August 25th, 2008

The Origins of Alchemy in Graeco-Roman Egypt

Men have thought the prospect strange
demonic scaring as they woke
from a ravishing crystalline dream
of abstract Eternities
to touch the edge of Change
where all Numbers twist and break:

yet Pattern lurks in the vanishing lair
of ragged particles. Alchemists
first kept the double vision and reckoned
as aspects of a single Stream
the Vortices of spinning mist
and the Structure of the unseizable second
when Life leaps upwards through the range
of fiery unstable Symmetries,
intricate dangerous Time.

Time
is the moving
image of Eternity
Plato remarked among the Stars.
Eternity
is the sudden
wholeness of Time
Apollo answers amid the Flowers.

Jack Lindsay



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