Clark Ashton Smith Poems

Mirrors of steel or silver, gold or glass antique!
Whether in melancholy marble palaces
In some long trance you drew the dreamy loveliness
Of Roman queens, or queens barbarical, or Greek:
...

In the steepest mile,
Climbing the mountain path,
You held my hand awhile.
...

I saw a universe today:
Through a disclosing bar of light
The motes were whirled in gleaming flight
That briefly dawned and sank away.
...

One bullet, dark and hard,
Stilled the coupling cats that yowled
In the yard.
...

All night the pool held mysteries,
Vague depths of night that lay in dream,
Where phantoms of the pale-white stars
Wandered, with darkness-tangled gleam.
...

A silken sea, a sea of damassin,
With figured foam as flowers wove therein,
Where all the winds walk lightly. From afar —
Clean-carven on the skies of cinnabar —
...

Above the desert's dark-obscured expanse
The rounded moon uplooms; at once laid clear
The waste leaps on the sight, the far and near
Known equally. As in a silver trance,
...

Ambitious of their solitary reign,
Whose many-pointed brilliance fills the sky,
The silver moon doth rise in majesty,
And with her splendor shares the stars' domain.
...

My heart is made a necromancer's glass,
Where homeless forms and exile phantoms teem,
Where faces of forgotten sorrows gleam
And dead despairs archaic peer and pass:
...

As one who seeks the silver moth of night
Where moonless gardens lose the afterglow,
My soul went forth ineffably, to know
Some vaguer vision unrevealed of light.
...