ODE to TWO

by Lauren Camp

every day lucky that every person is one 

of the two we are glad there aren’t others not even

when the valley enters winter bluster: muck-sludge

& gesture & angular then or whenever

we can sit by ourselves together there can be

silence whether the flesh of the ground is dry

or the axis ignited the night before the night

after & during those dreams

of insoluble edges those can be ours I can wake

to him with the arc of a thigh my body

jutting our ongoing conversation about spaces

& no other person will come any more no other

will be a third person a fourth the days will gallop

& tilt but hours may slow & after carrying

all our luminous attentions we will find sentences

settle between bloom & flame at the table

when the door squeaks we let it

already tired of fixing what happens

around us & outside the pink cloud in the fragile thrum

of our sun there will be no one to call but each other

or the cats hurrying out sleeping it off

we are the two as colors remove again & trees

cling to wind we two only as we misapply

another obstacle & a horoscope suggests we find more

while at the other side parents go into

the forest to find children & centuries pass waiting

for word that they’ve been brought forth

terrified perhaps but unscarred here we remain

with rusted sky in this anonymous small scrape

of desert one day & another in our house

of wood our tall ceilings just us many late mornings

our little perfections each strain of drought

as light rises reinvented with us as its favorites

Lauren Camp is the author of three books, most recently One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), which won the Dorset Prize. Her poems have appeared in Terrain.org, Poetry International, Linebreak, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. A Black Earth Institute Fellow, Lauren is also the producer and host of Santa Fe Public Radio’s “Audio Saucepan,” which interweaves music with contemporary poetry. www.laurencamp.com