The Nature Of Fire

 

 

The Nature of Fire

"The  great desire of a flame  is to continually burn.

 The nature of fire is that it always wants more."

~Corvidus the Elder

Under the wing of the Crow

hides a feathery system of madness;

students burn syllables of darkness

spat into the alembic of sanity,
turning gossip of  metaphysicians
wanly cadaverous by starlight,

whispering quicksilver clues.

The philosopher's stone still eludes them

though they work with the frenzy of madmen

to dry the cold humors of water, push
a natural progression of vileness
to purity using the flame.
The nature of fire is that it's immaculate;
the mourning of fire is that it always wants more.

They speak these glowing desires

in the tongue-twisting gibberish of blackbirds,

court the devilish salvation of  oddity,

vulgarly cawing of victory in the

soothing-sweet chant of the damned.

I cannot credential this lunacy

despite my degree in Catastrophe.

I toast it instead with the elegy

of a memory;

our glasses hold legions of flames' flickered casualties

like ladies lavish with luxury

pile amusements in portmanteau'd  piracy,

 

knowing fire will always want more.

 ~December 2013

 

lightly revised, July 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

reposted for desperate poets

   Woe For My Spurs

Original process notes: Poe prefaced many of his short stories with quotes, and many of them were ones he made up, as I did here with my  excerpt from the works of the imaginary alchemist, Corvidus The Elder.   

 

"The philosophers' stone or stone of the philosophers (Latin: lapis philosophorum) is a legendary alchemical substance said to be capable of turning base metals such as lead into gold... It was also sometimes believed to be an elixir of life, useful for rejuvenation and possibly for achieving immortality." ~wikipedia   And what deserves an elegy more?

 

 

Image: Alchemy the Useless Science, Remedios Varo

 

 

Home With The Diatoms

 

 

 

 

Home With The Diatoms

 

 

When I was a child

before sleep we prayed

for love to be shown, for safety to stay,

starved children in Korea to be saved.

Then the light would go off.

I'd put my real bed

of conches and nautilus twists

under the toss of the night's waves.

Regal on the seafloor

shells poked their bubbling heads

up out of snow-sand. Aquarelle fins and

gold-grey eye-globes blinked around me,

all greeted with a princess flip

of my green-scaled tail.

Reclined with coelacanths,

eyes blueing in my head,

all my mother-cut hair grown

long as a squid's arm,

I waited to swim into sleep,

watching the shadows of

far-above gulls mottle the green ceiling,

alone yet blanketed in

life watching over me, drowsing

to the epochs' stereopticon flash.

When we met in the deluge

you called in a lost language

for that nightspell to rise, to link us,

to sink us completely

in diatoms, wave after wave,

kissing underwater, not afraid to breathe

not afraid to drown, kelp-hair

in the undertow fanned and fluttered

summoned by a sea-fire of peace

to make ashes of fear.

 

March 2022

posted for earthweal's weekly challenge:

Shelter

Process note: "..Diatoms are unicellular [microalgae]: they occur either as solitary cells or in colonies, which can take the shape of ribbons, fans, zigzags, or stars..Living diatoms make up a significant portion of the Earth's biomass: they generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year,  take in over 6.7 billion metric tons of silicon each year from the waters in which they live, and constitute nearly half of the organic material found in the oceans..."~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Bright Liquid, © Edmond Dulac    Fair Use

Pink Shell With Sea Weed, 1937  © Georgia O'Keefe    Fair Use

The Bird Alchemist

The Bird Alchemist

The Bird Alchemist 

was small and hero blue,

a most consummate

mountaineer of treetops,

aficionado of the woven twig,

knight-errant of the whipping wind,

fetching his lady favors

of jumping bug and thistledown

in the aquarelle skyscape

of implacable spring.

The Bird Alchemist

was more than his mask,

a Renaissance Bird of arts

and sciences, bearing the commerce

of reproduction for the rippling

sake of his mate's feathered belly

while nocturnal vigils teased him

with the secrets of all things; aloof

in his cypress lab, rocking spellbound

before creation's daft flicker, til

victorious he rose each dawn,

worms transmuted into song.

May 2020

posted for 

Kerry O'Connor's

Skylover Word List for May

and for earthweal's

Open Link

(exploring Monday's theme 

of  the hero quest)

even tho earthweal is one of several word press sites that think I am spam

Note: Aquarelle is a style of painting using thin, typically transparent watercolors, traditionally created by applying each color thru a separate stencil, now more loosely used for the style in general.

