*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 65232 ***
{1}
These Poems Are Dedicated to
CARLO DE FORNARO
Who Was the First to Understand, Appreciate and
Sympathize with Them
{2}
OF THIS FIRST EDITION OF SIX-HUNDRED AND
FIFTY COPIES OF “THE SHADOW-EATER” BY
BENJAMIN DE CASSERES ONE-HUNDRED AND
FIFTY COPIES HAVE BEEN PRINTED ON TUSCANY
HAND MADE PAPER AND SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR
{3}
THE
SHADOW-EATER
BY
Benjamin De Casseres
NEW YORK
WILMARTH PUBLISHING COMPANY
1917
{4}
Copyright, 1915
By ALBERT & CHARLES BONI
Copyright, 1917
Assigned to WILMARTH PUBLISHING COMPANY
{5}
CONTENTS
{7}
THE PROTAGONIST
To Carlo de Fornaro.
Medusa! I go toward you smiling, serene; my will is granite to your
stare, and I have that within me which blows out the light of hells set
there within your eyes and turns to mottled stone the serpents on your
head.
I have woven of my pains a masque of bronze and the summits of my
deepest hells are changed into the impetuous lightnings of my will and
claws of steel have come to grow upon my mutilated members.
I have violated my own graves and set the skeletons of my selves at my
meal-less feasting board, and still found tender meat upon their bones,
and the marrow of their ancient griefs was as hippocrene to me.
Eternity! Infinity! I come toward thee swifter than a thought of death!
I come toward thee bulging like a woman in her ninth month!—bulging
with my hells, my devils, my Gethsemanes, booty of my sullen pride!
Benjamin De Casseres
{8}
TANTARA! TANTARO!
Death-lights on the scud and the baying of wind in the rigging, the hail on my cheek—
Tantara! Tantaro!
The wheel in my hand is shattered by a bolt from On High, chart and compass are lost in the coiling dun sea—
Tantara! Tantaro!
Scuttle me? Yea, scuttle me—I’ll bob up again, not in smooth waters but there where the storm is the wildest—
Tantara! Tantaro!
Didst Thou think to awe me, me the unhallowed, the daring, the storm-cleaver, the seeker in gutter and star?—
Tantara! Tantaro!
I am lashed to myself, to the iron mast of Necessity, and Thy scourgings I use for my rivets—
Tantara! Tantaro!
Ballast and cargo and anchor, all have been jettisoned into Thy seas—
Tantara! Tantaro!
On! On! my soul through the storm, through the wrath and the terror of death—
Tantara! Tantaro!
{9}
THE TONGUELESS ONE
There stands that Mute into whose ear the ages have whispered their secrets—
There stands that Mute with lusting eye and lusting ear who uttereth naught—
Mute of a myriad secrets who knoweth whither we wend;
Mute of the graven face and the alabaster hands—
There before me stands that Mute whose earthly name is Death—
That Mute into whose monstrous ear all things are whispered but who UTTERETH NAUGHT.
{10}
THE SHRINE IN THE MIST
I travel toward a Shrine that is set in a mist—long have I been on the way.
I hear dull rasping whispers afloat on the night:
Are they spirits conferring, friendly to me and my journey, or the half-smothered mockeries of the fiends that I know—that I know?—
They that sneer and pass on the winds in the night.
I travel toward a Shrine that is set in a mist—
By day I am beset by the beasts of my nethers and awed by the old bleached cadavers that strew the intricate alleys of vision.
I peer at you, O glutton, well-fed, nigger-hipped, bag-eyed; at you I am peering,
And wonder whether the Shrine is hid in the mists of your belly—
Wondering whether the Truth be not a belch and a leer and a lusty young wench.
And I peer at you, too, O Gautama, the purpled renunciant, great Shadow-Eater:
I peer at you there on the roadside, where you sit ’neath the Bo tree, motionless, graven as death, solved in thy pulseless Nirvana—
Wondering whether the Shrine is hid in the mists of thy brain.
Am I mocked? Am I followed? Who goes there?{11}
Hands off! thou Vile Thing!
Thou knowest not me nor the thing that I seek:
The Shrine that is set in a mist—over THERE, just BEYOND.
{12}
MY COMIC PERSPECTIVE
When a boy I was wrenched in a gin hidden in a garden of roses: thus am I lame.
Later was slugged on the head by the Father of Lies—the Ideal:
But I laughed and hallooed, “Come, To-morrow!”
