Magnapoets Free Verse and Form

Iris Dan - The Alchemist's Wife

The Alchemist's Wife

 

I. Transmutation

 

Transmutation

is not what I’m after.

What good would it do me

if where I now have

a lump of lead

I had a lump of gold?

 

What I would like is

(by whatever means –

physical, chemical, magical)

to ease, from core to surface,

the specific weight of the lead

 

to work in a network

(fractals, perhaps; it would be nice

to have a pattern) of fissures, tubes,

canals, and other communicating

vessels. To fill them with water.

 

And then to put in some fish.

 

 

II. Conjunction

 

This you call the height of mystical love:

sun and moon squeezed together

in the neck of the retort

 

fusing (for lack of space)

into a two-headed, three-legged creature

good for nothing but sinking

to rot at the bottom

 

while you sit there idly

expecting this pitiful mess

to turn into gold

 

 

III. The Alchemists’ Lane (Zlata ulica)

 

When the women’s work

and the children’s play are done,

I like to slip into the street

to listen to the ages

 

a defenestration now and then

and sometimes

the smell of charred flesh

(the old Jan, whom they burnt as a heretic

and the young one, who set fire to himself

when the tanks came into the city)

 

clay crashing upon clay, I hear

the steps of the Golem

he does an excellent job, they say,

by day drawing water and chopping wood

by night collaring evildoers

never tiring, never complaining

(one day, let me tell you,

he will raise against his master)

 

the Castle above, and the Emperor

asking for gold (not spiritual gold, but gold);

as yet, the alchemists have failed to deliver

every now and then, the man from the Castle

threatens to throw us out of this house

 

when the night solidifies into glass

insurance agent Dr. K emerges:

his gaunt and ghostly body

has gone through all

the alchemical processes; he dies daily

and takes all the ages with him;

at midnight he goes home to his father

 

Yet I wonder -

 

I Walk Today with the Emilys (a fragment)by David Matthews

Three liters of moonbeam,
A half-carafe of color,
A catalog of cellos...
Leaves fall through my thought
Like snowflakes on the river at night,
And time levies its tax
On this ransack of memory.
The ledger of loss and regret
Lies open to the wind,
And winter comes to my eyes.

Today I pause in my going,
The echo of my footsteps
And pounding of my heart
Caught up in a slant of light
And cloud
As Turner might have painted it
Or Monet...

I walk today with the Emilys —
Dickinson and Brontë.
They never let me down.

Rain, Like Misery, Engulfs (J.Armstead)

Heaven never stops
draining
it's burning toxic refuse
down upon your head.

The debris of broken prayers,
the refuse of disillusionment,
the viscous sludge of stillborn hopes,
pouring from a rusted spigot
at the ass end of heartbreak.

Wash your hands before it stains.

You dream of this cold wet
burning,
a furious sensation,
a sense of being pulled under
the tumultuous surf
by electric gravity,
and you don't want it to end.

Drowning in a chrome and poison rain...

So goddamn romantic.

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Originally published in the collection "The 45 Apocrypha" by Joseph Armstead.   Image courtesy of Dreamstime Photographic Stock, "Pink Rose" by Dolgachov, dreamstime_3364285.jpg