I
Twisting at the ends of light
Leaves likes faces...
Trees like winding staircases...
Stars like outrayings1 of sight...
At the volute crease
Of the fixed and volatile,
At the center of this whirling caprice
Doors like candle-lit pages...
Floors like dripping wax traces...
Journey long and far
Through harrowing stages
To become, from nigredo,
God and Gold
Spiring in potentia above the long, dark forest
Of the black dragon clamoring out of the cave of Virgin’s Milk
Climbing and wheeling along a
single joint
Of fetid prima materia, the triumphant end
The eye of the serpent, voyant,
Blinking into the night, insoluble,
Bringing the hunt to a cease
Slipping into echoes of vision
Rumbling through canyons of twilight
Rippling with the wings of predators
The refinement of metals
Sinking its poisonous bite
Into its long, incalculable tail,
Fangs and scales curling into
A shrinking ball of hibernation
Gazing eternally into a scintilla
Of pristine white
An unending epiphany of a minute sun
Forever at zenith
Burning at the extreme end of darkness
Glowing with the ultimate point of thought
All comprehension an ascetic ordeal
At the out-pressing entrances
Of the projection of archetypes
Within the swoon of starlight
A deep trance induced by
A delicate dove’s tail
Melding space and time
Trailing behind
Long, white wings
Of vast, cornerless halls
Adorned with unmitred columns of light
Rising into a crystalline sphere
Airborne with the reflections
Of eidolon figures gesturing
Mysteriously from out of candle flames
To enter
II
Solve et coagula- As Above, So Below
The fifth dimensional moment
Of transmutation.
Solve et coagula-Dissolve and congeal
Where the projecting artist sees
The fourth dimensional body
Whose shadow we are
Solve et coagula- As Above, So Below
Where the projecting artist sees
The third dimensional body
And the link between
The casting of its two dimensional shadow
Solve et coagula- Dissolve and coagulate
Where the projecting artist sees
The one dimensional body
That casts only shadow that is no shadow.
Solve et coagula- As Above, So Below
Neither light nor shadow
Neither the reflected nor its reflection
But somewhere between, destroyed at the passing
Of the shadow of Wisdom’s central essence.
Solve et coagula:
Analysis and synthesis,
Increase and diminution.
The stepping down of heavenly planes
Into denser and denser matter
To arrive one more, again and again,
At their exalted station, here
And therein, beyond.
As Above, So Below.
The advancement and succession
Of time, of thought.
A reincarnation into the instant
Of the timeful repetition
Converging and converted
Into the poetic rhythm
In which the listener “sees” time,
Glimpses consciousness, glimpses being.
Glimpses the unseen in moments
When the wind of a million days is met,
And time howls in our face
Only seen where mirrors dissolve and congeal
Into depths of nonreflective silver
Melted into a fiery liquor
Drunk until those mirrors are empty:
As above, So Below.
Solve et Coagule.
Long, transparent mirrors
Revealing the world passing through your face.
Paradoxical glimpses of the world
Flashing across this breathing parallax,
Through liquid window panes
Of winding, climbing
Trains of thought
Soon beyond to change beyond belief,
Destinations and departures
At a manifold of timeless stations:
The surface of the lines and tracks
Of this lucid, moving Looking Glass
Called your face
III
And the mental force
Within
The Image
Shifting in translations and inversions
Of rhythm, polarity, and vibration
Adducing the fields of language and matter,
Its projections turning and wavering
In ceaseless transferences of light and dreams
Plowing the aethers,
Sowing brilliant coppery seeds of latent images
Into the furrowed wake of time
To blossom with flowers in the fields of eternity
And if you awake
From this bed
The slumbering beauty
Upon your pillow still asleep
How long would it take
For her to wake and recognize
Your face, her dream lover,
Rising as solidly before her
As the Golden Dawn
And whose face would hers be
Once you awoke her?
A gentle conversation and testimony of eyes
With the universe:
A symposium, a lection of light
Speechless pupils, stuttering eyelids,
Corneas fixed and frozen- inarticulate
And the irids called on to answer
The Mystery of the Ancient Covenant
Of these melding double rainbows
And in the corner the tongue of Vision
Still and aptly listening
To these profound dilations of light,
Sketching swift, perfect renderings
In radiant, amaranthine color
Of the entrancing entrance of the Open
Lips of Eternity:
Stopping, only able to deeply kiss
The gorgeous face of this Original Brightness
Yet finding in the circle of time
The simple, dazzling elocution
Of love forever returning,
Slipping a ring around the heart of space
Reaching forward to be adorned with gold and diamonds
The speech of eyes murmuring
“I love you” : “I love you”.
With no more sentence, no further retort.
Plunging deep inside each other,
Pressing long and far into
Their Bodies of Vision
Like crystal lids fastly securing
The Alchemick Retort,
The edges of eyes become hermetic seals
Of this Universal Alembic,
Looking deep, deep down
Into the Bridal Chamber
Of the Royal Marriage
Like Voyeurs, like the gaze of angels
Vouchsafing the consummation of this and All Love
This Highest Stage of Alchemy
Achieved through
The Sustained
End Result
Vision
Of Love and Beauty
Leading to the purest state
Of spiritual gold,
The dissolving and congealing
Of all metaphor
In the constant flux of
Imago Ignota
The Unknown Image,
The composite, final instructions
For the lost recipe
Of gold and medicine
There the tremor of mental force and image;
The involution
Of the One Thought
On its journey into form
And its slow evolution,
The confronting of the tyranny of God and Creation’s
Own limitations that it set before Its Self
IV
I am the serpent
And I am the egg of the serpent
Disposed to revolve and twist
In synchronous spirals
Round my own subjectivity,
Brooding coldly on my own transmutation.
I am my own inner-psychic transformation
That slays itself, weds itself, and gives birth to itself.
I am the strength of my enemy
I encompass the long shadow fall of history
In all manner of greed and remorseless rape,
I am the shadow that falls in the field of attention
And attenuates life to a mind thin and cold
As ashes of ruin, the calx and regulus of metals
That penetrate bodies and lives with their poisons
That must be transmuted in the greatest pain.
I am the tyranny of despots
And the deportment of despicable
generals
Who sanitize war.
Their euphemisms are the source of my humor,
And I laugh at the notoriety of all murderous logic
Because I understand well killing, torture, and dismemberment.
I submit myself to an unendurable torment.
I am burned alive upon the fire of the art, till I perceive
By the transformation of the body
That I have become spirit.
V
Anima
Mundi
This is a composition of vapours.
It has extracted the subtle with gentleness,
The mixture of like with like,
And satisfied the need to bind the fugitive spirit of poetry
Within the miraculous water of language, the aqua permanens,
Which was extracted from the lapis of Art
Through the slow torment of the fire
Which the artist underwent to create it
The water is the radical moisture of imagination,
Which is the anima mundi imprisoned in time and matter,
The soul of the Stone or poetry.
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