ALCHEMICAL MEDITATION
It abides in secret on my pencil tip—
Greenland graphite, fossil bodies, the spans
of lost beginnings hoarded from the deeps
into softest stone across geologic time
to bring its word here for the wind to edit,
dawn quickened in folds of a stringent pool.
So life leaps from non-life, leaps outside the loop
of the un-living factum, the material pit,
to ride the sudden unfolding of a tide,
billions of years passing, before it snaps
into the billowing the sea-vents emit;
before it steadies, permeates, picks up speed
to surface dimly from the thrumming deeps.
There at the latest summit, another pool
in another random smattering of time
rounds out the new like a thought on the tip
of a tongue. To parse intent across vast spans
requires faith, or brief belief in the self-edit-
ing savvy of an always avid tide,
prodigal matter surging at Cambrian speed—
such selahs in the shales!—so another welter snaps
across scales, loop by impossible loop,
like a flicker from the Godhead’s fingertip,
everything bodied, so even the stones emit
light.
Perhaps, accounting, one might venture time
the mirror in which the Face reflecting it
sustains this aching flow from the very pit
of things, edge-less edge, below the deeps.
The longing eye looks from a shallow pool
at all that is, infinitesimal bridge that spans
across absence the way a synapse snaps
into mind, into place. Nothing can stem it.
Picture a loop that evolves into a loop,
how always something new leaps from the tide,
everything burgeoning borne at light speed,
though momently all looks destined for the pit.
An epitaph is not the final tip that snaps
one back into the deeps—sad, digressive pool.
The loop that is everything emits such speed
it spans the tide that will edit time, all, yes, into all.
