Made You Look

Lauren Camp

On Sunday I read the book my sister wrote
wanting to see more about our childhood.
I loved those low-cost years.
How together we were with our fights in diners.
Tunnels that sectioned off greetings.
Every day a thousand feelings
about living. I wanted the pages
to help me lure back some facts
but she reversed time reversal so quickly
already we were on to the baby.
And after that swaddled
a next. And a man
at her side and then some unsizable
emptiness. We were ahead of that soon.
I wanted to count back to zero.
Do it all over,
even the bad matters.
She is far away now; now
she is in Ohio. She has moved her couches
and punched tin statements to Cleveland
because she loves someone.
In the book, no one is named.
It’s a long way to the end of any book.
You don’t know what comes after that.
So many particulars she has written removed.
I keep thinking, I’d like to lie in the unmowed grass, slap
back the back door, take a fistful of stairs.
It seemed like all the time I was heading
up to my room. The querying energy
may have only been my fingers in my dark.
I miss all of it. It was my favorite
childhood and isn’t that just something.
Earlier today, I walked the forest here
past slugs and snags and God
in trees that I cannot judge as good or wrong.
I took endless curving pathways, felt rain. No way
to know where I was going.
She didn’t save me. I did that myself.