The Alchemy of Hope
By Lois P. Jones
for Joseph
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold they changed the world into words.
~William H. Gass
1.
I’m convinced if angels exist
they live in trees. Once you see the wind moving through the crown
of a sycamore like a child waving at the sky there’s no room
to doubt that they are opening their green robes to reveal the bark
of their history.
2.
Sometimes I see a man in a black balaclava, walking slowly toward me
on the dirt path and I think it’s my brother returned from his long journey
south of disappearance. How this life imprisoned him in the psych ward
of his body where freedom was not a conversation, but a pillow held hard
over his mind. He was an angel with fists but I listened
and some days we’d sit under the mulberry tree at the edge
of the pond. Some days, this 6’3 sports addict would ride
the children’s train like a rodeo cowboy.
3.
And what of the man in the film who wouldn’t marry because he was
convinced he was a honeybee.
Convinced his stinger was a danger to the flower.
Afraid of the ways it lodges in a victim until she took
his face in her hands, the way we all want to be taken –
to be seen into like a blind person
who dips their hands into cool water. She was the flower dying
all her life for his sticky hands to hold her.
4.
There’s a flower built to love you. Its seeded eyes so like a poet’s, able to see all of
you at once. I think Van Gogh loved sunflowers because of the way their eyes
listened, their heavy heads bobbing in recognition. They carry seeds of all the lives
that want to grow in us. I think of your four-year-old son when he awoke and held
your face saying: Before I was made I wanted to see you.
5.
Bury your face in the bloom of a buckeye and fall
deep into its nostalgia, a ballroom of guests
where you left your waistcoat one summer evening.
There was the beautiful woman under the portico
of stars – how you wanted to take her gloved hand
and press it against your heart but you left her there –
a memory of looking into you with a hunger only
the dead know. I met her today, a century later
on the path near the Matilijas in their white crepe skirts
and they asked me to listen. To listen as she poured her history
of pain into the cistern of my body. It wasn’t easy. She’d been taken
too many times. Write. I said. Someone is waiting
to press their face into your sorrow and know they are not alone.
6.
What if we could return to each other
as if dying were an attempt at tabula rasa.
To begin again from sky
like my brother’s ashes scattered over the tide pools.
What if death is to see outside a body,
the way the astronauts of Artemis in their weightless state
circled the blue-bodied Earth –
their faces turned toward us.
Lois P. Jones is a two-time winner of the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize (2023, 2026) and recipient of a William Faulkner Literary Prize (2026). Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets – Poem-A-Day, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Plume, Guernica Editions, RHINO, Image, and Narrative. Her work has also been awarded as a finalist for the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Prize, the Terrain Poetry Prize, and highly commended in the Bridport Prize.
Jones is the author of Night Ladder and is currently working on her second manuscript, inspired by the memoir of Frida Baumgartner, housekeeper to Rilke from 1921 to 1926. She has served as the poetry editor for Kyoto Journal since 2017 and hosts The Title Drop, a literary podcast exploring the art of book titling.