Alchemies

Maybe it wasn’t greed that destroyed
Midas but simply a failure to account for how
irrevocable are the consequences of desire.
Later, his gold daughter aflame in the garden,
he cried, ‘That wasn’t what I meant’ and
'I didn't know' but, by then, it was too late

just as one who describes himself as falling
in love is already at the end
of that trajectory. And when teams
of oceanographers search for affordable
ways to concentrate the gold finely dispersed
in seawater, they don’t think
of what will happen if they find the method
or of their predecessors bent over athanors
on the Rue des Halles and Goldmaker’s Lane in Prague.

None of us is likely to ask what can be
put back, what returned to, as we gather and go,
and yet, late at night, after the affair,
we yearn for the process
that would render the loved face mundane
and still the atoms moving in a pattern
that moves us forever.

Aleda Shirley