Daniel Biegelson: “We Carry Ourselves Everywhere”
WE CARRY OURSELVES EVERYWHERE
Even to places we have not been and will not go. A flutter of pigeons feast on a loaf of bread outside the corner bakery and end up on someone’s twitter feed. The window’s daily consolation of blue sky strengthens and diminishes. A chorus of roses in white five-gallon buckets. Swatches of fruit fill a stand on the west side of the street. Sentences suddenly dead end in observation. On their way to what was once a Woolworth’s the rear door of the truck shutters open. Parakeets in boxes and feathers poking through air holes. A flurry of moths at the glass. Next year we must remember to misremember. No, that’s not quite right. To keep our secrets we must lapse into a portrait of stillness or wrap them like future gifts. We discover them again as a wind of need bearing a squall of obligation. We open the door and sing ourselves inside. A few blocks over forgotten gaslights persist. It is not raining across the way.
Daniel Biegelson is Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University and Associate Editor for Laurel Review. His chapbook, Only the Borrowed Light, is forthcoming from Verse, and his poems have appeared in The Boiler Journal, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Field, Meridian, New Orleans Review, Portland Review, and Salt Hill Journal, among other places.