Lauren Camp

Inner Planets

After all day in the sun blitz, the hectic heat

            calling for argument and splurging

on low spots, I wanted most to be

busy with less. After the terraces of light, the spreading

            iron and groping of it,

I walked alone, never

                        to an end and quietly, yes, sat there and sang

the intimate shapes

            of earth’s history, the fringe above

and the physical flourish

                        of stars. Never to anyone, just my miniature

self. It was like being in love

            with the world

                                 as a stranger, alive

                        in the slagged dark that made this

            out of nothing! I was not prepared for the far off

storm with its thrilling

            embellishments, its thin revolutionary          

drawings of light, or how, when those ended, the sky

                        was taken to a circumference of thrumming

in a hundred subtracted overtones. I sat still

            in that struck concentration, cleaning up

the ways I believe—

how so often we are given to evidence

            the dark robs us

of hope, and we can’t see that it isn’t that

                        we need to see. Noble, it climbs through

persistence and lets us turn

            our cold faces up to it, unfit, but astonished.

                        The sky does what it must and it is never

the same thing. There is no air in space, no sound

            the higher you go.

Take 18 minutes

and you’ll see from the staircase I move to the singular flower, see me hurtle

to small appointments. Almost as soon as the key enters the room, I have consolations

and only one or two contain a message. A twitch from the wrong side of the view, the shade

of a half-finished parting. Look how stated heights grow beveled and toward

a rescue. Whether I’m with them, the footprints in this garden try another episodic

gesture. I have left and left where I sang the unused. By what else could I handle

the eternal imprecise wind? Shadows as blankets. All day the telephones demanded

to be hung up. Those little mouths. I wrung instead a diameter of branches. The trance

of my inaccurate memory continues to measure some dirges. What a split picture;

now, flowers’ soft hands. Let me look through another pane that inverts

the deliberate. Each night someone fastens the knife. Someone cuts through

a room. A woman with a violin strokes it clean to the melancholic. You’d nod to yourself

when I say I hold each scene in my mouth as a shiver, but what does that mean? Maybe

it insists we work over the plot. Seeing will never be finished.

Traci Brimhall