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SIMON PERCHIK'S recent books include The Gandolph Poems (White Pine Press) and Touching the Headstone (Stride). His poems have appeared in publications including The Partisan Review, Colorado Review, Manoa, Massachusetts Review and Chelsea. He lives in New York. * A click and its likeness can't change, curled the way rain yellows though you hold on almost make out the grin that could be yours - it's been years, minutes and even with your arms apart you have forgotten the smell the fleece-lined gloves filled with dry leaves half paper, half iron half pinned to this snapshot still bleeding from a thumbtack and your shoulders - you don't recognize the hand left holding up the sky to look for the other bringing it a morning ripped from wings and mountainside that can't close or open or dry :the rust still waving, gutting the cheeks whatever day it was. * You spoonfeed the dead half deaf, half lame, half with rocks to defend yourself though you wipe her lips on the one dark lapel cut adrift, leaning against the other the way each mourner will rest and for a while try to remember her name guess at it stone by stone with the water circling overhead till her mouth opens wide - you throw coals into her throat and from the snipped lapel stuffed with sea-winter, cliffs spoon by spoon the secret pact where the last to survive keeps something on foot still singing something she can use - a comb a bracelet, an old love song louder! shoes, a small suitcase. * Embedded and this statue still tightening its grip tries to revive the horse expects its crumbling reins to smell from leather and crowding - you squint the way the general looks for a small thing encased in a season exactly where he left it waits in the rain for your black umbrella to open make room for you and under the darkness hold the Earth steady while his horse works its way closer to this rain still wet from the climbing turn into ice and longing, lost - its front hooves mid-air shaking the stone loose for its likeness even in moonlight almost breathing, already side by side that could go on if it had to. * From that first wave, ruined wobbling on its back half weeds half bottomsong, tormented the way clouds still fill with seawater then veer into twilight - it took the darkness though you bend best you can sifting the damp sand as if you forgot something - in the dark it's hard to keep your hands from running aground, stranded palms up, one to test for rain the other for picking up small stones already soft, almost empty and between your lips overtaking the dry endless cry on its climb toward kisses and pieces - one hand kept empty to cradle your mouth the other drifting into lullaby. * You fold one hand as if the wall left without you, is crumbling and this love note beginning to yellow the way flowers lead back the dead, the lips, a mouth - between these bricks and morning one hand reaches down loosening another stone all night carried from the skyline and back as if it were used to moonlight, has trapped a summer evening, a heaviness, the moss almost familiar, the breasts, the cold. * Once into its slow climbing turn |
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