AMY NEILL BEBERGAL

PITCH

 

I sought the widest vision to contain the emptiness

of your bike leaned up against the fence. Cast runes

to surmise who was the leaver, the ride or its rider.

 

Had to knife through a bed of switch grass—a hedge

towards water to get to a river where you were

beside yourself on its banks, reflected, concentric.

 

I thought we were transcending, expanding vessels,

translating brooks, leaves in the eddy, grubs becoming

butterflies. But we were struck from the float,

held in solution where a small bridge passed over,

inventing the people we loved.

 

You were the change in the pitch of a siren

that recedes or approaches. I was the thud of the hammer

arriving after the nail disappears in the wood.

harmony.jpg

THE BLACK MOON

 

I had been dreaming so deep, wearied with signs and symbols,

but there was nothing for a right mind to perk its face towards,

 

no reason to rise. Still, I got postcards of your blind trains

crossing the Pyrenees. While you’re holed up there in twinkling

 

caves, the taste of honey on the edge of the blade still springs

tears; you can’t blink, can’t read the black moon.

 

How to change one's sky, I wonder, unless one's star go with it?

But as the vane spins, defining wind, I know heat has risen.

 

Without those hands chipping at the pieces, the thorny regions

dedicated to my feet, I’m unable to move, I’m speechless.  

 

All you wanted was to see behind the hours, those remarkable

gadgets, how they hit the earth like a monkey wrench.

BIO

AMY NEILL BEBERGAL lives and works in Cambridge Massachusetts with her husband and son, where she studies and works with children on the outer edges of the spectrum.  Her poetry has appeared in Killing the Buddha, Blast Furnace, A Narrow Fellow, Melancholy Hyperbole, RiverLit, The Boston Poetry Magazine, Rabbit, among others.  She is working on a collection of poems ripped from science, entitled Theory of Entanglement.  She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.