Untitled Suite, 3

Again this shrub each Spring
stirred by the same passion
its leaves never forgot

–one heart safely dead center
the other rash
brushes against your shoulder

and goes one from there
–they sense this bush
is pregnant, feed it blooms

and the root floats up
so the child inside is born
in the year-after-year fire

that returns even the dead
with flowers and thorns
drained dry for the later

–a splinter is enough
giving birth always to twins, one
a mast from an abandoned ship

the other floating downstream
nourished by the slow move
from leaf to leaf reaching down

as rain now that the shoreline
has disappeared and in its place
a fence, a gate and the outcome clear.

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Untitled Suite, 1
Untitled Suite, 2
Untitled Suite, 4
Untitled Suite, 5

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. For more information, including his essay, “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.