O, what’s distilled is never gone— just sleeping in the clay,
where every drop is dawn undone, and every dawn, decay.
The stills exhale their vapored ghosts, the beakers hum
old tunes, while silver slips through brittle hosts
to kiss the crescent moons.
The mortar cracks with the pestle’s weight, the herbs refuse
their cure— the roots remember last night’s fate and tremble,
faint, impure. The furnace coughs up cinder-songs.
The flasks go dark with dread, for nothing lasts, though
nothing’s wrong— just sleeping with the dead. And when
the master turns to dust his whispers clot in jars of rust—
what’s lost is still in time.
