I am corking bottles,
bugs, sunshine, dirt.
Five minutes of time
that ran sublimely,
into a bottle,
into the cellar
where I will store the world.
Keep the DNA of poems intact.
Cover the last few drops of rain.
A cellar from which
everything can begin again.
I’m corking sounds of voices
not on record,
full of sweat and air and salt.
Into a bottle,
heartaches and birthdays,
pollen from every flower,
dandelions included.
Into jars crammed under stairs,
a Noah’s Ark of atoms,
of paradigms,
a pinch of night,
a spoon of dawn,
nothing excluded
until I run out of corks
and bottles,
and everything’s labeled
to be opened
when time has ended,
when the world succumbs
and is no more.
Except a cellar of dimensions
hidden in parallel time
where someone
will pull a cork out of a bottle
and find it sweet and scary
and superb
and everything can start again
just as it was
when I put it in a bottle.