Let me know if you have heard this one before—
a squall of starlings in love with the evening cutworm
beaks black for winter occupy a field.
Morning carries a scent of snow.
The murmurations are deafening
Love as language is also a projection.
Everything is deferred and deferred again.
I can't resist the apple cart. One starling
startles and the field empties.
***
Or this one—
you have to imagine a window
to look out a window. Looking
out a window of broad sunlight
you have to find the seam.
You have to find the seam
to envision the harbor
as a blown sheet of dark glass
or the starlings as pigeons
in an upright world. Nothing surprises
in an empire of apologies.
***
Let me begin again
You have moved and left me
with no forwarding address.
In the giving I am gone
and what travels homeward
travels toward a begotten space.
You are not mended in the mending.
***
This is closer to an industrial skyline than I had imagined.
This is too personal to be a confession
It is an asphalt lot behind the chain-linked fence
but before the refinery towers.
It is dark field before the foothills and the snow
The snow and the foothills are imaginary graces
The imaginary graces are murmurations of snow.
And I am sorry for the elegies I wrote before you died
words left growing in the white hills under the new moon.
Daniel Biegelson teaches at Northwest Missouri State University, where he is also an editor for The Laurel Review. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Meridian and The Portland Review, among other places. He hails from New Jersey.