*
And this scar still hungry
scratching the way volcanoes
reach for nourishing snow
and just above the treeline
in back my ear, clamped
as if a mountaineer had placed
a rock and at the peak
exactly at dawn, points out
the soothing cold where air
comes to die and another year
has just been born
is already listening for leaves
for icy streams, for fish
carried back to spawn
in the rising clear water
— for you but you hear only the cloud
still damp, the slow climbing turn
where my scar bites down
on another Spring grown fat from snow
— you don't hear where to swerve
where to circle and the sky too
is lost, is looking for the Earth
for you and on my shoulder
higher and higher more skin
already dead and this little stone
I can't put on the ground.
Simon Perchik is an attorney from East Hampton, New York, whose
poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Rafts
(Parsifal Editions, 2007) is his most recent collection. For more information,
including his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete
bibliography, visit his website at www.geocities.com/simonthepoet.