Clark Ashton Smith Poems

Ah, can we stifle the old, the long remorse,
Who lives and moves full tortuously,
Who feeds upon us like the worm upon the corpse,
The caterpillar on the tree?
...

O face upturned to alien splendors!
Sybil, what visions have you seen
In haunted worlds? what music hearkened
In Edens hushed and vespertine?
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The pool's green lymph
Whitens with the floating nymph
Who rises algae-fleeced.
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Dear, can we endure to know
How these jasmine-girdled hours
Shall become the long ago?
Love, can we endure to know
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My dreams are belated orioles
That flee the mournful mists
To find, in the heaven of thy soul,
The lost summer and the balsam
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What hast thou seen, O wind,
Of beauty or of terror,
Surpassing, denied to us,
That with precipitate wings,
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O'er gardens lulled with ghostly light
In music leaned the languorous moon,
The burden of the murmured night.
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By an alien dream despatched and driven
In a land to strange stars given,
Stars that summoned forth the moon,
Singing a strange red eldritch rune,
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Sluggish drops of sullen balm;
Blood-red wine from fruits of bane,
Subtly mixed with polar snows
Melted in a harlot's palm;
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I fain would love thee, but thy lips are fed
With poison-honey, hivéd in a skull;
They seem like scarlet poppies, beautiful
For delving roots, deep-clenchèd in the dead.
...