April 4, 2015

SIMON PERCHIK: THREE POEMS


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










*
Now that it's raining you can forget
--let gravity do the work
and this rake, half bare, half

at attention through the circle
that holds the Earth in place
clearing the path the dead remember

though these leaves must be wet
cascading past savanna to savanna
as primordial headwaters spreading out

so many years apart and always
there's room for more dead
whose million year old cry

will sound the same a million years
from this tree calling, calling, sleepless
--you don't need to find out

--it's enough when it rains
you can lean down and grasp hand over hand
without caring why or holding back.



*
Here, there, the way silence
tows you below the waterline
and though you are alone

you're not sure where her name
is floating on the surface
or what's left

grasped by a single wave
that never makes it to shore
splashes as if this pen

is rowing you across the stillness
the dead are born with
--you are already bathing, half

from memory, half by leaping
from the water for flowers
growing everywhere --for you

this page, unclaimed :a knife
dripping with seawater
and your throat.



*
Even grief is passing you by
though you waited in the open
had a fondness for calendars

--dozens! drying
the way ocean nets are dragged
behind the day after day

who no longer ask but come
for the silence snapping them up
to be picked clean in a room

opening everywhere as seawater
or is it already Spring
impatient, wants the bed empty

and though you don't move an inch
the flowers are generous
never in the way, come and go

with trust in their eyes
--rage is helpless here
has to listen for a change

how warm the dirt is
and under your tongue
more rain, how easy it was.

 
 
                                                ~SIMON PERCHIK

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