These gravestones are shaped the way every avalanche
wants to enter the Earth –first as a single doorstep
then the rush though the rocks you listen for
are already moons helping you find the door
for holding on while the light under you
becomes another shadow made from wood
lays down as a room that cannot change its mind
is filled with cracked lips, the cold and end over end
the strong corners, the kisses that made it here.
For a few hours every night the floor
slows and the room cuts back
quieted, begins its descent
the way a dead lake is filled
with shoreline –the rug
is used to boards that stay wet
though it’s an iron bed
breaking in half where a pillow
once filled with seabirds
still clings to the other side
before it opens –it takes time
but the floor has to be washed
every night just to hear the dress
touching down, folding over the mop
the rotting wooden handle.
You wait at a fence though the yard
no longer moves –all this air
and not one mouthful for these dead
left in the open where each leaf
is handed over as the loss
that was the one too many
and from the same gate, half wood
half kept open as those slow climbing turns
that never make it back, forget how
to fall from moonlight, make room
for more wood and these dead
feeling their way down hand over hand.
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 Osiris Poems, published by boxofchalk, 2017. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit www.simonperchik.com.