The poems included in this collection, some in slightly different form, have appeared in Air Fish, Asimov’s SF Magazine, Berkeley Poets Cooperative, Driftwood East, Fantasy and Terror, Gusto, Lost Roads, The Open Cell, Poetry Night at the Null Hypothesis (audio), Star*Line, and Velocities.

First appeared as a chapbook from Ocean View Books, 1985

Copyright by Bruce Boston, 1985

The Alchemist Among Us

They say the alchemist has left
his dwelling in the northern hills
and now moves among us.

They claim he has abandoned
his bubbling beakers, pale ingots
and moldering esoteric texts.

They tell us he seeks not only
the transmutation of matter,
but that of spirit and flesh.

They warn he is an incendiary
who must be apprehended
before his doctrines spread.

They charge us to watch for one
with a quicksilver tongue
who questions all we respect.

Fools!--to know the alchemist
look to the pupils of his eyes:
his will be constantly changing.

Doubly fools!--for the alchemist
has already traveled these lands.
He has strewn his solvents at random.

and left us oblivious to his passage.
And now the world as we know it
grows thin all around us.

The Alchemist Is Born in a Sudden Changing of Seasons

Each winter morning,
bare and heavy,
apprenticed to the fires
of the smithy’s shop,
he bore his trade upon his back,
he forged his soul to cooling metals.

Plangently the hammer would ring
in the day’s first stillness,
loud against a chalky sun,
sending the wrens to higher perches
in the oaks and sycamores,
the deserted reaches of the barn.

Such blows would shake his teeth,
drop sparks about his ankles
and singe the hair
upon his turning arms.
Each falling arc trembled
the air in its breaking.

One day he watched the sun
drift north, bright as his furnace.
The snow had fled the gables,
and by the morning roadside,
soft crucibles of gold
opened among the leaves.

Climbing to the loft
he was stunned, left speechless.
There in the darkness,
pale as old straw,
the pulsing throat
of a bird he could not name.

The Alchemist in Transit

To cross and recross
the face of the continent
serving masters and madmen
only to discover
that the motes of light
which dance upon the sea
do not release
his sleeping veins.

To tramp the rutted roads
past plague and devastation
and emerge unscathed
only to once again confront
the same blank visage
like an aging question mark
in the silvered glass.

To watch kings and saints
shaping history
in their jagged shadow dance
only to learn
that their dreams
are less fevered
than those which prey
upon his own imagination.

To discover a valley
dark rich with foliage,
to descend to its depths,
to brush the bark of trees,
to see forests of moss
explode and rainbow
the shadow wilted air.

To find himself alone
in a land of tumbled boulders,
of sheer cliff walls,
wind etched as intricately
as the broken maps
and shattered incarnations
which fill his palms.

The Alchemist Discovers a Universal Solvent

When the moment
nicks my consciousness
keen as a dagger's edge

fast as the laws allow,
more silent than
the elasticity of bone,

I cross the continuum
and stand beside myself
with senses flaming

and body turned to stone.
For one fractured instant
sand hangs in the glass,

the breath of the forest
catches in its limbs,
a slice of the natural

and relative universe
is stretched on the block
with light suspended:

a still life taut
on the lip of a dream,
until the moment turns

and thought is upended:
the forest shakes itself
and time reassumes

its interminable ticking,
the steady dissolution
of all it subsumes.

The Alchemist in Place

Atop a stool
in his ramshackle laboratory
in the green glade,
his forearms resting
on the high slanting desk,
poised in concentration
deep into the night,
he inscribes his metaphors
with gold and rubric inks,
curlicues, dovetail allusions,
sharp breaks of the feather pen.

Fire from the dampened furnace
casts a rippling illumination
about the cluttered room,
light ribbons the stark serenity
of the alchemist’s features:
miniature flames catch
in the pupils of his eyes.

When his racing thoughts
swoop and settle,
he lies upon his couch
beneath the stars’ clear passage
and dreams in vivid cycles
rich with illumination.

Down liquid avenues
in a city of blown glass
he pursues the aqua permanens.
He joins hands with the
solar king and the lunar queen
and they dance in quickening rounds
until the mystic triune
is complete.

By morning’s white light
he awakens:
the room is filled
with yellow-brown towhees,
marbled finches, pearl gray doves,
all chirruping the dawn.

