The Chymical Marriage
By Sonya Taaffe
03 August 2009
They belong dead, but we resurrect them
in silver nitrate and the feverish flicker
that dreams beat against the inner eye,
the yearning golem, his disdainful mate,
the alchemist as eccentric and involute
as his flasks and alembics proposing
a toast in gin like white mercury,
the shadow stitchery of Paracelsus
and Prometheus' fire. Like cornerstone
shades, they seep beneath our century,
the lyke-wake wedding, lightning-engraved,
the dragonseed breeding of current and bone
that gendered only ghosts, replicant echoes
in red earth and Tesla coils, a shy chemist
who once saved me a sunflower to pluck.
To all the ways we strive and multiply,
to creation, to the divine and monstrous,
the scientific world and all its hauntings
black and white: l'chaim. It is our only . . .
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