New Mexico: Lauren Camp
Episode 7 of The Laureate Project
“I’m starting grounded somewhere—grounded in a place, but that’s not necessarily what I’m writing about. It’s just holding me. It’s sort of tethering me so that I can go into whatever I need to go to.”
Like wind witnessing terrain, we journey until we are arrested by that which we cannot help but encounter. And in that encounter, we find some of the many ways to (re)connect with the subtle world around us. In New Mexico, for instance, where Lauren Camp probes what a place can show about sideways entrances into the questions we’re yearning to ask or answers we’re yearning to offer in this, the latest reprise of The Laureate Project.
Exercise in Heart
By Lauren Camp
We’ve had to stop trying and we’ve had to go on.
The path seemed only soft stems, then a landscape—
spacious, partly vandalized. Birds paddled in
with their voluptuous chanting, slashing
our impudent truths. We were moving along
a ridge. Tender, the sun began to embroider
the meager shrubs which were not flaming with petals.
They seemed to have fallen asleep, nodded off
in the fields but hadn’t lain down. A chubby trail
propelled us through the final damp thought
of autumn. Into a quest without speaking
ugly world tensions. No need, after all;
the path sauntered with its geographies
and stony slopes. At one hurried curve,
horses swelled by, faces lined to the prow.
Clop and clop, their purpose; we slid
to the side. The sky in an hour would be
descending in a watermelon lace, quickly wrapping
to a matter of recess, each mountain devouring
the next. Then we’d squint through binoculars at planets.
A quick tilt would show us a halo, a future, a silvery pulse.
Imagine that: whatever we see we can call evidence.
Published in Worn Smooth between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023)
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Featured Music:
"You Make Me Sing" | Many Moons Ago | Courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
"She’s Something" | Esme Cruz | Courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
"Coherent" | Infinity Ripple | Courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
"Torn Apart" | Infinity Ripple | Courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
Wind sounds collected by Lauren Camp
There is something about the light in New Mexico. I once drove the turquoise trail which is basically the back way between Albuquerque and Santa Fe and I got a sense of that.