dictionary of alchemy

Absorbent Earth: chlk, marble, and clays. no specific formulas. generally carbonates, silicates, and sulphates.

Acesunt: any substance which is slightly acid, or turning sour.

Acid of Ants: Formic acid

Acid of Amber: Succine acid

Acid of Apples: Malic acid

Alembic: a type of distillation apparatus

Bezoar: a counter-poison or antidote, especially a stony calculus from an animal’s stomach

Bismuth corne

Bittern: Liquor remaining after salt-boiling; a solution containing Magnesium salts and bromides from the preparation of salt from sea-water by evaporation

Bitter Earth: Magnesium oxide or carbonate

Bitter Salt: Magnesium sulphate (Epsom salts)

Bitter Spar: “Dolomite”—Calcium and Magnesium Carbonate

Bitumens: an amorphous grouping of resinous and petroleum products: crude oil, amber, asphaltum, coal

Cucubit: the lower part of an alembic. shorter, more squat and ovoid than a matrass.

Damps: any dangerous vapors in caves, mines, etc.

from 'The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper' by Elmer Andrews; Lecturer in Extra-Mural Department, University of Ulster

draws on the battering vitality of the Anglo-Saxon alliterative tradition to give utterance to an imagination informed by the austerity of cold, plastering rains and sharp-toothed winds. It is a landscape which the Anglo-Saxon Wanderer or Seafarer would recognize. 152

clamor and clogging 159

tribulation is purifying. In hard times it is necessary to become hard too-- even traitorous. 160

sacral, archetypal and mythic resonances of experience. Heaney submits all to the dark. 160

morning field smells
read poems as prayers
'a marvelous lightship that will surface from muddied waters'
elver-gleams in the dark
hide-bound boundary tree 173

"S's only consort now, are the birds of the air...."
The First Flight
gannet's strike
camaraderie of rookeries
discovering his new zone of being through the various birds he encounters.

oisin and st. patrick vs. holly tree (ink)
lobe and larynx of the mossy places
the old dry glut
living like a rook in the air 180
unroofed tower....
rest balm wingflap
unpainted spaces

An Artists' sensuous delight in his wife is complicated by his awareness that he has chosen to reject her. He imagines his wife's eyelids/glister and burgeon
the fleshed hyacinth

what it is like to gather holly in the rain
'gleamed like bottle glass'
'a black-letter bush, a glittering shield-wall, cutting as holly and ice'

finger-cymbal

finger-cymbal,
one-breath,
interwoven.

we are too finely spun
to be other than meshed brass threads,
entwined (rice and sesame).

pressed into a sieve,
honey has the color of brass;
dull sheen warmed

lit inner flame,
closed-hasp—
(this may not even be a love poem).

brine

1.
we are Myriad;
old lives as cobblestones;
(bared-teeth), sunk
in Earth.

Our memories;
(scaffold-shapes,
mica-schist):
loom over us,
from Four Sides of Consciousness:

as the embedded thing in mud (green circle),
as the adobe bricks steaming in the rain (brown dust),
as the smoke from the distant storm (red circle),
as the sour yellow smell of wet chamisa rising from the plain (spinning circle).

2.
when I lived in New Mexico, the
adobe houses would cluster together wetly in storms.

the lashes of rain would darken even the red dust,
under the trucks, and
rusted car shells.

3.
Here, powdered-iron and
Creosote
hang heavy in the air,

and like (metallic) wet
steel wool,
Coagulate,
(inside particles of storm wind,
nestled in their own-made nest).

4.
The wet brine of a west Texas afternoon,
Creeps
through my backyard window,

Reading furtively,
unbeknownst (to me),
the chicken stock and lentils
hum quietly on the darkening stove.

The locusts were already there.

the Locusts were
Already There--

Knawing
on the new
Leaves,
the Tenderest shoots.

the melon vine
I planted in the Spring,
was no match
for the
Hungry Field
behind our House.

Townsfolk brought you Birds and
and you Burned them.
People brought you Dead things that had fallen from Wires,
and

you Cut them,
quietly, with Powder and
Dull kitchen Knife,
in the white shed
Behind our House.

Friends left you offerings on your Doorstep,
and you
Left them to Rot in the Field,
insects
Knawing round their Sockets.

(i found by accident that clove oil banishes your presence),

The smoke from that Field
was Rank,
heavy with the guilt of pollen and corner-dust,
Cloying, Meddlesome, Sweet

I would have Folded myself
into the Flames
for you.

but Mortar has turned to Quicksand
the bricks are falling
as bodies
Heaped.

blue Alchemy bone Powder
Grated,
is
Sieved.
(conch-shells, peacock feathers).

your
Poison,
smoke in my Blood,

Dissapates

Now.

I sit in a
White Room,
With a brand-new Crystalline
Heart,

Rainbow shadow Walls,
Feather-beaded,
Abalone,
and Cone.

Safe
within
Walls,

your Hold has
become
a Skeleton’s
hand
of Ice.

Melted into
a Once-Lattice,
an old Pain Scaffold,

New Invisible
Trace—

Non-Presence.

The locusts were already there.

The locusts were already there.

Landscapes in Stone (Paisajes en Piedra).

Time in the Rocks (Tiempo en las piedras).

An Eocene Landscape.

Remember this.

Remember this
The clicking, intermittent,
of the electric heater,
the ringing of wind-chimes on the porch,
that have been ringing for days now,
like cowbells rung frantically over the dark plains.

Our house used to sit on the edge of town,
blank prairie, high-desert pressing in,

Here, I feel the wind outside,
through the steam of bath-water on the inside pane,
The window has frosted over, the streetlight shines like a star,
I am happy and round in candlelight,
unsure of the future,
set on a precipice, like an unknowing child.

(reading Colette, drinking rose cava, 3 candles lit (lux perpetua…)

I hear the wind chimes shrieking from my warm white single bed.