*

All our clothes, cleansed and nakedness
—we hear the drying, branch to branch
as if a bell would ring and the sky
back away, strip itself—there is no rain
but memory :one thin rope
and everything dries in pairs.

We talk helplessly without our clothes
—the words sitting by themselves
getting used to the light, our room
smaller and what we say is drying too
—we sit and under this clothesline
stronger than what was washed

and shown. We match this ritual
with public care, with a morning
greater than anything else in the sky.  

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His collection Family of Man is forthcoming from Pavement Saw Press.