Five Poems by Simon Perchik: It's evening outside, Though over the doorway, As if you could untie each finger, This feeble kitchen match, Again this curve comes loose

Five Poems
by Simon Perchik

It's evening outside

It's evening outside the burn unit
where this snapshot grafted in place
still cools the gutted page
has absorbed its memory :the album
all night filling with smoke
though the engine stopped and you
are standing alone, smiling.

To the side a faithful tree
with no leaves and those goggles
don't help --not yet but someday
a dependable dressing you will hear
years later as this tree still young
hear there were summers and rain.

Someone is working on it, a paper
you can eat in the open
and once in your bloodstream
rolls around and around
with all that laughter you forgot
as warm as if yesterday
--you must be having a great time.

Though over the doorway

Though over the doorway
an old horseshoe clinks
empties inside a single nail

keeping it warm --a small room
a stove, the iron pot
covered with a ceiling

used to a door
that opens and closes
for no reason at all

collects what's around
left out for good luck
then winter

--even in the cold
you sleep on this kitchen floor
with its invisible nails

and creaking side to side
the way the sun is struck
one morning to the next

then back after the burial
--a clear advantage
--you don't give the sun a chance

let it burn as the faint scent
from oak flooring
--you have to make it work.

As if you could untie each finger

As if you could untie each finger
let go so your fist
would drift till it's empty

the way all roads lean
and once into the turn
you check for snow and falling rocks

that never fall except as sand
and salt from ocean mist
and those bonfires all night

lit along the shore
--with just one hand you fight back
wring from this curve in the road

the huge truck rushing past
filled half with water, half
with seabirds, half with another sky

hacked out for more mountainside
--you are forever finding turns
that come back to you as dirt

overflow with its darkness
its thirst with no room
not a breath, not a word, nothing.

This feeble kitchen match

This feeble kitchen match
leans the way a magician's cane
strikes the stage in flames
doves and all, shaking more dust
from that same darkness
each match shares with stars
left behind, in there somewhere

and your chest snap open
for those jack-in-the-box flowers
stretching out, confident
the dirt is warm, has no other use

--you will explode, give up everything
become an offering and the ice under you
weaker and weaker set out
for any minute now and your arm.

Again this curve comes loose

Again this curve comes loose
--head-on with the hillside
lifted into your arms

though you dead still listen
for those cars stopping by
in rags, emptied as if a flat

would make the difference
become a bubble, breathe
the way a stone will fit

inch by inch into your mouth
guide the Earth safely down
to lay your fingers on

--you sift for leaks you can use
over and over, facing you
the louder the better.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Poetry, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com..

Copyright 2014, © Simon Perchik. This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.