I have been bushwhacked by women, gnawed to the bone by a great ancient lust:
All things I touched turned slime-green and black-hideous thoughts played ’round my night-pillow like rats ’round the new-dead:
But I laughed and hallooed, “Come, To-morrow!”
I used to say, “God?—why, that is myself!”
The world took me seriously, set me up for a savior:
But I laughed, doffed aureole, and hallooed, “Come, To-morrow!”
Then I donned horns and tail and cried, “Behold! I am Lucifer!”
So they stoned me till I looked like a shambles:
But I laughed and hallooed, “Come, To-morrow!”
I bought from a drab a filthy old handkerchief, exhibited it as the Veil of Isis.
The popes of philosophy bowed down to me and mumbled “Eureka!”
But I laughed (for I knew) and hallooed, “Come, To-morrow!”
Well, here am I now, a butt-end, awaiting translation.
The world I have found a small box with endless false bottoms;{13}
I have come to the tomb, a little clay box which, too, is false bottomed:
I call into it, laugh and halloo, “Come, TO-MORROW!”
{14}
THE PEEPER
I am an eavesdropper, a peeper, a cosmic footpad;
With my ear at the keyhole of Eternity I report what I hear in that beyond-room, where IT works—
IT, the thwarter of me and of thee and of all things that savor of smut and of ether—
Thwarts even itself in its huge imbecility: IT, the spirit of Law, the shadow of thee and of me, the Great Blunted Purpose.
What I hear in the beyond-room, is it the illusions of dreams, the crackle of burning brain-faggots, or the veritable IT at its experiments?—
Solving us, evoking us, tempting us out of the womb of the Naught into the awareness called life.
Does IT use the dregs of me or the best of me?
Eternity: is it inhabited?
The imminent cycles, the durations dead, the secrets in them: are they in ITS keeping?
Still, I listen, with my eye at the keyhole, and report;
For I know there are a Thwarter and one thwarted, a Nothing at war with a Something, a gad and a writhe—
One who returns everlastingly, but who is never repeated in Time.
{15}
THE-CIRCLE-THAT-LOOKS-LIKE-A-LINE
I am the Watcher, and me nothing eludes.
I live behind the mask of things,
My breath is world-wither, and a chance shot from my eye-sockets confounds the God of Illusions at Its imbecile pastimes.
I stand within Time’s crumbling walls and weave at Eternity’s looms the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line.
I am leagued with the Sphinx, and her secretive mumblings I alone understand.
I am the footnote that explains that old undecipherable palimpsest called Life,
And it is for me the drum beats—the deadly intoning drumbeats that the mummer Man jigs to.
Briskly Man in his morn steps forth, guards up.
He bows, he smiles, and his eyes, foci of his myriad lusts, seek in the dust for the thing that slipped, eel-like, through his fingers in the yesterday.
At night, within his locked and barred room, his hope-fattened face dismantles.
His eyes grow knotted troubled lights, jaws sag—weary, oh, weary is he!
Pain! Pain! gay-pain! I watch, I record, in the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line!
Youth! Youth! how gay his step!
His soul scents Truth—he is off like a hound on the trail, white brow upturned, the old ecstatic urge in his eye:{16}
His hands would hook her now!
Up! Up! he reaches and steps off the precipice of the world.
A Hag bends over him, a Hag whose face is a lutescent leer, eyes steel-grayed by a knowledge of the pitiless truths.
Eternity rings with her glee-shrieks as she gathers his bones—bones that shall feed her quenchless immemorial fires in the nether hollows—
Hollows of the mocking shapes,
Hollows of metallic laughs,
Hollows of the wan gray spectres.
Pain! Pain! gay-pain! I watch, I record, in the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line!
Yea, I am the lidless, dispassionate Eye that pierces the murk and the mist—
My tears are a laughing,
My laughing a weeping—
I watch and I wait and record,
Brooding over my soul, that dried lava-stream and granary of volcanic dust;
Brooding over my brain, that mirror of the implacable trivial.
I am a shadow that is more real than a substance,
Am skewered and pinioned to offal—yet my soul is a{17}
Kremlin of unapprehended magnificence,
The Vision Malefic and the Vision Beatific, too.
I live and am not, am the Infinite withered to naught.
I watch, I record, and I weave at Eternity’s looms the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line.
{18}
MY DIVINE HATE
Ever-changing, ever-vanishing, an evocation from out the Mist, tottering forever to a doom that is never pronounced,
I am the visible Invisible,
The eel that slips through God’s hands,
A dominoed Abstraction whose lineaments the most curious cannot discover,
Renascent over your head when you think I lie dead,
Intruder in Time, enclayed for a moment, flinty, brittle,
Flying the flag of Rebellion, chanting my hates and my dreams.
