Thursday Mar 28

PerchikSimon 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.

 ---------

 

 
 
* 
 
—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.