Images : Creation of the Birds, © Remedios Varo      Fair Use

Aquarelle Landscape With Bird, © Anna Svennson on Instagram  Fair Use

Undine

Undine

 You the Stranger, more myself than my own breath

inhaled, than my dwindling dry hours.

You, a tale less true than even this ring's mark

circling my finger with flowers...

Rivers are mud and dust

here where I make my change,

in a land beloved because I must

in a place where I've given up

my rippled scales. There are no ships here,

none cross these waves

of wind-woven grain, no willow mask

on Rhea's face, no watchlight shines

except on fleets of stars exiled across

the cobalt water sky that planes in alt

between your closing eyes and mine.

Far and far and farther yet this trip,

on traitor winds with phantom sails, leagues long;

you always knew exactly what I am.

I've  known from our first hour

what must come next; you've always hoped

so blindly you were wrong.

Still, here we watch landfallen and bespelled

pale lightning striking on a dreamer's sea,

made from years and crucibled in salt.

We see them go, handfast on our brief brink---

the promises, the light, the air of day, 

the restless dead that are too light to sink.

 ~October 2014

posted for    real toads

Challenge: Poetic Marble

Margaret Bednar (Art Happens 365) offers us some of her photos of marble sculpture from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and suggests that we allow its statuary to inspire us--I have picked a different photo, not hers,  from their collection, of Undine, by Chauncey Bradley Ives.

in alt:  in the octave beginning with the second G above middle C <ranging up to E in alt> ~Merriam Webster Online Dictionary

Process Notes: Undine is both an alchemical term of Paracelsus for the spirits of water, and a figure out of folklore similar to Melusine, about whom I have written before, the water sprite who gave up her mermaid form for a human one on the condition her mortal lover never look upon her in her bath (when she was in her true form)which, of course, he eventually did. Rhea was a Cretan aspect of the goddess Cybele, mother of the gods, an earth goddess associated with an ecstatic cult similar to those of  Dionysus, and usually pictured with a lion to either side of her. 

Image: Undine, by Chauncey Bradley Ives, circa 1880-84 Smithsonian American Art Museum

Photo by Caroline Lena Becker, public domain via wikimedia commons
Undine, 1896, by Henri Fantin-Latour, public domain via wikiart.org

The Nature of Fire

The Nature of Fire

"The  great desire of a flame  is to continually burn.

 The nature of fire is that it always wants more."

~Corvidus the Elder

Under the wing of the Crow

hides a feathery system of madness;

students burn syllables of darkness

spat into the alembic of sanity,
turning gossip of  metaphysicians
wanly cadaverous by starlight,

whispering quicksilver clues.

The philosopher's stone still eludes them

though they work with the frenzy of madmen

to dry the cold humors of water, push
a natural progression of vileness
to purity using the flame.
The nature of fire is that it's immaculate;
the essence of fire is that it always wants more.

They speak these desires of fire

in the tongue-twisting gibberish of blackbirds,

court the devilish salvation of  oddity,

vulgarly cawing of victory in the

soothing-sweet chant of the damned.

I cannot credential this lunacy

despite my degree in Catastrophe.

I toast it instead with a memory;

our glasses hold flames' flickered casualties

like ladies lavish with luxury pile

amusements in portmanteau'd  piracy,

knowing fire will always want more.

 ~December 2013

posted for      real toads

Wednesday Challenge: Get Listed

The inimitable Fireblossom is in charge of summoning poems today, and has provided us with a word list drawn from "The System of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether' by Edgar Allen Poe. I thought I had used  all 23 of her diabolical words here in one form or another, but I missed 'irrational.' But it is there in spirit! You may peruse the list in full at the link above.

Process notes: Poe prefaced many of hs short stories with quotes, and many of them were ones he made up, as I did here with my  excerpt from the works of the imaginary alchemist, Corvidus The Elder.   
"The philosophers' stone or stone of the philosophers (Latin: lapis philosophorum) is a legendary alchemical substance said to be capable of turning base metals such as lead into gold... It was also sometimes believed to be an elixir of life, useful for rejuvenation and possibly for achieving immortality." ~wikipedia

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: Alchemy, or The Useless Science, by Remedios Vara

May be protected by copyright. Posted underfair use guidelines

via wikipaintings.org.