“[You can't tell what death is saying]” by Simon Perchik

You can't tell what death is saying
— it looks you in the face as the sound
when you are carried the way a veil

wraps its sorrow in streams feeding on shores
that know only thirst — you take the chance
fall in love with death, tell it your lips

grow colder, heavier — from the start
you're kept from everything else
— it's all you know, the step by step

each losing its way by looking
for the other that is already a shadow
will carry you where no one has lived before.

Simon Perchik

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 Reflection in a Glass Eye, published by 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 at www.simonperchik.com.
To view one of his interviews please follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8

Headshot: Rossetti Perchik

Photo Credit: Staff