Jed Myers

To Rise on Earth

                                   —after Jericho Brown   

Water of us once shined in the Tigris.
I saw this last night in a room in the sun.

Yes, last night, a room deep in the sun,
where inside all that light was a pool.

In all that blazing fusion, a pool,
a birthing oasis, cool and still,    

a bottomless uterine spring, and still    
I can see its clear fluid rippling to life,

see the life-ripples writhing their way clear
to rise on Earth, these splashes of sun    

that we are, star-flashes. And the surprise     
bloody show where we meet in the river—

my sickle sword, your blood in the river.
Water of us once shined the Tigris.

Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time(MoonPath Press), and, forthcoming, Learning to Hold (Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award). Recent writing appears or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Poetry Review, RHINO, The Greensboro Review, Rust + Moth, Terrain.org, On the Seawall, The National Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Myers lives in Seattle, where he edits the journal Bracken.