*
You glance the way fishermen aim
then cast their nets and though the camera
will struggle it’s the sea that needs
mending :another chance
at how much longer in the embrace
corners will form for a photograph
already in fear –nothing moves
where what will come and what not
makes you feel for glass, want to be seen.
*
Again a calendar, each page
is burying you in the sea
that races past your forehead
with only your hands for shoreline
and one year more
–by nailing it to this wall
you agree not to forget
and fast, go hungry :trust
will return, already draining the light
from the sun, sprinkling its warmth
not yet those old love songs
choking louder and louder
as days, weeks, wing beats
and from this heavy paper
an overwhelming joy
–it will happen, embraced by circles
and fresh scented shining blades
–you will lean into this wall
become branches and leaves
that are not yet smoke
though month after month
stay close, want to be lifted
remembered as the dotted line
the promised, no longer falling.
*
All but the splash is thickening
half as marrow, half
feathers and long ago seas
share this pot with bones
dropped end over end
though they stay, are growing wings
the way mourners are overcome
by turbulence, lean into each other
–it’s a dark kitchen, barely room
for the talons that will stretch
are already flying side by side
as smoke reaching around the silence
all afternoon carrying the dead
though finally every bone becomes too heavy
from nothing inside but shoreline.

Simon Perchik is widely published in places like The New Yorker, The Nation, Partisan Review, Massachusetts Review, Pavement Saw, and Southern Poetry Review. He resides in East Hampton, New York and has published seventeen collections of poetry, including Hands Collected; Poems 1949- 1999.