Simon Perchik


Two Poems

*
Katherine is reading this
and in the slow rain between each word
she hears her lips closing in

the way a love note is folded
kept for years alone in a drawer
half wood, half as if its darkness

is after something else on the page
she can’t remember touching before
vaguely, if someone older says so

though a star can be born and die
before its light reaches her eyes
holding on to these dim shapes

that have no sound yet –it’s too soon
–she will forget how far and you
what she hears at every chance.



*
Though it’s familiar this flower
doesn’t recognize the breeze
wriggling out the ground

as that distance without any footsteps
–its petals have no memory left
no scent that can expand into mist

prowling for more darkness
the way moonlight tries to remember
once passing through the Earth

on all fours, sniffing for stones
hidden from where your fingers
will clasp each other sideways

and the dirt still close by
–will smother all that happened
has no past, means nothing now.




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 www.simonperchik.com.
 
 
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