Simon Perchik - four poems

These gravestones are shaped the way every avalanche
wants to enter the Earth –first as a single doorstep
then the rush though the rocks you listen for

are already moons helping you find the door
for holding on while the light under you
becomes another shadow made from wood

lays down as a room that cannot change its mind
is filled with cracked lips, the cold and end over end
the strong corners, the kisses that made it here.




Your face is covered with paper now
held in place by its words for sky
and wind –a simple love note

can keep the rain away
let you read forever in the dark
though it tastes from the salt

still on your lips –all those years
soaking up this hillside
till nothing was left to open

except over your cheeks
you have all the air you need
in the corners not yet grass.




You sleep with the coat buttoned
and though your eyes are closing
the sleeves cling by listening

sure her favorite dress
is somewhere in this room
no longer morning, named

as if these walls once were stone
and what you hear
is losing speed, altitude –the bed

knows all about how an underground cave
stays open, kept trapped to survive
as a whisper not a whisper anymore.




You wait at a fence though the yard
no longer moves –all this air
and not one mouthful for these dead

left in the open where each leaf
is handed over as the loss
that was the one too many

and from the same gate, half wood
half kept open as those slow climbing turns
that never make it back, forget how

to fall from moonlight, make room
for more wood and these dead
feeling their way down hand over hand.


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 Osiris Poems published by boxofchalk, 2017. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.

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