SIMON PERCHIK

Five Poems

 

*
With a single blow, taken down
though this wooden frame
was once above the treeline

where nothing struggles or drains
or keeps the air from thinning out
as snow filled with empty spaces

–it's your usual photograph
clears your fists the way a boxer
is walked to the nearest corner

in time for your forehead to dry
put to your mouth a likeness
yell at the wood, at the glass, the jaw.

                       

*
And the river falling into you
lies down the way you are fed
by stones that no longer open

as rain and your breath
never seen again, left in the dirt
these graves are used to

is all they know –with each meal
a far off night bursts into flames
once it's singled out, fills your mouth

as if it would not happen twice
and yet you eat only in cemeteries
in a sea whose water has dried

to become for the dead
a new language, easy to whisper
over and over and the heading.

*
You crumple this hat the way a hole
changes color, is held in place
lets your forehead hide, circle down

end over end setting fires –what you try on
no longer smells from rain or stays
or turned low in the mirror

remembers to burn in the open
as the sound falling from dirt
and broken loose though you walk away

just to walk away :a damaged toss
with less than there were
no longer over your shoulder or done.

 

*   
Louder! though what comes by
has already withered
and along a certain curve

your voice tapers off
as the path bent over her shoulders
spreading its flow into sunlight

now riverbank and whisper
–you need two mouths
now that every splash

smells from stones
once it rises to the surface
in that slow climbing turn

covered with winter
and her name just beginning
–yell it! face the sky

still pinned to her grave
and by the handful each breath
half closed, half more dirt.

 

*
She wraps your limp the way the sun
marks out its darkness and along the ground
pours a small circle –you'll make it back

she says, writes on a pad kept open
how seabirds will call each other
over and over force their feathers

though your shadow too has taken on
that phase even the moon
with all its rivers and stars

–just two pills and at bedtime two more
which stone by stone will become
a second moon once you lay down

face up, floating midair, not yet asleep
reaching around the Earth
that stops as soon as you touch it.

 

 

 

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