3 poems
Aleph
We stop to be human among the daises and the violets. The brocades of brogues.
And now the meadow of glowing flowers is talking again. Full of the same wind, cut hair
and cold gossip. This is the one lesson. I select my discipleship.
As a mule. Burn the rumor of a demise of assignments. We stop ‘to bear
the polarity of opposites.’ Not in the machine barn, but in the field of minded grass
where we can feel as well as see. Your father’s voice
is my father’s voice blowing as finely toothed green ash
leaves struck by wind suturing across the tree line. The real and imagined light finds the gaps
like water to empty cistern. So, I said, Sister, I wanted to be one. Narrowly winged.
Not a simile. Not to assimilate One pronoun keeping things whole
by (mis)direction. Ms. which
way is the sky. The words become
paper thin. Thick on my tongue. I lick the dirt. I depart as another. So I can love
more fully. A ghostly love. Now a darkened love. Now there is the emerald
ash borer. Here as there no longer a simple letter apart. My eyes grow.
And now t/here is an emerald in your mind. Highly included, if we permit the truth. The trees
outside stiffen. My neck is vertebrae and muscle. Expected. We are plucked
and set as window dressing. The lights dim as a
round of green roses deepen under
the symbolic weight of June and the hidden light rises
which is also the first light which is also the light in which you drown.
Yud
‘words! There will be no other words in the world
But those our children speak.’
—George Oppen
Imagine you are a seed. Little word. Little one. With iris eyes.
Imagine ‘all the trees of the field / clapping their hands.’
Imagine a perpetual present. A perpetual wind.
The sky now threatening
like a question that cuts to the quick.
Reined. Then. Bent back the spring
trees iridescent daylight at a time of day
spun out
through the emboldened leaves
clouds strung overhead dark together drift as into a closet.
Do you want me to specify. Should I. ‘Trust to the genius
of trees.’ I was told to count. You had ten fingers and ten toes. Luck. Or. Blessing. Still.
Frustrated. My work never feels to widen. Never closes.
And yet. You revise me. Little word. Surely as I am
altered in kind. In the speech you make possible. Are you now the frame
through which I see. The dark stained glass emblazoned by excitement
of molecules. In the riverside park
above the cottonwood’s shimmy
a bevy of balloons released by a non-profit group of cancer survivors
scatters. Pick one, say, the red one and think later about ecological disaster
and watch until it becomes a period. A dot. Disappears. What else. Pop.
We predict. We know. We say.
From laws of order. And experience. A constant state of becoming.
Of rainwater. Flooding. Flooded with plastic and the roots of new roots. Go on.
Please.
Kaf
“Here comes the dreamer.”
What is your power. The power to relate. To suspend. My daughter
begs to be hung upside down. It’s a simple game
we play that has nothing to do with prayer—which of course
now it does—and my daughter says where is the earth. As I help her to leave penguin prints
on the ceiling. We pretend. A great many things. Infinite even. Depending upon. The abstract
is not always a wound. Skinned knee or bloody worse. We imagine gravity has reversed
itself in the house. Which could be taken
to stand for so many accomplishments. Markers even. Stages. Rockets. If we believe.
Events travel onward. On water. En garde. I’ve always thought I was a cave dweller in the severing
sunshine. It’s the fiftieth anniversary,
but time is different at differentiated levels of experience. Is defined
for many purposes. So my daughter scribbles—she can’t letter yet.
Dear Astronauts—we love you—thank you for going to the moon. ‘Goodnight light and the red balloon.’
Recently a friend finished
a memoir
about his child who was born with a medical condition and was not supposed to live
out the year. In darkness. Or in light. He titled the book Death of the Heart: A Journey Toward Life
which he admitted
a bit misleading, though he thought
worth the price in an era of constant quick clicks. Sometimes I wonder, he confessed, if I would have been
able to publish the manuscript if H. had died. And this is the way. ‘This is the way
we satisfy
ourselves with explanations
of the unfollowable world.’ And so. Joseph’s brother sold him for twenty
pieces of silver. What is your intention. Attention. ‘A flowering
focus on a distinct infinity.’ And if I gently place
my palm on your soft head of uncut hair, will you forgive my gift.
The danger of being us in essence. Real
and imagined. Done to and to ourselves. At some level. You do not yet know distinction.
‘Earlier and other creation.’ And you ask, Are
the astronauts going to be at our next family reunion. Talking and pausing at tables rowed out
in the grass fields behind the house in Atchison. By. Not simply
the river. Of stars. The castaway. The sea is in us too. The sea. Of stars. And you say
Let us say—Amen.
Daniel Biegelson is the author of the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE) and Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University, as well as an Associate Editor for The Laurel Review. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, FIELD, New Orleans Review, Salt Hill Journal, and Third Coast, among others.