Clark Ashton Smith Poems

Memory has in fee
A land where fallen suns
Illume the light and fragile bronze
Of autumn leaves unchangingly
...

The years are a falling of snow,
Slow but without cessation,
On hills and mountains and towers and worlds that were;
But snow, and the crawling night wherein it fell,
...

From thy beauty
And thy lovers' ardent wars
Time shall make his metaphors
...

From regions of the sun's half-dreamt decay,
All day the cruel rain strikes darkly down;
And from the night thy fatal stars shall frown—
Beauty, wilt thou abide this night and day ?
...

Though winter come with cleaving rain with bonds of rime,
It shall not sever us, the dreamers calm and wise,
Prom succor and solace of our pagan paradise:
...

Ah, more to me than many days and many dreams,
And more than every hope, or any memory,
This moment, when thy lips are laid immortally
On mine, and death and time are shadows of old dreams.
...

Forevermore the Earth reclaims her own;
Desire and vision, that have ventured far
In prospect of the empyrean star,
Fail, meteor-like, upon the heavens lone;
...

Under the spreading mulberry tree
When the purple fruit was falling free,
I got horny and had some nooky
With my hot cooky
...

The heat is like some drowsy drug
Laden with honey-foundered dreams. . . .
Again the pagan forest seems
To couch and roof our pagan love,
...

I am the spectre who returns
Unto some desolate world in min borne afar
On the black flowing of Lethean skies:
Ever I search, in cryptic galleries,
...