Simon Perchik

Gary Charles Wilkens

Dorianne Laux

Two Poems

You can read in this light :a face
caressed :the flush
across each page --in this light

your cup can see its soft clay
still pressed against those fingers
that won't stay :your son just born

already knows this, his thumb
shaping his mouth for some kiln
though every kiss will crack, knows

yet lets a sheen blow
softly over your eyes
cooling them, not become too crisp

--in this light you thought you forgot
you can see a young girl
brushing her cheek that still aches
though you shave twice a day

--even the words are warm :a shine
written into the words
that they might return, each page
the way copper plaques clamp on great mornings

will guide your son, outloud remember
who slept on this site
who was first lit here.

*

Each night the longing
as if it had a pedigree
could bark, a collar
and answers to a howl
my father chose and his father
and down to when this night
first lost its way. And wanted.

No lands, without a flag :an estate
older than boundaries --my son
as every star is bred
short, weak, wandering toward
a gesture :this soup

is always cold, allowed the silence
to remember, hear again my hands
rummaging. Or my father's. Or forever.

Nothing finishes. My son is fed
on the same floor except now
there's a table, just as rickety :the spoon

won't reach his lips
without the needed spill :the family name
written into his eyes
so deep nothing except the dark.
And missing.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Readers interested in more are invited to read his essay "Magic, Illusion and Other Realities" at http://www.geocities.com/simonthepoet/, which has a complete bibliography.

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