Elemental

According to the poet-cum-alchemist:

Precious minerals form her polished eyes,
and in her strange symbolic nature where
angel and sphinx unite, where diamond

gold, and steel dissolve into one light,
shines forever, useless as a star,
the sterile woman's icy majesty.

Where does Baudelaire find these words while concocting his Flowers of Evil?

The historical record will show a meadow of potential allegories to pick from.

But once picked, and placed in a flower book, what life left in the dried remembrance of things past?

Still, the meadow seduces the alchemist's eye.

In the beginning, there is nothing if not an endless supply of material.

But the meadow is not full of allegories after all.

Only allegorithms, for even the meadow is nothing but warped code leading you down an uncertain alley.

Do you go down it anyway? Just for the experience? But you already know the outcome:

Like both the desert and the desert sky
insensible to human suffering,
and like the ocean's endless labyrinth
she shows her body with indifference.

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Metadata: literature, art, poetry, alchemy