Simon Perchik

Drink and you are surrounded :the sea
will never forgive
-even these rocks couldn't live forever.

Your last breath will beg for water
-one great sea, one dome
-even now from under the sea floor
flowers so many places at once.

Your thirst is all that will last
-a formless crumbling against your lips
-you will breathe to restore
call out for stones and roots and bells

and rebuild the Earth -you still gather
at each construction site
and bedrock made sacred again
flowing past your cheeks -you walk

where the crews from job to job
and stars smelling from Spring rain
from footings -these workers

know you're washing a great hall
prepare air holes on all sides
-you are dipping into a stream
entering from everywhere at once

the way fires still rise -before you die
there will be a doorway :two rivers
slender, upright, shapely, firm
-you will cry out

and hear a small cup overflowing
-a brilliant sound, rushing with power
-you will reach down
for its comfort and forever.

Stone after stone this overburdened candle
clinging to its tears, its mountains
that smell from tides
from far off blue :a final wave
hardening midair, its sea all night

falling into dew --I light this candle
as if it expected you, lift it
and the solitary Earth get a better look
--all these stones and yet their winds
are far away, always far and never moving.

No. It's not that at all.

I try to watch how the mountain range
brightens when my hand lets go your breast
--its great light everywhere
and the graceful rivers to taper it
the way coastlines are carried off
by seabirds stretching out
and prairie grass half thunderclap
half rock, boundless and flowing.

No, not that either. You dead stay wet
each match tormented, slowly
and along this sandpaper strip
with its box scratched open, helplessly blue
--between your lips a still damp flame
let out :your breath sharp, certain, lit
held tight in my fist.

their heat can't strangle what's left
from a light older than water
half remembered, half falling now
as dried-out breezes, rock
no one has ever seen, overflowing.

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Psychic Meatloaf Poetry Journal