Daniel Biegelson

WHEN THE CLOUDS BREAK

a) When the Clouds Break

suggests a sudden upheaval in the heart, a quick spike in the ratio of light to dark, but
really we are not better equipped for a slow dispensation of wind licking away at a
cloudbank until, cloudless, the sky folds into a particle driven evening. Naturally, the
epiphany assumes a point of departure. Say the sky or the body. But the sky is replaceable.
For now. It lives in me. An ellipsis of pelicans hovers over the waves. Some words full of
rain overcast the sky. But how to leave the body behind. Or which body do we occupy.
One of mine is a ship whose husk/hull, rusted open, looks like a baying wolf. Lope
through the understory. Wind wave of grass. The delicate epidermis and vellus hair. The
hands hiding in pockets. To begin to return. From distance or immersion. From a point
of loss and gain. To begin. 

c) When the Clouds Break

we take in a kind of daily repetition or feel a similitude to the sermon upon our skin.
‘Don’t fight it, feel it.’ Why. Imagine the white cumulus clouds above pasted to a
weatherman’s blue screen. Then banter, a bad joke about hair spray, dogs jumping into
kiddie pools and a segment on housing starts. Am I a commercial break in a sea of the
same. A haven. What do I advertise. Is my body replaceable to you. Can we turn out and
over. Begin again out of loam rich with floodplain risk and root upwards like the
snowdrop. The tiny star of violet petals hoisted aloft. The downtown loft gutted. You
see. A gutted epistemology: there is no sea. Currently. I want to be a parcel of air. ‘You
send me.’ Where. How do we sign our own demise. How do we leave and persist. You
can’t break something and then break it again. You are the syntax of my own otherness.
May I be so to you. At least briefly. For what do we really know as the earth begins to
end again. Call out. My deep beautiful splinter. Wrap me in the arms of the visible and
invisible alike.

— with quotes from Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” and “Feel It”

Daniel Biegelson is the author of the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE) and the 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, Faultline, FIELD, Grist, Interim, Mid-American Review, Third Coast & Typo, among other places.