Untitled
Simon Perchik

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*
It’s the silence when this mirror
becomes a door–with a forward step
a bolt slams shut and your face
 
is cleared for the slow climb
into another’s where the sky
asks itself will anyone return
 
still waving goodbye :you shave
to find the way out, shine
from scalding water and the razor
 
clutched so those afternoons
stay warm by closing your eyes
when quieted and drowning.
  
*
You try to breathe by stretching out
though this couch begins and ends
as not enough room –from behind
 
a woman is pressing against you
warming the Earth with a cushion
softer than when it was her breasts
 
with the language the dead speak at home
helping them dress, undress, whisper
to pull you close –you can hear
 
her word for touch that has no grass
and underneath its heaviness
wandering off as arms and closer.
 
 
 
*
Loose inside this rock
its light is surfacing
as driftwood –a sunken ship
 
hollowed out by waves
by swiping at prey
with night skies and coming back
 
–it’s a cup you’re holding
darkened from shallow water
and overhead a second moon
 
draining its still warm shadow
lets you drown as drift
–there’s nothing left to swallow
 
and though its mouth is closed
there is one moon now
for distances, the other, emptiness.
 
*
The same cup each afternoon
waters this table with a sea
just starting –already the rim
 
is too far off and the coast
no safer, feeds on tilt
the way the sun all its life
 
flies end over end into hillsides
though this spill could soothe it now
cool the fever in your arm
 
by the slow rollover reaching out
to return as land, grow butterflies
a mouth and from wood, its flowers. 
 
 *
These ashes never had a chance
and though you sift for vents
your arms grow longer, tugged
 
by the great weight between two fingers
still wobbling in a slow climbing turn
that needs more time to grieve
 
to embrace this table, become wood
the way an abandoned millstone
will catch fire on its own, begin again
 
with one sun where two should be
and from its light the unbearable silence
trying to reach down, come close
 
–your arms are about to burn
leave your body as smoke
pulling aside your hair to look for bones
 
for underground streams wet enough
to pull the Earth into your mouth
as the word for lifted by hand.