*
What’s left are its pilings
pinned down the way the pier
once smelled from marble
though the sails could tell
one wave from another
were content as fingertips
and shoreline, here, here, stretched
without holding your hand in water
–what juts from this hillside
has outlasted its ships, ropes, tears
stacked in crates for a better night
and you are now the horizon
slowly dragging the sea back
for more darkness, its mouth open
hoarse from lips singled out
covered with mud, with a moonlight
filled with wood close by
kept wet for you and leaving.
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 Osiris Poems, published by box of chalk, 2017. For more information, including free e-books, and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion, and Other Realities,” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.
Clementine Unbound 