TORY DENT
Walking Away I
Persimmons spumed underfoot the churlish path where no path exists
Already the famous shimmering from the unguarded pond up ahead,
the lavender loveletter that revises itself by resurfacing again and again.
Your face, smoothed like a stone overturned by the sea in my brain
the incorrigible memory contrived to its seafaring metonymical place.
Beloved, the stone weighs me down necessarily, analogous to the
weights
used by astronauts and sea divers to achieve equilibrium
in
their voyages;
the stone, the loveletter overturned in the poem I rewrite like a
loveletter.
Certainly there's promised a clearing beyond the forest all of us believe in
if only subliminally when we glance at the fuschia horizon and wish
if only subliminally, as we always do, that things were different.
Toward the clearing, toward the horizon, upon the sea, within the
sstreet,
persimmons, movie stubs, exquisite odds from the ocean's bottom
spurn underfoot while we caress their natural likenesses in our pockets.
SIMON PERCHIK
334
Each Halloween and lifting the door
[ back away in horror, throwing apples
- the dead are always hungry
but on this night already icing over
they come without moving their lips
- even these sweets smell from ashes
from snow burning to the ground and you
are water now, wandering door to door
the way mountainsides sometimes forget
and nothing can be heard
except this thin waxpaper, unfolded
crackling in my hands.