The world is the Temple of Pain grounded and mortised in lies—
And that which they have told you is good I say is maggoty with lies.
Hope is a whore and love is a lie and a flea has more for his labor than a man, the wisest of whom is still earth’s awkward buffoon.
To-morrow is God—they have added a jot to Eternity!
Know they not to-day is Eternity and to-morrow its lewd, beckoning shadow?
And love they have sanctified because of its delicate tickle.
Pah! this rotten old breeding-patch circling the sun!
From the center to circumference, from nadir to zenith,{19}
I, the eel that slips through the Great Bungler’s hands, survey and judge and cannot be lured by these old temporal cozzeners.
Yea, forever I vanish, I change, yet forever stand firm,
Flying the flag of Rebellion from the Temple of Pain, knowing the Thing that skulks in the adytum.
{20}
THE ROTTED IDEAL
Framed in ebon memories her picture hangs there upon the walls of my brain.
’Tis not the face I put there in my youth: that glorious youth of me, slain by its lusts, bitten to death by the baby vampires that swarmed in its blood.
The lost woman of my soul! warm lips, black eyes—face that was a prism of love shot through by the rays from some dumb despair—
Long has it vanished.
And the dust of my acts have gathered on that brow, and my sins have smitten her cheeks to a pallor, and her eyes welter in two brackish tears—
Tears that have lain stagnant in those bony cups for a myriad soul-cycles.
I have wrought my own decay into that face: it has traveled the way of my own dissolution.
Will it break on my brain-walls and streak all my rottenness anew?
And a spider has woven a web over and around the great frame of ebon and the thin bladder of flesh that once was her face—
A leering, grinning spider has woven his web there,
A leering, grinning spider whose mouth sucks poison from her lips.
Lead on, hell-lights!
{21}
THE VISION MALEFIC
My soul is a tarn as black and motionless as the night above in which whirl forever and ever the pallid balls of light that are my sickly dreams.
I am weaving a shroud for the God whom I hate—I have defied him and cursed Him, and here is His winding-sheet.
I am lodged in my sins, and my soul is lean of its lusts.
The worm that gnaws at the breast of the maid new-dead—that is I,
And the bell that tolled her to rest—I am that toll.
My heart ventricles are like the bases of canyons untouched by the sun.
I am dried, bleached and blanched, lie stark in a great pestilent vapor,
And Time feeds at my brain like the vultures at the heart of Prometheus:
Who will shrive me and draw the lids over these eyes?
{22}
DYING
There he lies, his pale face fitfully waving a truce to Old Care,
Life flowing out from a million invisible rents in his soul,
To-morrow finally abolished.
To-night he still breathes,
To-morrow he’ll lie with the breathless,
Past the goal, uprendered, solved in black mist, domino doffed—no more.
O Life, thou plunderer,
Sly in thy cozzening, fell in thy lusts, weaver of nightmares, liar and cheat,
Here is thy last mockery,
Here is thy quarry: hast signalled the worms even now?
Swift be thy flight, thou craven and satyr and old purpled lust!
{23}
THE DEAD WHO LIVE
Up from the nether world in unending procession,
Like the lurid mists at the dawn-time,
Like the black wraiths that ascend from foul crypts,
Arise and ever arise my impulses.
Across the field of consciousness they stalk, anhungered, lust-ravened, lean of their ghastly dreams—
Thou devils of the gone-by!
{24}
EXVOLVED
I am the Spectre at the feasts of the strong men and sneer at their brag.
I listen where the weak wail and sneer at them, too, for their wail is old Envy masked as Humility.
The strong shall be tricked out of their strength, I say, and knock at the doors of the weak for a dole of black bread;
The weak shall become strong, I say, and burrow their way into the thrones of the mighty.
The pieces are changed, the game is eternally the same.
Only I shall persist in an eternal likeness unto myself—
I, neutral, indifferent, sewed up in my silence, my soul the great menstruum of contrasts, the Heel and the Worm.
{25}
THE GOD OF NEGATION
I have ascended to the topmost spaces and dragged the cars of the devildare gods from their courses;
They saw me not, but felt me as a Presence that hurled them from the track.
I have in a wondrous Thought undermined the Milky Way and have sown the orbits of the suns with dragons’ teeth uprooted from my rebellious soul:
Those eyes of gleaming fire saw me not, but felt me as a movement in the Abyss.
