Amy Beeder
bodies of agate.† Draw close the bones of this biddable metal:
                chalice & ingot, gilt saints on cypress planks,

Agamemnon's mask unearthed. Sulfur & salt: the alchemist's
                scarred hands. Think men upon their knees

before the riverbed for that Black Hills silt, that sluice
                long girdled in the zigzag crack. O

that lucre. The worshipful company's murderous guilds—
                It's too late now to look away from that bright flame,

too late to take the value back from filigree
                or sacred blade, ransom-gilded Seric, idol,

from hidden trove or gently beaten fleece. South
                of Ulaanbaatar cranes decorate the skyline.

In the Congo children work the pit shifts. Mercury & silica
                will grace the margins of each living membrane's

tender stem & inch of lymph. All flesh thus tempered,
                thus fixed in the mine's dark mouth.

Ûdwr. Meaning divine water.
                Physika kai mystica: the secret things.

Our guide in Potosí lighting his cigar with dynamite:
                "No se preocupe, trabajo par Sendero Luminoso!" Hands

cupping the bright flame. Tracing the halo.
                The hoards turned up by English plowmen, amulets

in shafts along the overpass. Shields beaten thin
                & dropped unearthly to your brokerage screen, leverage

on the scale of equity. Percolated, according to Theophilus,
                from vinegar, red copper, human blood & ash of basilisk.¤

 
†Ezra Pound, "The Alchemist"
¤Consult page 54 for how to grow a basilisk.
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Photograph of Selina Tusitala Marsh, New Zealand's Poet Laureate
"On Colonialism, Sam Hunt and Kickboxing"

"A force of energy swirls around her as she sweeps into the Brisbane cafe, fresh from her daily 9km run. The stick is a tokotoko, a Māori symbol of status and authority, given to the celebrated scholar poet Selina Tusitala Marsh when she became New Zealand’s poet laureate in 2017. She carries it everywhere, a talisman not of war but of words. 'We Polynesians love the materiality of these objects because they carry a story and they carry a spirit,' Marsh says. 'So the more they are touched, the more they are spoken to, the more they build their own genealogy and story.'"

via THE GUARDIAN
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Cover of W. S. Merwin's The Lice

"Before the first Earth Day, way back in 1967, Merwin was speaking for animals and for biodiversity, and sounding a warning of the coming human extinction. Now as we live into the age of the Anthropocene, more and more likely to be the last age to be given a name, his warning is no less grave. Was he heard then? Is he heard now? Perhaps not widely, but how much does that matter? Merwin speaks prophetically and politically, still, addressing everyone, one at a time.”
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