Simon Perchik - Poetry

Monday Nov 25

On Hiatus

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. For more information, including free e-books, photo, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website here.

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*

—my fist laid out

already the fever : a rain

you can see through—this splinter

belongs here, taking root

the way treasure sometimes

needs a wound, a rest

from hillsides toward the sun

—my strongest hand

smelling from death

from an old rafter near the dump

and skies it seems to remember.

This heat won’t hide my hand

or flow over these knuckles

the way stones are softened

—it’s when the sky becomes a hole

fills with a cloud that tires easily

that gives off its last raindrop

tasting sour and at peace

—no. It’s when a dried out board

finds something tender

wanting to be held, that will swell

with the same ecstasy all mothers

lick and weep.

Maybe something in my hand

is waiting to be born

and I offered it to you just now

to find its sharp cry

lit from within :a first spark

already devouring the sunlight

ready to climb and far away.

*

Its grain widening

fills with islands and tides

—sandpaper alone! a beach

and the light that found its way home

grows heavier : each morning

I polish a wood bowl

the way the mist will wait

face up for water almost tissue paper

innocent, smelling from acorns and Fall

and my hands, once grasses and clumps.

The sun must be wood

made from an old sea left out to dry

never sure it will burn

or why the air somehow shines

—I have to hold it close

and the horizon so smoothly

into dust and emptiness

—I have to slow the rim, my tears

already falling through the afternoon light

—I dread rainbows! hate flowers

—only sand, sand and worn down paper.