*

by Simon Perchik

With a sudden glow one leg
begins to bend though your heart
creaks, each step growing sunlight

from rocks the way mountains
flower just by breaking apart
though inside nothing moves

waits to brush against these dead
—they know what happened
write down the place, have the lock

and you walk by as the same few days
or weeks or now and then
a put-aside-half shows up

just for the view, slowly, as if you
are no longer alive, left as you were
face to face for a long time.

 

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in The Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His two collections are Family of Man (Pavement Saw Press) and Rafts (Parsifal Editions). (3/2009)