*

Simon Perchik

 

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.

 

 

               

 

 

 

 

 

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