My friend drives cross-country on long, obsidian roads, the air inside her
car green with herbs she’s casked in tall, glass jars. They lean gently against each other
like sleeping parrots in a carboard carton on the back seat; she drapes a linen tablecloth
over them in the heat of the afternoon.  Ten-pound bags of flour settle softly
for the journey, a different kind of ballast. Oh, the human elements:
water, salt, flour, and yeast.  We bake bread and stir basil into soup when we are blind
with aching; we map our interior spaces with fragrance and mythological hungers. 

Allotropes are born of the same element but with opposite characteristics, 
as diamond and graphite are born of carbon: a thermal conductor and an insulator,
one yielding, one impervious to harm: so human, this Cartesian split, though humans
may only return to a fluid state when we cut ourselves free of these garments 
and their glowing.  During decantation, a substance may separate, unsew its atoms
and let them rise like fish, as a light left burning in a butcher shop
may call our allotropes to separate, as oil and water rise from a single ripe olive. 

When I am old and the light grows dim, prize open a jar of dried mushrooms,
unassuming dark leather, washed silk of graphite; let what rises from its mouth
call out diamond-clear and glittering:       Open me, offer me water, excise wounds
sealed brightly over with oil and wax, heal me with jade and bay laurel leaves, lift me
into myself, a singing bowl, a light left burning in the dark, the elements to separate
inside me,  a rich, green-gold oil rising like an escalator into the bright of day. 

*derived from Greek άλλοτροπἱα (allotropia) 'variability, changeableness.”