(ר) :: Big Shake on the Box Car Moving

A groundswell. Heaved dog spikes. And heaved rail. Or. Chord strum. Or.
A wind swell. Straight line.

Carrying. Dust. And
when the air cools. Rain
after rain.

And nothing
extinguishes

the fire. I live with you always fixed within me and armed
with attributes you lick with an acid tongue.

I digress. I eat the apple. The stem. The skin. The flesh. The core. The seeds.
And I live with the limp you have given me.

…

It happened again. The old man peed his pants after dinner
drifting off      head softly knocking against the doorframe
on the drive home.      Wiper blades thudding. He seemed
not to notice as the spring
buttons on his walker clicked into holes
and I held his legs together as he swiveled
so as not to displace his hips
so he could pull himself upright and then shuffle
over to his apartment building.       Can I help you       inside. There was a note
in the air.       I won’t say
of panic. Sour spray of salt water. Or regret. Sugar scent of understory.
Or reversal.
Or endless alternatives       each signaling
an ending and a beginning.

…

It is raining again. In the distance. One of those scenes from a landscape painting
the sky        all angled daylight        and a charcoal curtain
the ground static swirls of alternating greens.       At first.
I wanted to begin
with an image of a face       to talk about the craters
and rivulets widening to rivers       and tear ducts drying up
and then I wanted to look longer through the lines of rain. To show you
how everything points to the painting behind the painting       the last box
car       stopped       in the middle of the redressed meadow     fractured
concrete slabs       exposed rebar       seedlings with the microscopic power
to displace       seen and not seen       the railroad tracks extending
beyond       the field       of the canvas
the herd of cows     grazing      on chopped corn stalks       heard and not
heard       because       the problem is not that you have looked away
or looked so long you know hear or can only see the afterimage
of afterlight—the problem is       ‘in the beginning is
the beginning of the Frame’       ‘the basic form’
the thin shifting       boundaries of the permeable body.

…

You and I sit in the interstices. The fitted sheet of clouds
blown over going and gone. Beads of water cling

to the glass. Molecules tending toward internal coherence. A net
inward force. Each to each. How can I atone

for my lack of atonement. When it happened again. As we knew
it would. The lights flashing though I wanted to say

synesthesiacally blaring but I am too inside my own body
to name the drops stitched to the window. Etcetera. Etcetera.

To say our skin embroidered remains beautiful to the touch
though numb. Etcetera. Etc. To say the human

is the animal is humus. Etc. etc. To say. The breath the dust is us.

For a long time       I wanted to believe        as I split from me
trying to read to my son       upon my lap       as he labored
against croup for breath
my daughter      as she curled her small hand around
a fistful of my hair       or trying
to love you in the small hours before rising for work
as my body       burned       and now burning
continuously        until or do we part       I wanted to believe
that shift       that estrangement       was a form
of bewilderment. Or       wild astonishment.
‘All chance       direction.’       Order. Reason.
Mysterious arrangement.       Of return. Pointlessness
a kind of purpose in itself.

And yet. The leaves today in fall tussle
were rising and falling instead of blowing side to side.
And the blank scar of the page spoke of a kind of seamlessness.
And standing ‘on a smoking bank’ watching
the double-decker ferry churn back across
the hudson or looking up the treeless mountain
to see a scatter of stones careen out of the clouds
I am fissioned
I in all the afters me in all the befores of my life.

Are you ‘the tremblin’ kind.’
Do you ‘tremble.
What does one do
when one trembles.’ Talks in slow winding circles of smoke.

Does the trailing vine cast aside take root
at the nodes of slit stems.

Do you hear the spider’s nocturnal stitching.
Are you the black and blue mussel with shut shell
upon the dry rocks.

Am I the father and the son of a system of suicide.
Am I the black locust
‘that trembles and trembles.’ In times
like these is it necessary. ‘Our country
moving closer to its own truth and dread
its own ways of making people disappear.’

Outside the museum the headless collection of bronze figures hunch.
In the town square the disappearing pillar returns the memorial burden.

Can you offer author a new network nectar
Can you ‘let loose the given image.’

Is fear of G-d the beginning of wisdom or fear of the fear of absence.

Do you prefer revelations to confessions. Which is the cone
and which the seed. Are you prediabetic. Are you a silver cup
filled with wine or a silver cup filled with air.
When was last time you said the lord’s prayer. A poem.

Does ‘a secret always make you tremble.’ And certainty. Too.
Does the error of silence

make ‘the entire being tremble.’ ‘Tremolo
tremolo when the hands tremble

with pain.’ And what if what I create
has no hands. Or if I am the hands of what I create. O. Part.

Parcel. Bushel. Peck. Synecdoche. Please.
Should we never ‘seek consolation for pain.’ Stranger.

Please. Please. See the stars. Please. Slice open the apples.
Grown. For you. Heavy. On my branches.

Daniel Biegelson is the author of the book of being neighbors (Ricochet Editions) and the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE). Daniel serves as Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University as well as an editor for the Laurel Review. Daniel's poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Bayou Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Diagram, The Glacier, The Journal, Interim, Superstition Review, & The Shore, among other places.