There was no tree nearby though leaves
are still falling where you stood
slowly waving goodbye as if its silence
was not yet the tool for turning your lips
into the breezes that don’t move
—you built with that hand a grave
filled it with wood and corners
and someone who loved you
who can no longer breathe out
return your words kept warm
as if there were now two Earths
one for you, the other the cold.
–
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 (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.