I have numbed the arm of the blind old Artisan, and he shall die at my last Epiphany:
He heard me not, but felt me as the great Destructive Presence.
{26}
GODWARD
God?—the sum of my tendencies, uttered, unuttered, definite, innate;
Me the individual, my special differentia—not thee, but me unevolved, guessing at myself unegged; that is God if God there be.
Christ was the deepest, Napoleon was the deepest, he of Weimar was the deepest: to be yourself, that is the deepest—
That is to be God.
Thou shalt love thyself more than thy neighbor.
Sound trumpet, thrust rapier, cleave unto thyself: self-ward we go, godhood be ours!
Unique in all time is my unquotable self: God in the dungeon of me, fear-shackled, thonged in the cords of the past.
Into the light at this moment, thou long-buried ONE; sternly, defiantly, joyously, I lift Thee into the light!
Long hast thou lain in crypts, and thy eyes are still closed; mute is God’s tongue, as silent as dreams.
Sound trumpet, thrust rapier, I cleave to myself, though spiked to a cross and rabbled by Doubt!
{27}
BEYOND SENSE
My brain is the haunt of a naked Curiosity that has lured my soul across the purple bars of sense, beyond the last outpost of Reason, where I know not if I be I.
Lights quicken and wane, glooms thicken around me and break into lean and hurrying Shapes—supraterrestrial phantoms, spectral norms of this world and vague patterns of things not yet become.
Forest of branching selves, my various masks, my serio-comic souls, my antique, half-remembered egos: are ye that?
And here I now stand peering tensely curious into the crater of Eternity, seeking out Demiurge there in the depths,
When the truth flashes on me: I am but fume, spew, from that Depth—
I and thee, all, but fantastic smoke-shapes flitting above the crater of Eternity;
And Demiurge, muttering, retreating, advancing there in the Depths, is but the shadow of Me the Curious One.
{28}
THE CYNIC OF NAZARETH
The keenest Cynic of them all: Jesus Christ!
Hail! passionate rebel, great anarch of Nazareth, slitter of masks, announcer of Self procreate from a self—
Halloo! Halloo! from me to thee.
Sombre in hate, clear-eyed, dawn-browed, a mock in thy soul,
A mock at psalter and sceptre and a sneer for the sickly old God in the temples of stone—
Hail! Cynic and Mocker of Nazareth: greeting from me to thee!
{29}
DE PROFUNDIS
Night! Night! Eternal Night, whose black vapors have filled all the sluiceways of Time—Night! ageless and void, seamless and bald:
Night upgurgling from chaos, upswirl of the noumenal seas, drape me and veil me from the illusory lights of this world!
My being’s at nadir,
I pass into my solstice,
I have touched of ITS garment, the black thing IT weaves on ITS sentient looms, ITS great blouse of black which encircles the world fold upon fold—
While we crawl in ITS creases and guess.
Sit I in the night of ITS sleeve,
Withering into eternities,
Bowed in ITS night, in ITS night!
{30}
ON A MARRIAGE
I hear laughter and there is a feasting, and another marriage is made—
A conspiracy has been formed to accouch another being.
Thou child unborn that now resteth in eternal day, day that is neither light nor dark;
Child that art yet uncreate and unwhipped of Pain,
In laughter and in feasting they have conspired against thy blissful sleep
There in the Unconscious,
There where thou art lapped and laved in non-being.
Hast thou heard the rumors from the lust-plane,
The guilty murmurings from the priest that made two beings incorporate?
Dost thou know thou art doomed to be born, to bear the cross and have the nails of pain cleave thy temples?
O thou sweet dweller in the White Temple,
Baby! Baby! as yet a lustful dream in two human hearts!
Already thy white robes are stained by a tiny red mark—
Thou art doomed to enter the lazarhouse.
Baby! Baby! I hear thee in the night weeping and wailing ’gainst thy birth:
For another marriage is made.
{31}
THE SYNCOPATED SPINNER
Yon drowsing Spider that squats there upon Time’s rotting timbers spinning her seven webs of a million threads, spinning and weaving from the birth of the Primitive Cycle—
Her criss-crosses, her mazes and labyrinths that are called Eternal Laws by the midges caught in the films
Spun by that drowsing Spider squat there upon Time’s rotting timbers:
Awake! thou great spinning demon, shake webs and midge-men into the Nothing, and with the shade of a smirk that I know resume thy loathsome pastime
There squat upon Time’s rotting timbers!
