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