[syndicate] The Clark Ashton Smith of Zane Grey

[jeff harrison]

THE LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS 


the 

In a land where weirdness and mystery had strongly leagued themselves with eternal desolation, the lake was out-poured at an undiscoverable date of elder aeons, to fill some fathomless gulf far down amid the shadows of snowless, volcanic mountains. 

of 

My dreams are like a caravan that departed long ago, with tumult of intrepid banners and spears, and the clamour of bugles and brave, adventurous songs, to seek the horizons of perilous, unknown, barbaric lands and kingdoms immense and vaguely rumoured, with cities beautiful and opulent as the cities of Paradise, and deep, Edenic vales of palm and cinnamon and myrrh, lying beneath skies of primeval azure silence. 

st 

Because you are silent to my lyric prayers, deaf to the melodies I have made from the sighs and murmurs of a wounded love, I have broken my golden lute, and cast it away, tarnished and unstrung, among the red leaves and faded roses of the September garden. 

rs 


* 


THE MAVERICK QUEEN 


>From her balcony of pearl, the princess Almeena, clad in a gown of irisated silk, with her long and sable locks unbound, gazes toward the sunset-flooded sea beyond a terrace of green marble that peacocks guard. 

ma 

Then, with one voice that was like the voice of hesperian airs among palms at evening twilight in the Fortunate Isles, they answered, saying: 

erick 

qu 

"If I could fly like that, and plunge in from the heavens, nothing could evade me," thought the shark. 

"If I could swim and dive and dwell under water as he does, everything would be at my mercy," thought the osprey. 

n 


* 


WEST OF THE PECOS 


Splenetic, pale Narcissus, in the green dead depth of some rotting pool: thou seest thine image drown and re-emerge, beneath the shifting iridescence of corruption, the beautiful bright scum that damascenes with fantastic arabesques the fetid water. Or in the brazen mirrors, mottled with verdigris, of queens that were fair and fatal, avid and insatiate of love or pain in lands the desert has long obliterated, perchance thou viewest the implacable perverse nympholepsy of thy mien. 

In the quest of her whom I had lost, I came at length to the shores of Lethe, under the vault of an immense, empty, ebon sky, from which all the stars had vanished one by one. 

the 

pecos 


* 


ROGUE RIVER FEUD 


The world has a thousand poisons, thin or potent, 

ogu 

honey-like or nauseous, 

quick or languid, 

ive 

corrosive and deadly, 

or captious and deceptive and narcotic. 

eu 

There are poisons bright as an amber wine, or rich as blood or rubies, or clear and hueless and innocent-seeming as the water of untroubled lakes, or dark and turbid as the ooze of the nether sea. 


* 


HORSE HEAVEN HILL 


And thus I recalled the name I had assumed beneath the terrene sun, and the names I had borne beneath the suns of sleep and of reverie. 

orse 

My death is like shadow, my life aquiver, a pulse in the light; I am so close to death it makes me proud, cruel and demonic. Unmoved, I flutter from Helen's lips to Adonis' wound. I love my death, the flame, more than anything. 

eaven 

O Fairest, O dearest, to what shall I liken thy days? Methinks are as precious gems, as pearls and amethysts, which, from a broken string, some idle princess, sitting on her barge of ivory and gold, lets fall one in to the bottomless blue and placid sea. 

ill 

   

 
---------------------------------
Access over 1 million songs - Yahoo! Music Unlimited.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tekspost.no/mailman/private/syndicate/attachments/20061201/771c0cd2/attachment.html>