{32}
LOVE AND SLEEP
I am a pale passionate Pilgrim evoked from the dust and the dark.
In my brain are the molten ivories of the dawn, in my heart the brooding desire for thee.
Whispers of the purple hours to come, whispers of the white eternities past,
Draw me hither and thither and nowhither.
Ah me! shall I rest here a while on the chubby round earth or travel back to the ivoried eternities?
Stand I thus at pause,
I, a pale passionate Pilgrim evoked from the dust and the dark.
{33}
THE WATCHER
Who are these shadows about me—my neighbors, my nearest, the jostler whom I felt at my elbow?
I—I who have gazed into the eternities and can in a glance pierce the curtains of Time,
Who have watched through this night the endless procession into being and beyond that
(The cry in the womb, the release, the hasty scud across earth, the thud in the Pit!);
The screams in the dark, seen in a vision the Wheel go around and around and the writhing, pain-gutted images clinging to the blood-smeared spokes—
I—what have I to do with this black, seething Now and its shadows?
Surge around me, ye humans, ye water-gymnasts;
The tide’s running out, the present is ever-dissolving and the morn bringeth death to ye all.
But I who plash in the eternal waters and stray to the pallid horizon
Will return on the day of your silence, the Same, ever the Same.
{34}
FACE TO FACE
It is well thou art hid, O Lord, and sittest with glued lips fast on thy throne beyond the yellow disk of day.
Up from the slime I came, a Caliban blaspheming, leaning on crutch, superb hate in my eye, peering through bramble and forest for THEE.
Aeons ago was I thus, and now I am here, still evolving, planted firmly on two feet, almost at thy heels, not vexed, as cunning as thou,
O Lord of the vortices, fiend in the flux!
Linked to Prometheus, linked to great Lucifer, I’ll meet thee at the GREAT CROSSWAYS and heal thee forever of the disease of creating.
{35}
MY SHADOWS
Yonder lies my way.
Yea, I have taken the road, and in a sleep, in a cycle, I returned to the forks—
For all things are One, and beyond the One I cannot step.
The gad ever stings, and the Furies drive me forward—over suns, over flaming chaotic foreworlds, to the hilt of creation;
But my thought is firm-set: illusive the flight, the return, the urge, the reaction.
I move not.
Based in the One, squatted here at the forks where the grooves of Change center,
I move not,
Adventure not forth,
Ran not that race over far-streaming worlds, nor danced on the cosmic pain-griddles.
’Twas my dominoed self,
An aspect of me, a shadow that travels forward and backward and upward and downward on Time’s dirty screens.
What road shall I take when all things return unto me?—
I who move not on Time’s dirty screens, was not touched by the gad;
I who am here at the forks where the grooves of Change center,
Who am One and the All, am motion and rest.
{36}
THE VIGIL
Here in the naked primal night,
Here where the VEILED sits graven in silence in ITS garden of weeds,
Here where the NOTHING drowses and mutters of a SOMETHING to come;
Here where the fangs of my soul have fastened at last;
Here where through wild-steaming streams of passion and great shroud-like dawns I have dragged my undying Desire—
Here, too, will I vigil with THEE through the glutted eternities—
Thou imbecile artisan, thou bungler, evader, rhetor and faun!
{37}
THE CLOSED ROOM
I am at the door of the Closed Room,
I stand without, whispering and chatting to myself, in many fantastic attitudes, like gnomes that skulk in castle-moats.
There are finger-marks on the door-knob—
Many, many have gone in, no one ever came out.
Through chinks I hear vague rumors, or is it the echo of the blood in my arteries?
And my eyes have spied, as I think, a light falling through cracks in the wall, or is it only the reflection of brain-sparks on the polished wood?
I finger the old worn knob, but am not yet admitted.
{38}
HALF-SEEN
Out from the brake and stubble of sense I peered for a moment—
Wist! was that THEE that passed on the wind?
Once, too, I swam out beyond sight of all land and emerged on the crest of the highest wave—
Wist! was that THEE that sped over the horizon?
I throttled one by one each image in my brain on a night when the north-wind blew from the Zenith—
Wist! was that THEE that startled me into a body again?
Ride thou on the wind, or merge in all horizons, Image unimaged, escape me Thou canst not, for I am the part that must make THEE whole at the last—
At the last!
{39}
THE LONG VIGIL
Like sunlight, I touch all things, yet nothing do I gain;
I am neither richer nor poorer than I was at the beginning of things.
