Wednesday 5 May 2021

3 Poems by Simon Perchik

 *


It's the rope you carry from a cemetery

with the dead holding on as if the knot

would keep its shadow in place

 

let no one lift it from the ground

to blacken their teeth not to forget

why night became a night

 

covered the Earth and for the first time

as the word given it by the dying

who need certainty, who lose their way

 

when separated from each other, want

something to hold that is not s stone

would never let go their hand.

 

*

You reach for December, rip the page off

letting it lay crumpled on the wooden floor

side by side the days, hours, minutes

 

still shaking from the final week you tried

to bring them back to life as tears

 ̶ this calendar can no longer hide your grief

 

gives way from under the great weight

that turns snow to stone where each death

stays covered with a night

 

that never leaves the room except as cracks

loosened by just standing in front a wall

making do with what is left to let go.

 

*

Where this scaffolding ends

the emptiness faces a sea

rests on waves that long ago

 

dried as one breeze more

still smelling from salt

and thee lift-off that's now

 

impossible from the street below

though you rely on trees

as if for the last time each leaf

 

would soar branch to branch

see everything from above

 ̶ you reach for the ground

 

the way a roof is deserted

can go no further, relies

on corners and the afternoon

 

to fill the sky with its light

from tears trying to learn

how to dry, become pillars

 

on which everything is built

as nights that spill out

the breathing you no longer need.


Bionote

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Family of Man Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2021. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at simonperchik.com . To view one of his interviews please follow this linkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8

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