Brushes With The Dark Law

 Three prose poems published in the Spring, 2025 issue of Everscribe

Alchemy

But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth. II Timothy 2:20.

The ingredients for happiness change in time, but all the elements you need are already at hand -it’s habit that weeds out what you think you can’t use. Myriad vials will fill with what you miss. In the first half of the 21^st century elixirs are running out.  Don’t waste them, don’t flip coins. When can you cook gold like this again?

Soon the intelligence we made will make our native intelligence fade. Soon the habitual moon will deny us love. Yet even true love loves cosplay. So go in fancy dress for couples’ therapy, in a shaman’s get up of Bantu cloth, eagle feathers, vipers’ skin, and Dzi beads.  Nothing is off the table. Orpheus holds the fire extinguisher in the lab late at night promising he’ll be open to how he’s hurt you.  (So much is learned in our 50 minutes.)

Play with the world, steal its gifts, for a last supper. Raise a clay cup suitable for rain, hemlock, ayahuasca, wine or vinegar. (Though among these occult magic tricks a sponge soaked with vinegar works wonders too.) Pursue new wounds to break open the sounds of your purple heart. I guess the old ceremonies fail to ease the ache of underused awareness.  So your swollen feet make the pilgrim’s journey. The phonemes confess it. Make up a chant; who will know? Perhaps it makes the perfect lotus grow from mud. A bloom is exactly  the golden art you need and seek, the secrets hidden in caves for future emergencies.

Because, rest assured, the red lights are blinking.

Listen.  It’s real. You thought you could answer and did not need to steal. All bets are off. The prophecy’s not wrong nor dated. The common cup matters because it’s empty. Might as well fill it with gold, a singing emptiness extracting essence from a suffering that is horribly overrated.

Gravity

At evening we made a fire at the edge of a blue lake high in the mountains near the border. We made the camp to heed the songs of robins and night herons  -- you would not admit you were cold.  The stratocumulus sunset stayed until dark, and then a black sky of chilled stars fell down upon our world.  A rat rustled in the reeds near us, but that night nothing could scare us.

The dust of a windy day covered us. We looked up at the black dome of emptiness. I said, “maybe wonder will solve us.”  You scoffed, the white puff of cloudy air, the denial inside you, fell into the fire. You would not admit you worried about your death. Instead, you pulled me to it breathing with the fading birdsong and letting a mysterious force draw us together, then to the ground. We lifted arms, heavy as stones, and knew gravity would not leave us alone. Pulled to each other for warmth, our brave fear made us complete and lovely, and we lived by the unspoken trust in what heaves us home.  After another wave of gravity you snored like a duck in your down bag.   I stayed up as the night got colder and the stars rushed away, pulled apart in all directions, their causes and effects chiming with the chemistry unleashed at the moment time began.  From here there was no place that did not pull us to it. 

Tomorrow we climb the ridge in front of us and cross into a new country.  Our weight will hold us on the path until we’re there. But now I raise my hand to the constellations above. My finger traces Orion’s belt. My hand is heavy. Though your hand pulls it to you.

Luxembourg

Before puberty I brought piles of atlases home from the cold marble library, before the screens tunneled me away from the world with the fear of missing out. Historical atlases -- page after page of mysterious oblong shapes unheard of: Savoy, Wallachia, Zimbabas, Xiongnu – delicately colored geometries of Golden Hordes, Knights Templar, Caliphates. The calm seas surrounding the ever-melting forms, joining, then disappearing page after page. Luxembourg, a shape without history, tiny and blocked in a low land, inspired my imaginations.  So I carved out new countries – counties, states, duchies, electorates rearranged in orders invented by alternate history and my pencils.

Why not? I was born in the generation that would see history itself die.

On real graph paper I made up populations, flags, mottos. My childhood hand taught by polity to make uniforms, not yet poems. I sketched broad-shouldered soldiers with epaulets to escape our forever wars. My mind muddled by mutations made shadow states in impossible time. Drawings of nothing real, yet as real as Indo-Turkic sultanates now erased. Ah, those secret histories and cherished inventions formed from the same emptiness that will swallow my falling body. Atlases, screens, blue graph paper lose their proud biases in no substance. To manifest history is no error but does not last. Quiet seas bring no lines and mark coasts I’ve never seen, will never see. So I still limn the lands in their myriad shapes born and dying in time. Small Luxembourg’s mind locked in itself, without the distant blue eternity of pliable oceans where history dissolves in the brine.