*
How you fold your hands, tin
is not what you can count on
for turns –off shore is still risky
though you squeeze this rim
the way seabirds are trained
would suddenly dip one wing
and with the other the soda
breaks apart as if your arms
were left in the open
and side to side could only guess
where you will find rest
and nothing else.
*
You can’t hold back this knob
already resistant to sunlight
filling your lungs
the way all the firewood on Earth
waits in these clouds
as cries and ruin
and though the sky is aging
you hurry through, each breath
weak in the doorway
covers it with a lid
half lit, half spreading out
to open, close and you
are breathing for two, the air
given some mist
to find its way home.
*
Depending on the height, dust
is colder in the morning
though once you tuck the rag
it’s the shelf that staggers
pulls you closer and slowly
smothered by something damp
made from lips, shoulders
and the invisible breathing
into pieces, smaller and smaller
till the air around your heart
won’t let go this wood
no longer days or falling.
Where the sky dries up
these sunflowers scale back
though just as easily
you could take a chance
trap this rain left over
growing wild the way each petal
breathes in while laying down
where your mouth would be
come from a name
written on a tree
clasping it and the sun
not yet a wound that oozes
–you could drink from a slope
and place by place tame this mud
to bend, gather in wells
scented with melting stones
and the darkness
you no longer want to stop.
*
This wall is for the map, the rest
to separate the distances
as if they had a beginning, would forget
someone didn’t write it down
the way the calendar, by heart
will reach around what happens after
and still recognize a simple shoreline
hidden between the unused years
that no longer protect you
though you let them hold on
as if places mattered
–a single wall, the nail
even when bleeding from its mouth
points out where you are
the rivers and the others.
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 Gibson Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2019. 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 link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8
–Art by Dom Crossley — Artist Profile