Simon Perchik

TWO UNTITLED POEMS

Though your eyes are closed
the sun no longer wanders where your arms

stay folded, can't wave to each other
or help you stand up, reach for the same kisses

now rocks and shoreline  ̶ it's your average sun
glances around and for a few hours

winters in the Earth, side by side you dead
as nights though you too came alone

sent here as if you had won a second chance
could become a morning that won't go away.

*

They must once have been the same  ̶ sunlight
and this riverbed  ̶ miles apart yet both

dried as the word for next followed by silence
 ̶ to yourself, begin to count by twos

the way all bottom stones are first drained
then gathered around, become evenings

as if the sun had forgotten how, lets you
empty your eyes slowly into the night.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Rosenblum Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2020. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.