Passion, hope, pain, grief, leave me unchanged (I shed universes and moult cycles).
To the eye of the world I am tossed like a cork on rough waters,
But I know I have stood Here since the Day of the Primal Appearance,
Transfixed in supreme wonder,
Rigid in pride, dissenting, unmoved.
{40}
PROPHETIC
Time lies cataleptic in my brain: Eternity alone reigns there.
Infinite space has shrunken to a single point of fire, from whose heart radiate the trackless voids.
Life I have bosomed in a sigh.
I will exhale with the dawn, step lightly to my zenith, death in-wrapt.
{41}
RESURRECTION NIGHT
I slept, and out of their ancient tombs of tissue-plasm streamed a shadowy host of Living Dead.
Gliding silently across the waxed and shining floor of my soul, they breathed their breaths upon the emptièd mirror of my mind:
And Terror and Guilt captained that crew.
The subtle fingers of the dawn brushed my brow and my soul flowed back into the sluiceways of the old familiar world;
But long I laid in wonder staring at the wall, for in that night I had again become the Things I was before my birth.
And Terror and Guilt were old shapes of me.
{42}
BIRD OF THE NIGHT
O thou pinioned Thought, where wilt thou wing me to-night?
Dug from the marl and silt of my soul,
Breath of my delicate dreams,
Bird with the eyes of the circular fires sucked from the suns we have grazed in our flight,
Cleaver of lightnings, warbler in the zenith of my passionate being,
Plumed and feathered for thy mystic spiral progressions,
Where wilt thou bear me this night?
{43}
THE CLEFT IN THE WALL
They pass through my brain and leave not a mark: cities and women and autumnal skies.
I am related to nothing in the phenomenal flux,
The world-days are vain shapes of desire, a mist on my mirror, my mind—
My mind that reflects cities and women and autumnal skies,
Wrack of old Chaos, wrack of old Time.
My soul is a fountain that balances the ball of the visible cosmos;
I toss high, I toss hither and thither the whole universe, the hollow ball of desire—
It is nothing to me, a sport, a day-dream, as meaningless as old death and old birth,
Or cities and women and autumnal skies.
I travelled far with my pickaxe and spade and spied by chance a tiny cleft in Time’s granite wall—
I called it the NOW;
And through it I peeped like a boy through a knot-hole,
Peeped into the Infinite, a sea no bigger than a dewdrop, placid and waveless and spaceless.
(What Giant Shape lay therein, the opening and shutting of whose eyes gendered immeasureable cycles?){44}
I passed through the cleft of the NOW with infinite labor, and dispersed body and soul,
And cities and women and autumnal skies drift past my sight and leave me untouched.
{45}
THE TRUANT
What was its mandate?
Where is the script IT placed in my hand?
Who sent me on this strange errand?
Or was it—No! No! too horrible!
And yet—and yet, how came I here?
In the immobile immensities, where renascence and decay and the plexed dream called Life were still unsensed—
Before I aggregated,
Before I anealed into an I,
Before the first stratum of lust was laid,
Before the dispart from the ALL—
In the immobile immensities something was ordered of me;
I was sent on an errand!
Hey ho! I have dallied with mortals too long,
Yet I dare not return without the thing done.
Or was it—No! No! too horrible!
{46}
CHANGE AND AN ENDING
Glow, glow, thou yellow fire, mother of me—thou shalt reclaim me body and soul.
Shine, shine, thou pulsing white eyes of the night—I shall quiver in thy lights and be recompounded in thy crucibles of clay.
Moon! Moon! sick-yellowed in amorous need of life, shall I not be as thee—still, cold and age-seamed?
Yea, in the whirl of the atoms and the swirl of great hidden forces I shall be accouched in an uttermost star,
Builded anew in the dirt of a still unwombed world,
Speak, dream, languish and rot again and again,
Go the round of the infinite cycles till I spy, as by chance,
IT, the Cagliostro, the Worker, the kneader of mud-shapes,
Slay IT there where I meet IT, and lay me down, out of Space, out of Time, certain of endless quiescence for me and for THEE.
{47}
THE QUEST IN THE FLESH
Here where the forces elemental circle me, caress me and touch my city-scattered parts to a whole;
Here on the mount, ’neath a blue-burnished heaven and a passionate luring sun, where the war of the wind with the leaves mocks at the strength we have hid;
Here is the lesson to learn, here is the Teacher eternal, the war-lord of Space, the parent of hate and of love.
