Home > Poetry > *
profile/simon-perchik.md
Published: Wed Jul 1 2009
Diego Isaias Hernández Méndez, Convirtiéndose en characoteles / Sorcerers Changing into Their Animal Forms (detail), 2013, oil on canvas. Arte Maya Tz’utujil Collection.
*

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 Partisan ReviewThe Nation, AGNI, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. (updated 4/2016)

 

Back to top