Clark Ashton Smith Poems

The secret rose we vainly dream to find
Was blown in grey Atlantis long ago,
Or in old summers of the realms of snow
Its attar lulled the pole-arisen wind;
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Moss-cup oaks, broadly sprawled,
Clench the path, with sapling laurels
Intervalled.
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Winding—winding to the sea,
Ever on, goeth the river free.
Here he bends, and there he goes,
Here he stops, and there he flows.
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Since I have seen the refluent glory of the sea,
My dreams are made of azure, emerald and gold:
Tumultuous topaz, flowing sapphire manifold,
Have turned my slumber to a deep and splendid sea.
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Beneath the sunset and the sea
Their coral-builded cities be;
They keep an old forgotten reign,
A purple, far supremacy.
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Below the duff, before the granite stair,
The foam-crests curl and feather in blue air,
Numberless as the helmet-plumes of hosts
Resurgent from millenium-foundered coasts.
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Shaded by his palmy feet,
The sciapod
Roots his tresses in the sod.
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With pencils on scratch-paper
We drew grotesques
And passed them underneath our desks.
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Beneath the skies of Saturn, pale and many-mooned,
Her palace is;
Her wyvern-warded spires of celadon, enruned
With names benign and mightier names of malefice,
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How many a new and strange neurosis
The film-producer vexes
When love requires a symbiosis
Of nine or seven sexes.
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