SIMON PERCHIK - POEMS

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 linkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8

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​Slowly this coral
braces for the back and forth
by changing colors
 
beginning with moonlight –in time
the leaves become tea, gutted
the way an old woman with beads
 
weighs your palm for riverbeds 
then spreads each finger
whose only memory is the darkness
 
that helps you breathe
underwater till it burns out
smells from emptiness
 
and standing in a circle while you drink
from a cup filled with some meadow
overgrown, forgotten, all at once.
 
 

*

​Without the map you make a turn
the way someone pawns a coat
and butterflies disappear
 
though you remember the road
before it forked, became a valley
and the town, driving through
 
with the trunk propped open
helping you count over and over
to ten, half someone’s breath
 
half moonlight pressing against the hood
to open it, let out the wings, the road
and how much longer.
 

*

​Don’t look around –it’s this conch
whispering back, keeping you awake
the way sailors embrace the stars
 
with rope when the rigging loosens
as the coming wave
falling to its death in your ear
 
–a nameless shell holds your hand
so it stays wet when lifted by moonlight
swollen from the darkness it needs
 
to flood the Earth, let go the railing
jump from the afternoons –you should look
for piling to carry away
 
on your shoulders as the voice
still circling overhead, almost a sea
almost all from your eyes.
 
 

*

​You swallow head down
the way this hillside
sets for some far place
 
as evenings –it’s safe now
to drink from the birdbath
then throw your head back
 
purified by the pebbles
now gathered in a circle
as if they were the ones
 
you dead listen for
with your eyes closed
–in such a darkness
 
water becomes distance
finds the place in your mouth
for a field where a plane
 
skims by to cover you
as mist from its descent
still burning in the ground.
 
 
 

​*

​It was mindless gesture
greeting someone not there
though the cap still tilts
 
is falling behind as the gust
from passing sirens and bells
helps you close your eyes
 
where the brim from the inside
folds end over end
catches fire and over your forehead
 
cushions it with ashes the way a stone
softens another stone, moves it closer
wants it to press your mouth
 
against the evening and open it
for the darkness you bring
to loosen the earrings and sparks.