[39] Untitled Vignette, Simon Perchik

With a root’s single mindedness
you bathe wearing just one glove
the way a tree just born

already is wrapped in bark
kept dry and alone
for the night after night

that would become your heart
—you can hear it in the water
as it rises to grow the streams

not yet those summer breezes
filling your arms with darkness
though you grasp one

and not the other, the hand
with fingers no longer naked
whose rings tell you nothing.