
I was desperate to write poems instead of clear, directed emails, but worried I couldn’t remember how. Because I had been invited to spend a few weeks at Hedgebrook and wanted some material to work with, I did something unusual for me. I wrote—despite the emptiness of mind. Every day for almost a month ahead of going, I sat down at my desk and opened a Word document template I had made. It had nothing on it but a title: “Got Nothing Over Here.” That was, after all, how I felt.
Every day, I typed something under the title where the first line would go. The next day I started another draft. The entries were typically short and insubstantial. I neither revised them nor judged.
These were what I took across with me on the ferry and what I built out later that summer. In the case of “Verge,” “tourniquet” and three or four other words of the original forty-nine remained. I was grateful for those—and for the gentle time to meet my mind in a lush and nourishing place, where I could begin to be less tame and organized. Where I could let anything I wanted to investigate find its way to the page.
Lauren Camp serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently In Old Sky. A former Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park, Camp has received the Dorset Prize and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute. She has been a finalist for the Arab American Book Award, New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, Big Other Book Award, and Adrienne Rich Award. Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.