*
You never get used to it
left and right –moonlight
all that’s left on your grave
each night heavier, bitter
with no place to fall
sometimes as snow, sometimes
counting on pebbles from others
all night bringing stars
to strike the ground over and over
covering you with shadows
and still you’re cold
come here as paths and distances.
• • •
*
To live like that, listening
as the sudden dive to the bottom
and though your mouth longs for a sea
death happens wherever water goes
–you hear the rain passing by
with shells and salt flaking off
from a dress that is still new
covered with moss and grieving
–you slip your hand through
as if each sleeve over and over
is filled with moss not yet blossoming
where the branches at the top
dig themselves in, opening the Earth
and the small stones that are your lips
filled with falling and thirst.
• • •
*
What you hear is your chest –with each crackle
more rain tearing holes in the sky
still struggling to open –your heart
sloshes around, growing salt from grass
kept wet the way dirt takes the shape
you use for shadows when there’s no water
–you stretch out naked as the ocean
on and on without stopping to breathe
or dry or arm over arm become the last
the slow climbing turn still missing
circling to calm a nothing beach fire
going mouth to mouth to burn itself out.
• • •
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 Osiris Poems, published by box of chalk, 2017. For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at simonperchik.com.