Plucking the Lake from Devotion

by Lauren Camp

The music of worship needs sometimes to echo

a body of water, the makers of breath

to be saved by unfaltering nature,

to be drawn from their traces, and travel

above to a clearing. So you might understand why

we should not be allowed to wander

into every larkspur and trail fork, why we must leave

some domains in the distance, not structure a day

with backpacks and bootprints

around someone’s temple—the depth that holds

context for hope. Reality is sometimes more

myth than contours. I’m narrowing down to a specific

soil in the desert and a time older

than the sum of its parts. When water had edges

and basins and pine into distance. The version

most often repeated claims two eagle plumes

sited a pueblo on a land draped with bare places.

In dust and from dust, strong arms wrought repeating

walls and ladders to fathom the sky. Wind bent

and reshaped and vanished. The people lived

in dimensions of owl between dawn and moon. Lived hard

in their origins as cool water flowed

from the mountain. Water was favor, and they named

its crossing for fields, fire and horses. Hawks passed above

and aimed with grand movement. Around them

over time, the people saw violence—new roads, wire fences

and closure. The crowd of such disruption creased

their reason but they bent again with stone

to the corn, transferred thought back to the sparing

desert, returned up their rungs. To gather their senses

they climbed past the amber

hair of the deer through sun-glare and hills

to a lake far from the near earth

of the normal. The vessel of nothing but tears,

to each other’s reflection. They went to the lake to rename

their universe, to say Not today Not

tomorrow, and to measure the cause

of their home and of regular days. At the lake ripples

choired, open-mouthed. And look, here’s a danger line: the lake

belonged to the people. To catch their pleas

and whatever they do when they need

another essential beginning. The strong people

might only have needed the repentant light. Or they might

have offered their flaws or other injustice. I’ll never know.

And you should never know, and that’s the importance.

When I read about the lake’s acquisition, I imagine

spirited flowers that spiral up

beside water. We all want to be changed

by such colors. The truth is other people were given

permission to hike the beautiful earth

and photograph its shimmers. Borrow the blue.

Tell me when do you want others in your prayers? Tell me

how a lake could be taken. The strong people took

truth as burden, but remembered standing safe

against sky when the lake was glad to see them.

Years crawled over the water without offering

this private sequential shape for wounded refrains

and invocations. A request isn’t always

a solution. The people asked in languages for the extravagant

muscle of water, its many windows. They asked

its solace. They asked and asked

and with drummed cadence. For 64 years, they asked

with dented voices, shuffling vowels.

And when the lake was returned, they planted their feet

in its mist, offered it wings, bones and their endings.

* * * * *

"Plucking the Lake from Devotion" is from Turquoise Door (3: A Taos Press, 2018) by Lauren Camp.

Lauren Camp is the author of four books of poems. Her work has been honored with the Dorset Prize, fellowships from Black Earth Institute and The Taft-Nicholson Center, and a finalist citation for the Arab American Book Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com