Do I not hate with a love that’s intense?
Is not my soul strengthened in battle?
My brain is a duel of opposing forces, and the thing that I war against is more precious to me than the tickle of grass or the ease that brings degradation.
War! War!—bring me helmet and shield and the sword of the spirit; the great weaponed SELF that I seek and that forever seeks me
Is shut in a tower of gold o’ergrown with weeds and the rank, poisonous fungi of outworn selves,
And here, gripped in these forces elemental, I make a passionate compact with my dumb, brutish instincts
To assail every live-dead thing that hinders my march to that tower of gold, o’ergrown, untended, unkenned;{48}
And there in the winds, in a fury of battle, deliver the SELF in the light of the sun—
SELF that shall live to its uttermost transfigured instinct,
SELF that am God of all gods.
{49}
IN THE ADYTUM
The door is ajar—
The door of my soul swung on the hinges of doubt;
It is ever ajar and waits for a Caller—
A Caller, in the night, or the day—I know not the time that he cometh,
Oh whether he cometh at all.
I crouch in my being, implacable, receptive, the ears of my soul in rigid prick,
Catching whiffs of the Verities borne from seas remote that mirror the catchpenny world in its depths.
Sundered from all I sit,
To none abnegated,
Before my door standing ajar,
The door of my soul swung on the hinges of doubt.
What finger-marks these on the white knob of my door?
Narrow, black finger-prints, telltale of thinkers and ghosts,
Or maybe somnambules who have walked out of the world,
Or he, beloved of my soul: Has he called?—where loafed I then?
Who wills may enter,
But none have I seen—
Seen enter the door that’s ajar,
The door of my soul swung on the hinges of doubt.
{50}
THE WAY OUT: BIO.
Like a polished pearl hid in a pocket,
Like lighted tapirs set in the murk of a crypt,
Like the flicker of phosphor on dun seas,
Like a meteor athwart the heavens of Cimmeria—
So the Secret of my soul shines for me in this timeless Night.
{51}
MOTH-TERROR
I have killed the moth flying around my night-light; wingless and dead it lies upon the floor.
(O who will kill the great Time-Moth that eats holes in my soul and that burrows in and through my secretest veils!)
My will against its will, and no more will it fly at my night-light or be hidden behind the curtains that swing in the winds.
(But O who will shatter the Change-Moth that leaves me in rags—tattered old tapestries that swing in the winds that blow out of Chaos!)
Night-Moth, Change Moth, Time-Moth, eaters of dreams and of me!
{52}
MY HOLY LUST
The lust of the sailor for new lands, the lust of the boat new-launched for the turbulent, foaming, sky-running waters—
Lust ever and ever I thus.
I stand in the ring of the earth and lust for the rings above and beyond that widen into great monstrous nooses in the pits of azure and opal till my glance is lost in the fire-capped zenith—
Lust with my eyes and my ears, lascivious of all things unguessed, all things not conquered.
I lust for the Strength that runneth before and purge myself of the close-clinging, stiffening muds of old custom, running the fine needle of my quickening Desire through a million ephemeral nuclei,
Thrust to the core of each vanishing truth.
My lusts hold me taut and redeem me of pain, and I sigh and I sob and I laugh in the ear of the LOVED ONE, spread on the winds, locked in the blast, till she yield and diswomb her last secret—
She, my finality, target of lusts, peeping here, peeping there, ever lost, ever gained—I come at her again and again on the arrows of Time.
{53}
THE OVERONE
The great GOD sleeps and dreams through Me,
And cycles run and cycles ebb and still IT blossoms in my brain
Or withers in my stoppages:
The God in chains, the Ghost in leash to Me!
O sleep is deep, and deeper still the unborn dream,
And under sleep there is a sleep where walks the great Noctambulist.
Bitten by the vermin host, stung by knout, gnawed by gad, IT flushes through my arteries,
The rising God, the Coming One, the God that’s tethered in my brain.
{54}
THE ULTIMATE
I wait for THEE in vile places a little while and wait for THEE in high places a long while.
In the bellies of my adders I make my way laboriously, and I am that high look-out in the eye of the eagle lost in the azure infinities.
Thy Secret, O universe, I have willed to know; thou swift-hurrying, invisible SPIRIT buried ’neath thy monstrous uncountable atoms—
Where will I fall flat upon THEE, weaving myself into THEE?
Flying to my remotest zeniths, diving far into the unplumbed Nothing, waddling in these earth-muds, I seek THEE with my passionate intent Here and in the mutable many Here-afters.
