Property

Lauren Camp

After each lyric drop of rain falls bodiless, shuddering

and rippling to the shoulder of this parched earth.

After this, 

the deep-throated sage, artemisia and juniper slowly lift, 

arranging their scent. 

A desert takes what staggers to it.

The storm landed in unplanted pathways the spiritless 

withered places, transfixed nearly 

to stone, and now the ground

is socked in a blanket of flat-patch goathead.

Winds hiss through, unfinished, to say something we don’t understand. 

What we’ve planted fails under the branchless sky, and the periphery 

of the property is wrapped in fast-formed stickers, a crowded geometry: 

precise, spiteful, yellow, without margins.

Each morning we scoop with trowels.

I had never loved a land enough to want to bend 

and whittle out the dangers, to lift them up by centers, 

needling the soft pads of my fingers where they gaze upward. Enough

that I would sign my name to each spot I clear 

with a drop of blood. 

(stanza break)

My bucket fills with five-sided thorns sprawling like stars.

And in the end, nothing left

but the dead-dry ground— 

again shredded at the effort of pressing water to it.

Jeanne Marie Beaumont is the author of four collections of poetry including Burning of the Three Fires (BOA Editions) and Letters from Limbo (CavanKerry Press). Read more.