A Flower Bursting From
My Head © Dee Rimbaud

back to Periphery Online ABOUT THE POET Simon Perchik [since 2003] 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 2008. For more information, including his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website. "Whoever reads my work will early on recognize that it comes from a source intended to compliment the real world. There is nothing surrealistic in my poems. But poetry, to be effective, needs more than a restatement of reality; it needs magic. And it is that magic, the illusion that gives the work whatever power it has. It is that power that distinguishes poetry from prose."

UNTITLED Leave it to the lumber company —every December the same snowlit barn —another calendar and already a clean bedspread is covering the invisible windows, the mourners room to room and near the blocked door the same tree dying in the cold —with both hands you move its sun closer lift its rope-ends gathered together —you almost make a knot hold back the tree from leaving from growing those prizewinning sizes and row after row tract houses each evening lit by a child half pony half reaching up for apples. A new calendar—just what you need for the wall you never find time to patch —one nail should do it and you make a hammer from the year ahead. It's June, still snowing and though no flowers bloom the barn's only door has opened, the hay slowly green again, making friends with you following the way each hillside never lets go reaches out and every year higher —these same drifts once the wingfeathers from gusts half hooves, half snow and in your arms the days, the steadied, softly held together.

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This page last updated 2008.6.13