Image: Unsplash, downloaded (https://unsplash.com/photos/o2rI0ri6IOo) 11.12.2021.
*
This well all afternoon, homeless
huddled between the weeds
the way a ruin is restored
with beginner stones, thrown back
too small and you stand by
–they once nourished these dead
feeding them wet flowers
and the need to touch everything
be bathed by a waterfall half shadows
half flowing into the dirt
unfolded, for petals and the crumbling
without going past your arms.
*
And though you lean closer
you have forgotten her name
–with a single gulp
you swallow ink, squeezed
is at home in your throat
tilted back, black, iced
with emptiness and your breath
end over end freezing
the way every night a little dries
and you drown in the words
you wanted to say out loud
–this opened jar is enormous
and from your mouth
reaches down, overflows
in darkness and is she there.
*
With laying down and stars
what has become lost
clings as if all wandering
is tinged, calls the missing
lets you pet the dirt
the way shadows side to side
are already in the open
–you take in a stray
that is not a dog each night
watching over you
weighted down, come back
as a single breath
and the Earth is calmed
in pieces, not yet out loud
one against the other.
*
Who better, stone
knows all about burials
and hillsides –its slow rise
would shelter you
the way these walls
still surface one by one
from some long-gone sea
whose weeds are paired
once in place as the grave
it takes to make stone stone
given a name, a shadow in front
to soak up the ravines
the chisel, the sledge
that go on counting dirt
step by step as if one
more than the other
was on fire –stone
has been there before
–look around, ruins
still standing and your body
all those years walking away.
*
Even here you rattle these keys
as if this lock is giving off light
left to right, scraping against hooves
iron bits, stirrups half spit, half scalded
by cries to turn, more! get to the end
or let go though you are working this knob
the way all sores have a story to tell
lift your fingertips over and over
as the need to open the Earth in silence
in the dark where everything you touch
is hillside, slipping away and the door
goes back to begin again, night after night.
About the Author: 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 Family of Man Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2021. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at simonperchik.com
To view one of his interviews please follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8
More Perchik in ZiN Daily: https://www.zvonainari.hr/single-post/2018/12/27/face-to-face-simon-perchik
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