Live Encounters Poetry & Writing August 2024
The Alchemist, poems by David Adès.
The Alchemist
The alchemist read the tea leaves of her heart,
found her calling early.
The music of transformation swelled within her.
The sciences, yes, chemicals and potions, flasks, beakers,
and the vectors of contagion,
but she was drawn to more than this, to esoterica,
to the human psyche, to swirling seas of emotional vortices,
to intricate mazes of the soul, strategies, chess gambits,
military manoeuvres, the cut and lunge of politics.
Secretly, telling no-one, she made potion after potion,
refining, discarding, pouring the gold of her beauty
and youth into them, the alchemy of her obsession,
an entire life of toil, patient, refusing frustration,
until her final act, her antidotes destroyed,
a triumphant smile on her wizened face,
removing the stopper, kindness flooding the world.
Allotment 21250/?
Waking up this morning to another allotment
in the uncertain sequence of allotments —
wedged between allotments 21249/? and 21251/? —
I validated the assumption (again)
that I would wake up, an assumption daily
more tenuous. Waking up to an assumption
daily more tenuous, I flicked the domino
of assumptions and watched their click, click,
click of validation as they each tipped over.
Watching their click, click, click of validation
I ticked them off: the day cold with snow
and ice, slippery slick on the steps to the streets,
on the sidewalk; the face in the mirror
as tired as yesterday’s, darkening
with another day’s stubble,
a headache already manifesting,
two girls still asleep in their beds,
a mental list of tasks lining up, ordering itself.
With a headache already manifesting
I started on the list of tasks lining up,
the day inscribing new, unheard notes:
preparing breakfast for the girls —
awakened now by my wife
to their respective allotments —
gathering schoolbags, a chess set,
homework, a swim bag, a lunch box,
all of us living the same, different day,
going about the four paths of our lives,
together and apart, combative, wilful,
recalcitrant, each of us with our own needs,
our own wishes, singing our own notes,
our own discordant songs,
unable to harmonize if not by accident,
going about the four paths of our lives,
apart and together, living the same,
different day, preoccupied with
our own concerns – oblivious amidst it all
to the day’s singular music,
to the four submerged melodies rising and falling
within us, amongst us, between us.
Lost
The day I argued with a door
and came off second best
I was at the Art Gallery
researching a painting
to relieve it from obscurity,
from a cache of paintings
lost in a storeroom and
rediscovered, provenance unknown.
My mood was pontifical.
I orated to the bin
(when no one was looking)
at the lost art of art
and prepared a list
on a whiteboard
of iconic paintings
thought lost and then found.
I thought of myself
as lost and not yet found
as I read the inner screen
of my longings,
the secret artist in me,
riotous colours
splashed over time
and never seen.
Please
do not rouse me
from this fitful
jumbled dream
of a life
that I can make
little sense of
but that holds me
in its beautiful
capricious arms
like a familiar lover
whose every curve
and breath
I want to know
and whom I too
hold tightly
not wanting to let go.
The Naked Face
A shock wave ripples, ripples outwards
each time I meet the naked face of
obsession, its intent glare, its bared
teeth with their bulldog grip never
letting go, and my life resembles a
house of cards, flimsy and once again
toppling, until I too fall into fixation,
and aware that Inuit has fifty words
for snow, must know which language
contains the richest repository of
darkness, literal and metaphorical,
darkness of the soul and heart, looming,
malevolent darkness, darkness of the
oncoming storm, shifting shadows
pooling in the dark rooms of the house
of the black dog, darkness welling
from deep inside the pit of betrayal,
nuances of darkness, gradations, sooty
onyx, stealth panther, glooming dark,
the mine’s obliteration of light, darkness
of the times, kernels of darkness
expanding inside the end of all things.
© David Adès
David Adès is the author of Mapping the World, Afloat in Light and the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal. He won the Wirra Wirra Vineyards Short Story Prize 2005 and the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2014. Mapping the World was commended for the FAW Anne Elder Award 2008. David’s poems have been read on the Australian radio poetry program Poetica and have also featured on the U.S. radio poetry program Prosody. His poetry has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. His poems have been Highly Commended in the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, a finalist in the Dora and Alexander Raynes Poetry Prize (U.S.) and commended for the Reuben Rose International Poetry Prize (Israel). David is the host of the monthly poetry podcast series “Poets’ Corner” which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb8bHCZBRMBjlWlPDeaSanZ3qAZcuVW7N. He lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.