Calenture

by Clark Ashton Smith


	Rathe summer had sered the grass in which he lay
	Under the little shade
	The live-oak made,
	While things remembered and foregone,
	Loves from the drouth of other summers drawn,
	Like rootless windlestrae
	Went past him on
	The hot and lucid flowing of the day.
	The wine-flask at his side
	Shown empty: he had spilled
	The last drops for oblation on the dried
	Pale rootlets dead with May
	Of the small-seeded oats no man had tilled.
	He thought: their death is clean,
	This tawny change that overtakes the green
	And makes the unnumbered fragile skeletons
	Yet yields no mortal fetor to the suns.
	Their death is clean...but ours
	Is not the death of grasses and of flowers...

	He thought: they die and live and die again
	With little travail, none of little pain:
	But love, though brief as these,
	With endless agonies
	Of bitter and relucting breath,
	Accepts, refuses, and receives its death...
	And here it was,
	On grass that bore the seed of the same grass
	On which I now recline,
	That my mouth drank the wine
	Of dregless love and beauty from the cup
	Of pagan flesh in fulness offered up.
	To him that keeps, forlorn,
	From morn to vacant morn
	The vigil of the seasons, shall there come
	Ever again the timeless, tall delirium?

	In the afternoon with burning silence filled,
	Cicada-like, a fever sang and shrilled,
	Hurrying anew his passion-wearied blood
	Through veins oppressed by heat and hebetude.
	Indifferently he watched the westering day
	Like spreading fire consume
	The thin last shrunken shade in which he lay.
	He closed his dazzled eyes; in the red gloom
	Behind the sun-confronting lids he saw
	A faceless and colossal woman loom:
	One moment in his eyes,
	Ere the dislimning vision could withdraw,
	The breasts were large and dim as daylight moons,
	The hips, on scarlet skies,
	Glimmered with arch of evening semilunes,
	The shadowy shell curved between vast thighs.