Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker and elsewhere. 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>.

What I hear, flat, off key
--my eyes take control, squint
and the sky tightening

--one bird is always rain, the other
a soft hillside
and that girl I almost forgot

arching her still warm tongue --my ear
hardly moving and yet these birds
find me

--you didn't know her
didn't hear the darkness
and deep in my ear

still troubled, unstrung
--do you remember suddenly too close
--the chicks half hidden, their nest

midair --those two huge crows
in close formation
--the flapping cry to your heart.

What I hear, my eyes shaping a sky
that won't seem right, you
will be gone, covered with wings

with what's broken from my eyes
in pieces, still warm, deeper, deeper
and my ear thrown to the ground

--you didn't hear
or when the sky comes at night
to make room for birds and overflowing.

________________________________________________________________________________

This ditch no matter how haggard
won't reach the sea --it does no good
on my knees --sift

as if the sun would sink to the bottom
come to rest near stones
crying to go home --it's useless

to lift my hand again, show me
the river it found, thinks it's gold and
warm
and throw each stone back before it dies.

It does no good to stand --the water
will leave without me, the stones
say something about how the sea

is close or can't be seen from the air
--they've been convinced by this mud --I can
hear
how stones cringe. And close their eyes.