4 Poems by Simon Perchik
*
Without a father or a mother this silence
longs for home the way far-off rocks
come by to soothe you bit by bit and stay
turn your gravestone pointing east
where west should be, round and around
smoothing the Earth for the wind
over and over writing your name in the air
signing away everything –you need this compass
to come back, find the river again
filled without touching your fingers
or the small rock at the top no longer moving
emptied to find you a shore nearby.
*
You face each afternoon the way this window
becomes a wound, clings to the sill
though in the dark it’s the curtain
that reeks from smoke as the emptiness
sleeves give off when covered with lace
still warm from reaching up for those feathers
mourners leave on the ground to put out roots
know what to do with broken glass
with the hole so close and following.
*
Though there’s no grave for its shadow
the stone covering your face
has a place for a mouth as the emptiness
that arrives thirsty, tired, side by side
–you dead no longer have cheeks
need a mask and behind its silence
the touch when tears become too heavy
–it was the usual burial –flowers, dirt
and by the handful a shoreline
to keep you from falling –your eyes
use this darkness now for the moons
that long ago stopped passing by.
*
To end its day you point till the lamp
gives in, darkening as if this time
stars would lay bare at your fingertip
and you hear the room unfold
become a witness that is not a flower
taking you along to see for yourself
what passes for corners and roots
in walls no longer moving –you accuse
and the light backs down slowly and alone.
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 Rosenblum Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2020. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.
To view one of his interviews please follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8