The Alchemist Takes a Lover in the Infinite Variety of Fire

In the arcane wilderness
far from the commerce and rage
the artifex and his soror mystica
watch the precious distillates
stream against the glass

Male soul and female spirit
they seek not only the alchahest,
the aurum vulgi of the day,
but night’s subterranean coin,
an aurum philosophicum

of sure golden illumination
cracked from the celestial egg.
Sulfur and quicksilver fuse
in the depths of their study,
a sleeping deity stirs

in the bellows of their breath:
the sick metals are cured,
a glowing stone revealed.
Far from cities and nations
in the untamed birdsong wood,

the alchemist and his lover
join bodies and minds
in rites of transmutation
to feel their warmth ascend.
From calcination to sublimation

in the vas hermitca of self,
mercurial essence is renewed
by flight dazzling and precise.
Fire, as it leaps against the grate,
never dances the same dance twice.

A Thousand Faces

The old man comes down from the mountains
his hair filled with brambles and
full and wind-flowing like a fine robe
and the old man comes down from the mountains
his hair filled with brambles and
full and wind-flowing like an intricate tapestry
the work of a thousand dancing needles
and the old man comes down from the mountains
his skin wrinkled and laced by concentric networks
overlaid and moving to fine filigree
and the old man comes down from the mountains
to the north where he has been meditating
with the lost tribes and feasting on lotus roots
and pine berries and the old man comes down
eyes flaming with the knowledge of bestial altars
thoughts rich with the forbidden drugs and
the forgotten dances which swell the veins
spawn of Dionysus and the old man comes down
from the north with ice white teeth and
huge hands leaping from his loose sleeves
and the old man comes down from the mountains
with an intensity almost painful and he refuses
our questions and will not speak with us.

Finally the father figure
self onto self
begin the same no difference
like the cycles of the sun
that clock between her legs
the warm juices of her mouth no difference
begin a soft seed breaking the rhythm of the womb
the chain is detonated no difference
each cell embryonic in its brother
liquid and linked in geometric precision
the woman grows heavy with child no difference
the birth trauma is completed with a metallic
tour de force as the razor slits the dancing umbilical
no difference no difference

And the old man comes down from the mountains
disguised as a pedlar in the night
and I follow him along the shore and
ask how one knows the true self
and he gathers the mottled and ribbed shells
to string seaweed necklaces and I ask
how one knows the true self and he chants
mantras to the growling white-tipped water
and I demand how one knows the true self
and he dances in the rising tide
until the wet sand clings to his feet
in soft clotty bundles and as morning
light edges across the beach slantwise
and I fall drunken from sleeplessness
at last he whispers that one knows
the true self like a stream running.

So I follow the stream high into the hills
and higher still in the mountains and
at its fount there is a garden with a temple
and at the bottom of the garden
a cypress tree is standing
and on the walls of the temple
its green jade walls
there are a thousand faces
each of them my own.

Tongues

Sure as amber,
light as the lizard’s eye,
with words like fire,
or wax dripping on a coin
—the face concealed,
each eye a tallow valley—
the old man turns,
chanting gibberish
hoarse with sense:
a fierce wind blowing,
a melting fact.

Like wax or fire
such words unleash
only in the flowing,
the hand ignites each letter.
Sure as vespers,
bright as the fringed sky,
the senses burn at dusk,
parchment curls,
the tongue is pillared.

And in this silence
of fallen coins
—the failing light,
the gutted trees—
scribes gather
like quail in a blind thicket,
like birds who have yet
to know the sky.

Give us the cup of speech,
they whisper,
their ink pots open,
feathers poised for flight.

I was born in Chicago and grew up in Southern California. I spent most of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area. I now live in Ocala, Florida (City of Trees), with my wife, writer-artist Marge Simon. I've worked as a computer programmer, college professor, movie projectionist, retail clerk, bibliographer, furniture mover, book designer, gardener, copy editor, book buyer, ghostwriter, and editor.

You can find my autobiographical essay "Fifteen Explanations in Search of a Life" in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 30, or Contemporary Authors, Volume 177, both available at many larger libraries.

I've published forty books and chapbooks, including the the best-of fiction collection Masque of Dreams and the novel Stained Glass Rain. My stories and poems have appeared in hundreds of publications (including Asimov's SF, Amazing Stories, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, The Twilight Zone, Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, and the Nebula Awards Showcase) and received a number of awards, most notably the Pushcart Prize, the Asimov's Readers' Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association.