Daniel Biegelson

(ק) :: To See What You Cannot See

Come as close as you can.
            To forgiveness. Than resignation. Leave
the feathered thing behind. Go down
to the ship. The rattling ghost yard.
Where the SS United States—Blue Riband holder—rusts
or awaits its turn as a museum of the end
of maritime glamour and post-war détente
at a wharf behind an ikea warehouse
in the city
of brotherly love.       ‘Set keel       to breakers.’
Let my people        be people. 
Teach yourself to read    the human
faces. (At least the eyes. Under the dark
eyelids.) Created in imitation.

‘Last hawser      in you     creeks       my last longing.’
Are you the word
without echo. Written upon me.       You used to trace me.           
Call me.           My puerto rican. Should I have objected. More fiercely.
To the possessive. The slimness of your category. 
I am still working out the variables of my belonging.

//

I moved west to escape collapse and decay. Last molting
of an encased cicada
giving rise to the winged imago.
Kadosh. Kadosh. Kadosh. Rise upon your toes. There are no jews here.
Though what if the place         upon which      within which
you stand       ‘startle and stare out’ is already
holy. The earth holy. The sweetgrass holy.
The mannagrass holy. The hackberry holy. The apple holy.
The sternum holy. The navel holy. The nipples holy. Every
hair on the body holy. 

We sat around the table in an early mountainous winter before
reading some formalist I cannot now remember
bemused          entranced         off put            and off kilter
by bob pack relishing the notion that we don’t love
the smell of our own shit (or the sound of our ‘skin half drum
half fart). It’s what distinguishes us
from monkeys he growled and grinned. He was a dapper man. Making
some sort of play (‘Should I play
ball with the dogs / or should I walk away’) ‘Hardly
real’ as we all are from time to time         all at once about
to be enfolded or relinquished. Into the storied atoms
we already are. Now. Dispersed. Scuttled.
What do you say. Will you ‘be the throat of these hours.’
Please. Did the giving
famish the craving. An idol says. Always says. Yes. So.
Does silence. In some lights. Is silence
made an idol. ‘How can I write a holy litany’
when so many twist your tongue. In some lights. Some shades. So
not always (Holy
tongue. Holy stomach. Holy hell. Holy shit. Holy hola.
Holy shalom.)

//

Afterward. The familiar. A waitress at ruby’s café brought coffee. Watched me
scribble on napkins like hanshan on tree bark.
(Apologies for the grafted
elevation.) She asked me
what I did. In my silence. She asked
me if I made any money in my teaching.
            Enough for pancakes. We said. Differently. Her aside more
of a question. She said
she did her best thinking while painting.
Cats. Mostly. She didn’t like the abstract.
I do my best thinking while sleeping.
I can read almost any recalcitrant
thing and wake in the morning
with some understanding. Come closer.
Our embarrassment over
our metaphorical nakedness is the same. Our sigh. Our sorrow.
Re/turn to our branching lives together. My dreamed son
who I held as my son
was asleep for twenty minutes as I lay listening to sirens streaming
north up higgins toward the railroad tracks where folks
still       from time to time       hop onto boxcars.
My dreamed son who asks
for a microscope       a telescope       for his august birthday
to see what he cannot see.
My dreamed son is young. Not older
than/then. My ontological son.
Who calls out. Who is called.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Daniel Biegelson is the author of the book of being neighbors (Ricochet Editions) and the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE). He currently serves as 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 Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, FIELD, The Minnesota Review and RHINO Poetry, among other places. Find him at danielbiegelson.com