Simon Perchik


*
Though only two survived, each eye
is homesick for the others
still fingertips, unable to go on

are fanning out as darkness
before it becomes hillside
carried off with this small stone

for loving you, are letting each one
loosen, fall away from the others
still wet from a brother or a sister

or the night washing over you
the way you see through dirt
–you watch how you are wanted

with just two fingers, held close
looking for rain after it leaves
as lips a little at a time.



*
For a few hours every night the floor
slows and the room cuts back
quieted, begins its descent

the way a dead lake is filled
with shoreline –the rug
is used to boards that stay wet

though it’s an iron bed
breaking in half where a pillow
once filled with seabirds

still clings to the other side
before it opens –it takes time
but the floor has to be washed

every night just to hear the dress
touching down, folding over the mop
the rotting wooden handle.




*
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 Gibson Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2019. 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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