The embattled gunpowder
arrayed on his palette, the fields
given chance after chance --his skull
cracks, the dust
exploding under the wide brush stroke :the sun
layer after layer never loud enough.
He lifts the sun closer to his ear
to the lost dog barking
at that long, curved train
whistling the deep breath
hid across the tracks --his ears
crushed and he
can't reach them from the ground, the trigger
still warm, familiar :a small brush
--canvas was always orderly, it stopped
blood, it almost calmed the harvest
from running away
--how else do you fill a hand
that aches for crumpled rags
and the cleansing spray, the dark mist
in his arm at last
strangling the sun --how else
could it have been
but a ladder :crossties
that carry back the light
too heavy for even the Earth to lift
--and the pistol! calling everywhere
--it must have sounded like that dog
whose ears were just as useless
and tormented --how else
where blood from the ears is sacred
and he listens
wishing, be found and carried home.
Each base egg-white, the kid
rounding third, slips and you hear
the ball still falling.
Nothing wants to fly
not even the rain.
You hear the leaves and look
at your hands --a small plane
is reaching out to be fed, a field
jumping to its death.
It's almost noon.
Nothing could be further away. Or darker.
Even with your eyes closed
it's never dark enough
--you need both hands to hear the leaves
the cry they make
to be fed on the ground
as worms :not even the rain
with all its feathers.
You hear the ball carry back its shadow
on your shadow and your hands
seem to move, the plane
caught in midair though your eyes
were closed, were fumbling
for the rain in your hands
still falling.
This jetty groomed :an Assyrian beard
holding fast, every wave
exact --a nomadic tribe
and the grazing herd --throw a stone
and watch how water still circles its prey
--fish live with this
--the deal is they report
which rock is fattest, the water in turns
escorts, barricades, shrinks their eyelids
into burning glass. --whatever moves
is dark enough, a hook
from under its mask strikes a throat
a whisper splashes sideways
and the sea rises --I lift but my eyes
bend closer as if the dead
could be cured on an anvil :this jetty
thrashing against my cheeks
tighter than the way a spy
is still hung head down to drain
what breath is left, no one inhale
its tainted and the forgery.
and the waves again and again
brought to the exact spot
as if one splash would reach
its underground stream whose eyes never close
--every rock is afraid, even I am sure
these waves dread the sea that led them here
rapacious and head first its strangling calm
--this jetty couldn't wait for the drought
to break the water in half
again and again in half :each wave
after wave with the only weakness they know
and I still hold that thrashing tail
that Sunday sometimes gone for weeks
sometimes the stone
I brought in from the rain.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Poetry, The New Yorker and elsewhere. According Library Journal "Perchik is the most widely published unknown poet in America."