simon perchik

These wings I smooth :a dim light
lifts off, my jacket
hanging on to rotted sky and haze

and the attic still climbs
banks into the storm --mice
must love to fly --my wings

painted blue so long ago
and somehow a cloud among this mess
--it's cold up here

--box to box, the planes
unpack, starting up
--what the mice hear is the wait

to trap the sun :the polish
gives so much away
and now the sky

--what they hear is rain
is the mad kept alive
by breathing through their heart

--they hear the wind
shaped by this furious rag
kept empty, smelling from names.


Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Rafts (Parsifal Editions) is his most recent collection. Family of Man (Pavement Saw Press) is scheduled for Fall 2009. For more information, including his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at www.geocities.com/simonthepoet