Alchemical Journey

You’ve moved

As if your feet were lead

That dragged   and marked

All your wanderings:

On sooty pavement

Sand   and black loose soil

Up stair treads   across beige carpets

The snail-like silvery tracings

Forming a strange hieroglyph,

Indecipherable.

Its involutions   turnings

Abrupt right angles

A labyrinth

Into which   year by year

You plunge deeper

Hopeless of Ariadne.

Your soles sigh on the grit

Of the Bridge of Sighs

Above the black hulls of somnolent

Gondolas

Leave metallic half-moons

Disappearing abruptly

On the verge of train tracks

Leaden lacunae of departures

And arrivals.

Inward   through the maze

Of your wanderings

Toward the Minotaur,

That shadowy  echoing energy

Baying like a caged hound

Just around the next corner

Of the blackened ramps and

Cobbled arteries of your heart.

When   in terror and weariness of years

You reach the dark central cell

Perhaps in some narrow rising street

Of shuttered doors

In icy Mistral

Clutching a thin coat,

It is the faint glow of your own steps

That lights you.

Watery light reveals an old woman

With swollen legs

Tending pink geraniums.

A freighter in Marseilles harbor

Mouths a smoky OM.

There is a smell of fish.

Brought to bay in the final vortex

Of your flight

You reveal yourself to yourself:

How you’ve always brought you light

Through darkness.

Lead is transmuted;

Water turns to wine;

Labyrinth becomes mandala

From whose center

Your heart opens in terrible beauty

A vermillion rose

A mass of liquid fire.