Even these weeds panic circle around your fingertips as if the stream they fasten on knows only one direction —the dead still fold their arms, dare you to raise your hand, ask for salt clear the ground before the no! no! stops and in the silence makes room for flowers and your mouth sweetened by the warm breath it still remembers as sunlight struggling and the pull up! pull up!
You hold this stone to your cheek as if you hear the bed widening and a second pillow keeping the other half warm though its bell-scented blanket is filled with driftwood and snow covering the Earth each night with the arm you sleep on —she wanted the room cold calling out from a corner the way your shadow turns still faces the wall to remember where by holding on to stop! stop it! just stop it! it’s the window that’s open and breathing.
A ritual spray —two fingers dripping from a small cup to pull it closer —you need more emptiness though it’s the leaves squeezing their prey underwater the way your fever feeds on shoreline and foam from an enormous moon leaving the sea still naked —drop by drop what’s left is struggling on the floor kept wet for its cry swallowed whole as driftwood scented with night after night.
You single out this bottle the way each wish starts as emptiness and place to place alone, uncertain she will become night skies and mountainside broken open for the river that’s late still drifting along in your chest and its longing for rain —you are listening for water from the 40s, defenseless not yet the glass bringing you closer washing over her, making it happen.
It’s what you do, the mirror becomes a sheet, the bed is in there somewhere —you squint and under this frost the glass is warmed, covers your eyes even more than tomorrow —you end each day inside a hill on its way to this sink where without any hope the faucet holds your hand and all the time pulls the mist back in as skies and kisses clouding over flowing into an empty dress worn only at night lets you breathe again —without a blanket, without a pillow you barely see the silence covering a mouth with your lips.
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 press, 2017. For more information, including free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.