two poems by lauren camp
Four-Dimensional Road
Pluto after Seven Thousand Hours
for Clyde Tombaugh
Within the round were two glass squares where he could focus
on unhurried minimal peripheries and his eye fixed then shifted
between to unhinge the profile of cosmos. He did none
else but wait, coming each day to what clung and each place
the sky joined or wandered. Had anything altered? Any small
constraint to decipher? Voluble sun nicked the windows
after three fatty days of rain. He arranged eyes at each glass
as enormity, navigating what he must have thought
was between point and pointless while others’ lives embedded
as hurry. Pinprick stars companioned each quadrant
for months. Moons passed. Seeing time isn’t ever easy. At the separator,
the same drubs and murky down on each plate and those tracks
of eons, star images, puddles of gas, and winter’s ongoing scrupulous
draft. His attention constantly ordered. In 1930 he saw the spot.
And saw it again on the other glass. In his eye it was another sky.
Snow continued its flakes and flexed that numb cold that also stuns.
Lauren Camp is the author of nine books, including Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026) and In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. She served as the second New Mexico Poet Laureate (2022-25). Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com