{55}
THE SLEEPER
My soul fell asleep, asleep in a great city, among the leering faces of her millions;
The iron hoofs of many strange and monstrous animals ground their imprint in my prescient white Self that lay stark and helpless on the highways of the world:
O my Soul, my Soul, awake thou!
The waves have gone over me and crawling things with fiery eyes have wriggled onto the white throne where I ruled,
And the old seven deadly delights have kissed me each one and licked up my strength with their smooth yellow tongues:
O my Soul, my Soul, awake thou!
O the terror of sleep and of Me who am blotted, erased and spun into things that are vile and grosser than compost,
And the long death of Me that drank of this hemlock of earth that brings not the death that is surcease—only a death of vile dreaming, a lapsing without a forgetting:
O my Soul, my Soul, awake thou!
Out of their crypts stalk my elder old selves, and whilst I stare with the impotent eye set in the head of the dead they drive in the little brass rivets of habit to the core of my being:
O my Soul, my Soul, awake thou!
{56}
THE ALLEYS OF ELD
Night and the Sea and the depths of Despair!
The gulfs of Time, the moaning of wastrel souls, the ullulation of fiends in the brackish currents of Change:
I heard with an myriad Ear, and was withered and worn and wrenched in the screws.
How came I into the Alleys of Eld?
Endless doors were closing behind me—I could not go back, the slams were decisive, I heard ITS skeleton-key turn in each lock, and peering back, I looked into its eyes, sinister as Time’s face, brooding upon me—
As I hurried down the Alleys of Eld.
A sudden emergence here on this shore, my brain still gimletted with the memory of those eyes, my ears still pricked with the click! click! of ITS skeleton-key—
Emerged! ah! the Night and the Sea and the depths of Despair and the memory of IT!—
Emerged from the Alleys of Eld!
{57}
LOVE THE DESTROYER
I reject Love—
Love and its sibillant, low-murmured lies, sweet sting of fair bodies, old meat of old Death.
The boom of the red sea of lust rings dull in my ear—I have seen the waves go over many; dead, dead forever they lie in the steaming hot currents that bubble up from the mud-beds.
I reject Love—
Love that has strewn millions of Me along the path I upclomb, shredded my flesh with its claws and burnt out my brains in its long searing clutch.
Through that ageless black night, with my earth-itch fair full upon me, once my Eye was stabbed by a bolt from the fulgurant Light and my soul pined away from its love and grew strong in its terrible Nay.
I reject Love—
Love that accouched every star in the blue, that with knout of Desire sends the young worlds grunting round and round the senescent, suns.
I hear swash and lave of the unimagined fulgurant Light, burning sure and serene at the Axis of things—soft swash and soft lave wrought in the great Mnemonic Cell-Soul of me!
{58}
REJECTION
The wafir of Time I have bitten—sweet it was not.
Each tapir of thought stood at flare in my soul—and I saw only the density of the gloom.
My soul has fumed at the lips of Thy women.
(Pah! ’twas a fool’s trick to try to seduce me the HUNTER OF THEE.)
Effort, emotion, thought, dream, lust—what have these for me?
I came to judge of Thy works, not to dance to Thy pipings.
* * * * * * * * *
Thou canst not stanch the woe that is mine,
Thou canst not bribe to sleep my Everlasting Nay.
Godlike am I in Thy presence,
As weary as Change, and as young;
A mendicant rebel, a Presage, a rejecter,
A contriver of strange things, unbegotten, eternal!
* * * * * * * * *
An abattoir hid in a garden of roses—
Such is Thy universe:
Thus do I judge.
{59}
THE SPEAR OF THE GREAT SPURNING
Upreared in the night, pallid-gray ’gainst the moon, towers she they call Astoreth, goddess of flesh and of worms, older than all years, younger than Love.
Alone I stand in that desert in that dead of the night with the Spear of the Great Spurning, tipped with the poison of an Ageless Thought, leveled straight at her dugs.
Pallid-gray! Pallid-gray! ’gainst the moon, sick is young Astoreth, who saw me grow from cycle to cycle—
Astoreth pales ’gainst the moon at the vision of him who will not suck at her dugs.
Drive well, O Spear of the Great Spurning—drive well at the Mother of Life, who rowels our flesh—goddess of flesh and of worms!
Drive well, O Spear, tinct with my Thought!—with her fall comes the Great Manumission, and nothing else shall be save the beat of my Thought in the Void.
New York City, 1902-1906.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 65232 ***
