Simon Perchik
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Readers interested in learning more about him are invited to read Magic, Illusion and Other Realities at www.geocities.com/simonthepoet which site lists a complete bibliography.
***
Where your arm was empty most
you fit blooms :worlds
looking for each other, stripped
from their roots –even the clouds adrift
oceans cut loose :Leviathans
gasping forever :each wave
looking for another
–you warm these flowers
as the shallow pond once gathered them
before the sky had learned to rainbow
to thrash till yellow and red
blue and every blossom still tries
to sweep away its color
its side-kick :the Eve
it still needs
to climb that pig-headed double helix
or fall –to climb
wandering the sky itself homeless :a sister ship
that points :a mast cut from a star
different from all others :the Earth
all Earth is looking for, points
as a magnet hooked into polar ice
spinning day and night outward
–you will toss these beauties
to begin a current :the arm
that will soften under your breasts
–you will fit petals
into the ground that came loose today
into the pieces, your tears broken off
glistening like feathers.
***
If I closed my eyes, if the dark
could fall downhill
as stars still roll to a stop
and I dust myself, scrape off
the dried tears trying to weep again
to fly back
though my eyes are shut
and the world each night
practices its wings to come, wobbles
till the light claws through
the way moths learn first to fly
–if I closed my eyes your eyes
could be darker, could see
the loneliness taking shape
winding around itself :the nights
tighter and tighter till even your arms
and nothing hurts. And you watch
and everything hurts :the harness
a seeing-eye dog wears, your arm around me
and we could walk. You laughed, “Here
is a place to lift your foot
here you rub my nose,”
here the darkness that touched my leg
never lets go, became my footsteps
leading me –what does it take
to lift my foot without the Earth along
as if each stone was hollow
with room enough for us
to walk our way out –if you closed your lips
if something like wings could fold :lakes
soaking up each stone
rolled to a stop underneath
–if the–, if, if, if
if I could rip through one kiss
to drink the sky black and my breath
gently mending the Earth
and your arms pressing together in loneliness
that would look like a stone only older.
