Amy MacLennan © 2011 All Rights Reserved
Amy MacLennan © 2011 All Rights Reserved
Even the Earth keeps its clouds
on the move though you have forgotten
all gestures begin with a train
setting out—you expect change
and the constant far-off glow
still trying to connect the nights
with nights once caves and distant herds
—you know how it goes, the grass
was always greener so you sit
let a million years slowly recede
till the ice carries you back
where tracks had already taken root
in silt beginning first as a creek
then trickling toward another
—you can hear the hooves
and along the gravel bed—be sure to wave
touch nothing! let your still cold breath
lie down beside you on its way for water.
***
Look after this rock, it needs
your help, left on your headstone
where the sea has always come
for the stillness that lasts
though your hand never opens
as shoreline further and further out
—calm this child, let it nurse
and from your breast another hour
another sky—let it sleep
float up as mountainside
that is not a mouth
filled with that strange milk
all stone once was, what a heart
still does yet it will never remember you
or the empty cradle-song
half white marble, half
breaking apart from want
—care for this flesh
that has your cheeks or perhaps
in the darkness it called you
by name without leaving.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, the New Yorker, the DMQ Review, and elsewhere. For more information, including his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.