Four Poems by Simon Perchik

You are pulled and the same darkness

lifts your arm around these stars

spreads out door to door

 

knocks so your fist can smell

from blood become your heart again

dragged ahead as if you belong

 

near distances, end to end

                        though this cemetery

has forgotten its dead

 

holds only the invisible hillsides

                        soaking in stone and narrow alleyways

passed along till they close

 

and what will be your tears

waits as lips, as the sky brought back

crumbling with not a light left on.

 

 

 

 

 

*

Even these laces, breathless

falling to the floor without you

and the wait for calm –they cope

 

by helping you undress

used to shoes that weigh too much

are lowered forever, caressed

 

and still you talk non-stop

dangle your bare feet

half overboard, half

 

the way these enormous clothes

lose hold, break apart, then nothing

to heap one on top the other.

 

 

 

 

 

*

Branching out and this hillside

bit by bit unraveling

the way your shadow keeps to itself

 

just by darkening, fed the dirt

you once could see through

as if nothing was there to hum

 

then swallow some old love song

that came into the world

facing the ground still trying

 

to leave you and night after night

you listen for these smaller

then smaller stones eating alone

 

as the cry forever struggling

from its harsh stranglehold

to keep up, side by side and stay.

 

 

 

 

 

*

At the end this sand coming by

covers you with soft flowers

that long ago dried as footsteps

 

still treading inside some shallow grave

smothered  as afterward and dust

–you loved her the way the Earth

 

keeps warm and between two suns

place to place what’s left

you walk without looking down

 

though your arms are closing

have grown together a single fingertip

touching these shells and pebbles.

 

 

 

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Poetry, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013).  For more information, free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com