PRELUDE OR PROLOGUE OR PROEM OR PREAMBLE OR PREFACE OR FEAR AND TREMBLING IN THE MIDWEST

Daniel Biegelson

Or apologia or ars poetica or in the beginning you wanted the word 
and you wanted the light or you wanted to build 
A blaze but you didn’t want it to remind us of the bonfires 
Our bodies were thrown into or the inmates are running
The panopticon and the call is coming from inside the house
Or at first I thought to make the title longer than the poem 
itself or I am sorry that I can’t make anything 
Easy or simple but I really do want to communicate  
Because I love you and do you see how we are pulled in every 
Direction at once and the dry grass bends toward the angling light 
And then the unseen wind switchbacks against the cut 
swales       lifts and pulls      in waves       the roots
And the roots give you an ontological migraine  
Or do you       see how a child’s warm breath on the cold glass
reifies the smeared heart 
Or how the nocturnal nervous system fires or the straw 
nest of field mice burns
And you still love the smell of gasoline and warmed thatch

And how at first I wanted to begin every line with and
And then I wanted to begin every line with or
Or I refused to use questions marks because there is
An uncertainty in every expression and everything 
Everywhere like yesterday the world was knowable
In its unknowability and today we’re swimming in dark
matter and then I refused to use commas
Because I was after the fullness of silence which we know
is impossible or at least can only exist outside
Our embodied experience which is why you can’t hear 
the orb spider twisting on its thin thread but can hear the ‘pharaoh 
pharaoh’ call of cicadas you can’t see which is an idea 
I’ve repeated so often you would think an echo a form 
Of reincarnation or resurrection and increasingly I am preaching 
The dead democracy gospel which has less to do with the vole
Bludgeoned by the tilling than it does with glyphosates
And epistemology and everything to do with silos and axiology
And which might be the title of a new folk song for a new era
But not really or the world may be enchanted but obviously
Not by me or necessarily for me and you may be thinking
that this is too abstract for any kind of beginning  

Which is also why I wanted to begin with a concrete image 
something like       for days on the unveiled shoulder 
Of every highway exit
there was a weather-whitened carcass
Of some still unrecognizable animal 
given the speed at which I was cornering 
maybe a deer or coyote or a large farm dog 
Gnawed or picked clean and a tinted green two-liter bottle
Half-filled with piss
and strewn bits of weather-cracked concrete
and rusted metal 
or something like the black crow needling 
Around in an eye socket or the same bird perched inside the tree
Of my body or stalking back and forth along my branching veins 
And calling or cawing or cawing and calling

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 editor for The Laurel Review. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Denver Quarterly, Diagram, Interim, Lana Turner, & Puerto Del Sol, among other places.