Five Poems

Simon Perchik

It’s a struggle though your legs inhale the vague heaviness walking around your heart

no longer breathe out
or lower you to where the night comes down from the ceiling

as dirt mixed with silence  and wood –you’re too weak
to walk the streets –the dresses

are empty and your skin takes in too much air
would float the way a plank

is salvaged from a shipwreck
to make a likeness, a clearing
you can fall on and her shoes too

will dry –you sit on this bed as if both pockets are stuffed
with waves, rocks and further apart.

You settle in the way stone
is squeezed from that same darkness
dirt is made –know all about puddles

and shrinkage, content with pillars
struggling as if you too are lost are lowering your forehead

pouring it slowly into your eyes
cold from both hands and undertow 
–you dead have built a winter here

share it among these mourners
who kneel as if something would stop
let the tears wrung from its shadow

seep into your bones, fill them till even these rocks are in reach
fall to the ground, broken loose

to bring you a little something
keep you warm piece by piece
from a bed not used anymore.

This carpet dropped at your feet
welcomes you though every path
is due a clear reason trailing along 

–speak up! spread out, walk
the way great oceans break into foam
just to count while every one here

is devoured trying to go on
as an endless shoreline –we know why
with our fingers reaching up

you turn your head –louder! talk
as if these leaves will never dry
are waiting for you to make a sound

that’s not another number
added to ours –for you silence is enough but we too have a mouth –tell us how

draw out a breath that will have a place
as if nothing happened –every death
is named for you, isn’t this enough.

You point as if your shadow
dug its way out, cools
surfacing at last in a darkness

once melted down for rain
and one last time though it’s your finger 

splitting open the Earth
lifting it from the bottom
that’s no longer a morning

covered with mud and distances, has your legs
your arms, your eyes.

What you still carry to bed
is this water coming from a well
icing over, masks your cheeks

and though there’s no pillow
it’s your mouth that’s melting
filling the hole where she used to sleep 

–in such a darkness say what you want
this sheet took the white from your eyes
|that look at nothing but walls 

–you are washing your face with a room
emptied out to freeze her half where there are no mornings left.