To Count All the Prayers of Earth
The map of light moves above our home. Coyotes bark
in the intricate red-densing sumac and the clear
lateral air. I only need to contain the near.
Though every ochre hovers around me, I still settle
on my knees and every day, I see farther
divisions: my friend in her bed with a view
of her month of small days, the constant guns
sorting our country. Each callused gasp
makes more noise. Wind moves either side
through a week of grubby elections. To limit what I feel,
I hand-to-hand dirt. The artemisias curl.
Was transplanting a mistake? I want these roots
to stage ground by the narrow bands of fence
that my love set down with calm while our country
kept gnawing its streets and fisting its faiths.
All this time I’ve been sated. Blessed
from the weeping. Since our first summer,
we have invented what we were learning (mud,
deadwood, storm) in ellipses of rust
and earth, and the next week beckoned,
and the next, and now I lie with knees open
while he divides the iris. Years and years of such secure
wind that sifts and slings. Bees spring again
and the valley tufts with its bewilderment. Listen:
I need what a mouth needs. Salt, sweet, dusk,
devotion. And to push forth every variance of green.
Are my hands only good sunk in the yard?
If so, I will keep dressing for the crows.
Lauren Camp served as the second New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight books of poetry and her next collection will be Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026). Read more.
First published in Apogee (Issue 11)