2023 First Place Winner: Esther Keeley, 'The Flâneur'

ESTHER KEELEY

First Prize - 2023 Tower Poetry Competition, 'The Planets'

The Flâneur

You float through this atmosphere like it’s a mirror or a lake

where you dilute your consciousness and go swimming, turning

like a corkscrew, or a tube of lipstick, or the ribbon

that your mother used to tie the ends of your plaits with.

Coiled and then unfurling, time

lapsed, a familiar film, a stop motion spin.

You let the planets govern you like gods

that you can see but never hold —

waiting for new life like the silence between heartbeats,

you carve out a space for new holiness

and it looks an awful lot like a constellation

and did you know that the word planets comes from the Greek planetai

meaning wanderers, you are a wanderer like a planet is.

You are as free as the poem you are trying to write,

and watch as it forms on the page like a city or a canyon, telluric

in your attempts to capture you like to roam

across the nebulae with the flickering grace of a gramophone’s needle

as it lowers itself into arches and chasms of black plastic.

You lose yourself in the whorls and folds of the sky

like a tempest, you are austere, you are an auteur,

you are an acolyte, devoted as a child is

to finding the ocean in a seashell.

You do not yet know that a poem,

like a planet, can hold you for a while.