In the night’s dark half-glitter
regard the stones, jewelled
with drops of mercury.

Watch the drip of memory
as it cascades through retort,
alembic, crucible.

Outside the light, forms
amass upon the scales
and unlovely creatures

formed of no living union
caper and prey, immune
from the cloying call

of natural ways, always instead
seeking transmutation, the next
shape they will take

according to a different ordering
far from the tidy arrangement
of the so-called elements.

Rare metals, noble gasses
have their own sphere.
It is our task, my dear familiar,

to harness all to our own
purposes, and to exile
those foul usurpers

accused of witchcraft
for we are scientists, ahead
of our generation

and steeped in the medium,
arrayed in silk and silver,
accustomed to the comings and goings

of nitrates, carbides, all manner
of oddities and anomalies.
See what I have here,

outside the firelight, in my flasks
of burnished lead. Here no glimmer
of reason can penetrate.