Electromagnetism

A formless yet practical alchemical poem
to one lost and found again
By Avram Leib ben Gordon

You were all of fifteen years when
First you caught my eager eye.
Alas!, every literary mystic’s fear:
The cliché of the “old soul” in an illicitly young body.
So much older you seemed that we adults (hah!)
Passed you pipes coiling with blue smoke,
And welcomed you as peer.
A mere little girl, perhaps,
But past your mortal age.

My friends, only later revealing
The true number of your years,
Were greatly bemused when I flirted with you.
When told of my gaffe, I then politely yielded to
Law and Moral, and I put you from my mind.
I must have blushed vermilion.

Eight revolutions ‘round the sun,
Like a tetherball on a leash of gravity,
The Earth has since spun,
Weaving its way eccentrically
Through the constellations.

I, long ago, was a college-town radical
With freak flag flying high,
And knowing that I, personally, was going to Save The World,
Sported an anxious gleam in my eye.
Do you remember my pitiful ache of want
When my mission forbade me the escape you offered?

Notions change, and boys grow up.
Three years of blue-collar labor,

Spent learning to tame high-voltage power lines
Have toughened the weak body I wore when you knew me,
Nimbling my fingers
And tempering my loose mind.

Do I still have that eager gleam in my eye?
It burns bright! Raw current I now wrest from the Earth,
And route into the puny shelters of civilians --
Amperes which drive not only your clothes dryer,
Your lights and computer, but also which
In your fine sweet body give life. Electricity!
Spark of evolution, mathematical medium of the soul.

Sometimes, I shock myself deliberately while I work,
One hundred and ten volts of bliss, stirring up memories,
Startling long-dormant neurons from slumber.

Since I gazed upon you most late,
In June of nineteen hundred and ninety-seven,
I have traveled wide (though not so much as you)
And learned how common among Earth’s teeming masses
Are beautiful genius-gifted lasses like yourself.
So why then am I still drawn to you?

Pulsing with faint current
In the vessel that is your body,
In your fine soul’s carriage,
Are eight neuro-endocrine bundles.
Chakras they are called in Sanskrit --
Root, sex center, solar plexus, heart,
throat, pineal, pituitary and crown

Eight there are of these, as the number of years since I met you,
As the notes of the musical scale and the colors of the prism.
Through your chakras and mine pulse
Delicately undulating wave-forms of electrical energy,
Tracing figure-eights in microvolts.

Sometimes in torrents, sometimes in trickles, the current ever flows.
Ever closer to Understanding grows
Science in its potential to one day measure and modulate
The subtle currents which define the soul.

Were a mechanical meter invented
To scope and graph the emanations of your chakras,
Would it show them to be for this time
Harmonically balanced with my own?

Even the subtle currents of love and life and laughter
Must obey natural laws,
Just as the electron is bound to its orbit,
Just as this Earth is tethered indelibly to its Sun.
No matter how often it catches its own beginnings,
It’s very spark of life, the engine which propels it,
Ever returns it thus to be borne away,
Yet again and again.