Ultimate Collection

I am the sea that girdles the world.

I am the first and I shall be the last.

I am the Serpent of the Ages.

Shadow of Dreams

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Stay not from me that veil of dreams that gives

Strange seas and and skies and lands and curious fire,

Black dragons, crimson moons and white desire,

That through the silvery fabric sifts and sieves

Strange shadows, shades and all unmeasured things,

And in the sifting lends them shapes and wings

And makes them known in ways past common knowing--

Red lands, black seas and ivory rivers flowing.

How of the gold we gather in our hands?

It cheers, but shall escape us at the last,

And shall mean less, when this brief day is past,

Than that we gathered on the yellow sands,

The phantom ore we found in Wizard-lands.

Keep not from me my veil of curious dreams

Through which I see the giant things which drink

From mountain-castled rivers--on the brink

Black elephants that woo the fronded streams,

And golden tom-toms pulsing through the dusk,

And yellow stars, black trees and red-eyed cats,

And bales of silk and amber jars of musk,

And opal shrines and tents and vampire bats.

Long highways climbing eastward to the moon,

And caravans of camels lade with spice,

And ancient sword hilts carved with scroll and rune,

And marble queens with eyes of crimson ice.

Uncharted shores where moons of scarlet spray

Break on a Viking's galley on the sand,

And curtains held by one slim silver band

That float from casements opening on a bay,

And monstrous iron castles, dragon-barred,

And purple cloaks with inlaid gems bestarred.

Long silver tasseled mantles, curious furs,

And camel bells and dawns and golden heat,

And tuneful rattle of the horseman's spurs

Along some sleeping desert city's street.

Time strides and all too soon shall I grow old

With still all earth to see, all life to live:

Then come to me, my silver veil, and sieve,

Seas of illusion beached with magic gold.

Shadows

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A black moon nailed against a sullen dawn

Shakes down dark petals of a sombre rose;

The long lank shadows, sons of solitude,

Slink to the hills that silent, crouch and brood.

Across the East a grisly radiance grows,

And in the West the last grim star is gone.

Sons of the glaring idols of the night,

There still are groves amid the ebon crags,

In silent valleys, far from human sight,

Where horror slinks and doom, and sunlight lags.

There still are caves which know no mortal foot

And crawling rivers, blind and ghastly still,

And rocks that grip the oak tree’s twining root—

The asphodel still blooms beneath the hill.

I know your faces leering through the dark,

Your mumbling lips that fail of human speech.

The winds of night enfold you, swift and stark,

Unhallowed phantoms, whispering each to each.

You thrill with horror subtle, nameless, blind—

But grimmer shadows haunt the human mind.

From a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith, June 23, 1926:

I am that which was, was never,

Is, is not, shall be and shall not be.

I am unsubstantial existence, vague Being.

I am Unreality, a dreamy fog floating in this abyss

Of Self Beyond Self.

I live but I do not exist.

I have being but I have no form.

Men desire me but they now not what I am

Or from whence I come.

I come from nowhere and I am because I came not

And go not.

I am the essence of Nothing, the heights of

Attainment, the shade of a dim cloud that has no

Existence. I am built out of the fabric of

Unreality and Nonexistence and I am as powerful

As Babel, as unstable as a sea-fog.

Men are my slaves.

Only a free man can be my slave.

If a man be not free, he is no slave;

And being my slave, then only is he free.

Sighs in the Yellow Leaves

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I took an ivory grinning joss,

From a chest of scented sandal wood.

Now where the woven bamboos cross

It stands where a silver idol stood.

We sat beneath the drowsy fronded tree,

From shell-thin cups we sipped our amber tea.

The Mandarin laid his coral button cap

Upon the silken ocean of his lap.

He raised a finger nail with jade ornate

And carved the sky in patterns intricate.

“And so Confucius taught,” it seemed he sighed.

“The man of virtue shuns the paths of pride.

“That joss you boast is evil’s blood relation,

“Begot of demon born abomination.”

The good man sighed and wept and guzzled tea.

I filled his cup with smooth complacency,

Smiled at his measured jests and stroked his cat,

And watched the silk worms fall upon the mat.

And all the time, fanned by the sleepy wind,

The joss looked down and grinned and grinned and grinned.

The Singer in the Mist

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At birth a witch laid on me monstrous spells,

   And I have trod strange highroads all my days,

   Turning my feet to gray, unholy ways.

I grope for stems of broken asphodels;

HIgh on the rims of bare, fiend-haunted fells,

   I follow cloven tracks that lie ablaze;

   And ghosts have led me through the moonlight's haze

To talk with demons in the granite hells.

Seas crash upon dragon-guarded shores,

   Bursting in crimson moons of burning spray,

And iron castles ope to me their doors,